The allocation of financial capital is a critical driver of an organization’s performance. However, the value of managing and allocating human capital is less widely known. We consider an employee’s skills, knowledge, wisdom, behavioural traits, and accomplishments as their career capital. You get a high rate of return when you match high-performers to the right roles. If they are in the right role, they outperform an average employee by as much as 400 percent. Organizations need to pay as much attention to the allocation of its human capital as it does of financial capital.
Our Goal Alignment Program (GAP™) helps to achieve organizational alignment of financial and human capital to strategy.
“Problems caused by misalignment include confusion; waste of time, money and opportunity; diminished productivity; demotivation of individuals and teams; internal conflicts, power struggles and ultimately project failure as well as resulting in time and energy spent doubting, conspiring, guessing or gossiping when that same energy could be deployed in moving an organization forward.” — S. Box, & K. Platts
Results from a McKinsey Global Survey confirm the positive effects of talent management on business outcomes. Organizations with effective talent-management programs outperform competitors and, among publicly owned companies, are likelier to outpace their peers’ returns to shareholders. Notably, these organizations typically outperform competitors by two-to-one. They match high-performers to roles where they can add the most value.
The survey also found the specific practices that are most predictive of a successful talent management strategy. There is not a single best practice management of human capital. However, the survey results show three common practices that have an enormous impact on the overall effectiveness of talent management and organizational performance:
- an ability to rapidly allocate talent
- the HR function’s involvement in fostering a positive employee experience
- the strategically minded HR team
Match High-Performers to The Right Roles
Today, roles within originations continue to change rapidly. However, all organizations benefit from taking a systematic, and data-supported approach to making human capital decisions. Organizational alignment means continuous adjustment of the structure and resources to achieve the strategy. People are your most valuable resource, so it is essential to match high-performer to the role where they contribute to the organization and find fulfillment.
All organizations can cultivate these practices and thereby improve their talent-management strategy and organizational performance.
So, designing and managing organizational transformations, strengthening business performance occurs through enhanced culture, values, leadership, and talent systems. At the heart of culture, values, and leadership is the performance DNA of the people in the organization. Your talent system must measure and use performance DNA throughout the employee’s life cycle. It starts when you match high-performers to the right roles.
Any organization going through a massive transformation must assess and consider its high-potential employees for critical positions. By finding the most vital value-adding roles and defining markers for success supported by people analytics, you can build a unique competency model tailored toward your values.
Rapidly Match Employees to New Roles
Your first step is to gain strategic clarity on the value agenda. Step two is properly realigning talent by matching employees to available and high-value positions. The third step is to ensure that the employee will find fulfilment in the role. While the work to achieve all three stages may seem to be daunting, with the right tools, it is game-changing.
An Organized Approach to Talent Matching
Taking a strategic approach to talent matching as part of a significant transformation. It triggers several advantages:
- Time — a more coordinated approach to reallocating employees based on people analytics to the best-fit role saves time when the information is at your fingertips
- Access — digitally collecting the data and data points for each position, as well as the organization’s leaders, is far easier to peruse vs. traditional internal recruiting approaches
- Effectiveness — tactically, keeping track of the myriad choices you make during a transformation is difficult, so have a visual means for keeping track of options
Applying this approach ensures that your process, which must occur no matter what, happens most effectively.
Accounting for Unconscious Bias
Whether an organization is implementing a new strategy, finding ways to cut costs, or becoming nimbler, HR needs to find better ways to deploy talent. If proper and efficient talent-matching practices are missing, filling roles quickly becomes a popularity contest. The positions are filled based on who knows who — which can lead to unconscious bias — rather than on finding the best-fit candidate.
The redeployment of talent in a value-focused manner is essential. It must consider knowledge, skills, wisdom behavioural traits, and accomplishments — talent stack — to match the employee to the best role for them and the organization.
We recommend that you take the following steps:
Understand the Value Agenda
You begin by aligning with your organization’s ambition and deconstructing what will drive value across divisions and departments. GAP™ supplies analytics, methodologies, and tools to rapidly model, assess and optimize your organization.
Identify the Critical Roles
Identify the Critical RolesIt would be best if you knew the most critical roles based on the value agenda. This insight includes what matters most in each position. Without this understanding, it becomes almost impossible to make informed, strategic decisions. Determine what talent stack is needed. The analytics about your talent pool and our career benchmarks aids in making this determination.
In our approach to strategy, you make this assessment before the strategy is adopted. You should know what capabilities you need to implement the strategy you choose. Also, you need to have a good understanding of whether these capabilities exist within your organization or if you must acquire them.
When choosing the best person for any given critical role, you will need to understand what traits are required in order to succeed in that role.
Assign the Right Talent to The Best-Fit Roles
Best-fit staffing means assessing fit and matching the available talent that reflects each role’s markers for success. It is essential to find your top talent and ensure it is part of your ongoing performance management process. It would be best if you had a data-driven best-fit staffing and succession process.
Solutions using our people analytics can prove especially useful for aggregating data and supporting recommendations. Our approach provides an organization-wide database of high potentials. You use the data to find future leaders, enable talent mobility, create meaningful, focused development plans, and highlights your top candidates for each job. It also shows you where you do not have an internal candidate who will be a high performer for the role. So, you will not have to run an internal selection process first or adopt the approach of having all selections compete with the open market. Both methods have significant drawbacks.
Concluding Thoughts
Organization alignment means that every resource — human, organizational, technical, and financial — increasingly supports and contributes to achieving strategy; in a manner that is: measurable, efficient, and effective, and follows your principles, policy directives and constraints.
To achieve alignment, you need to elevate the allocation of human capital to at least the same rigour as you allocate financial capital. When you go further and adopt a systematic and data-supported approach to making human capital decisions, the benefits abound for your organization.
It is best if you adopt the right technology to support these processes. It saves time and simplifies the process. It also helps you combat unconscious bias and enables leaders to know the available options in addition to the actual choices made. This information allows you to pivot quickly; should you not be producing the expected results.
The approach works best if you make human and financial capital allocation and technology decisions in conjunction with adopting a new strategy.
BEST FIT HIRING
The Solution to Identify the Best Candidate for the Job
Facilitate your hiring process and recruit the best candidates for your organization to increase performance and reduce turnover. Capture valuable information for better coaching and onboarding of new hires.
EMPLOYEE DEVELOPMENT
The Key to Career Management and Development
Increase employee self-awareness with this self-directed assessment platform for optimized career pathing and development aligned with organizational goals.
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TALENT MANAGEMENT
The Tools and Insights to Manage Talent
Acquire thorough comprehension of your employee’s performance DNA for career development, career pathing, and leadership team interventions. Match high-performers to the right roles.
