Is Talent strategy a waste of time or a beautiful key to unlocking organisational competitive advantage?

Posted on: 22nd March 2021

Why Talent?

Dramatic shifts in the world of work have changed where we work, the shape of the working week, how we collaborate, the way performance is observed, measured, and managed. In turn, as we operate remotely and with all manner of adaptations to the psychological contracts between employer and employee, communicating ‘who we are’ has become more complex. Staying true to values and articulating these through the employee value proposition brings Talent strategy into sharp focus.

As businesses are busy surviving, adapting or even thriving, attention turns to a company’s (usually) biggest cost– their people, the Talent. Arguably, now is the right time to focus on talent, either moving, changing, developing or growing it. But we’re not just talking about a generic plan to categorise talent, look at succession planning, recruit better and develop more. We need to think bigger – the holistic and beautiful approach to Talent, the strategy that enables businesses to support all their colleagues to perform to the best of their ability and to drive company performance. Win. Win.

Recently, a client asked us to create a Talent strategy for their pensions and investments business. Which of course we delivered on time, to budget and with great client feedback, but enough about us and onto the key question…

Gold standard Talent Strategy Design:

To create the strategy, we looked at a lot of data, both internal and external.

We also spoke with the Executive team to get their view on Talent. We found an Executive re- grouping after a year to end all years – proud of keeping it together but looking to Talent for solutions to a whole raft of new issues, on top of those they had in the first place. Going back to first principles, the business needed Talent capability which delivered:

  • Competitive EVP: attracting new Talent to drive growth and engaging existing Talent
  • Solutions to skills gaps: now pressing
  • Organisational resilience: through succession planning and managing key person risk
  • Improved performance management: through greater clarity, skills development, and process
  • More impactful reward strategy: that drives the right outcomes
  • Differentiated models: that fully articulate diversity across the organisation

Looking outside, we reviewed direct competitors as well as a broad range of talent exemplars and we found some interesting stuff. This may just be a reminder to most of you, but we found some interesting nuggets that we thought were worth sharing. The overall theme was that companies were focused on improving the employee experience:

  • Growing Business Resource Groups, both in size and participation – letting colleagues build momentum and dialogue on subjects that matters to them.
  • Publishing clear targets and plans for D&I – where they are now and where they want to get to. The balance seems to be shifting from Diversity to Inclusion to building a workplace where everyone feels they belong.
  • Being creative on flexible working – additional family leave, carers leave, emergency leave. Even unlimited leave – we can’t wait to see the results of that pilot. Companies are genuinely seeing the benefits of investing in people at a time when they need support the most.
  • Being clear on their EVP and aligning it to business strategy, purpose and values. Sounds simple and nothing new but those organisations that get it really stand out from the crowd.
  • Well-articulated culture, values and – dare we say it – personality – sharing business and individual personalities in annual reports, careers websites, blogs and films all add up to build that all important picture and help attract the best (and better informed) Talent.
  • Enabling employees to bring their whole selves to work – a real focus on supporting employees, not just with hardware to work from home but financial support, mental wellbeing support, charitable work, casual dress and even meeting their pets and children.

So what:

The data was clear and in parts a joy to read – align your employee proposition to business strategy, be brave and show your personality, be clear with what you expect in return and you’ll have a compelling Talent proposition to attract, develop, engage and retain your brilliant employees in an inclusive, high performing workplace. What more could you ask for?

With all this beautiful work front of mind, the Talent strategy we produced for our client was brought to life with a phased implementation plan, enabling the client to put strategy into practice. We provided a framework so they could be true to themselves, stop the bleeding where required and then focus on building great Talent capability through line manager engagement and development.

By focusing on the specific Talent issues the business was facing, we were able to propose core elements, add some innovative flagship initiatives, and set out how all this flows into clear actions and metrics. We can’t wave a magic wand and do it all for them, they now need to make it their own, but we’ll be staying close to see how they get on.

Conclusion:

As we said at the start, our world is Talent so we are clearly biased but hopefully you’ll agree that investing in a Talent strategy to drive performance through people is a good idea and could even be a beautiful way to unlock your organisations competitive advantage.