When introspecting on your company, do you see an optimal performance? Most leaders have an ongoing dilemma – overcoming turnover, low engagement, market fluctuations, and flat-out bad hires, among others. There reaches a point where no amount of good intentions and efforts scales your organization.
If this is an ongoing struggle, there may be a wedge between your business and top talent. This sort of gap reduces productivity, which causes missed opportunities and overall poor results. So it’s a significant reason why companies fail to perform at their best potential.
Talent Optimization may be what your company needs as the answer to close the gap.
But, What is Talent Optimization?
Talent optimization is a four-part discipline that breaks down the needs and requirements to align your business strategy and your talent strategy so you can achieve ideally better business results. Talent optimization focuses on collecting, analyzing, and applying people data.
The four-part discipline consists of:
- Diagnose: Measuring people data that matters, analyzing the evidence, and creating metrics to improve actions. With this data, leaders can focus on the real issue of a business’s talent gaps. These activities will continue until completed. Once complete, you’ll discover new information that will change how you currently design, hire and inspire in your company.
- Design: There should always be the intention behind creating and renovating your people strategy. Your company’s organizational structure, senior leadership team and company culture should be aligned with your business strategy. Team dynamics are almost always overlooked and super important to a company’s performance. Designing includes:
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- Selecting your organization’s structure.
- Evaluating your leadership team fit.
- Understand senior team dynamics.
- Establish your culture.
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Adding these steps with intention and strategy, supported by data, moves your company to a better position to perform at your desired level..
- Hire: Using new data to hire top talent and build high-performing teams. Hiring the right people and placing them on the right teams is vital to ensuring engagement and productivity. By defining the job and using assessments, you’ll decrease poor job, and team fit and improve your hiring outcomes. The steps are needed below:
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- Define and communicate job requirements
- Equip your leader to land top talent
- Predict new team dynamics
- Determine candidate cultural fit
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Hiring the right team, great things come. People are fulfilled by their roles, and everyone goes the extra mile, increasing performance and engagement.
- Inspire: Using data to create and drive important employee-oriented activities. Many teams don’t have access to data insights to help them be more self-aware of their workplace behaviors. This data could potentially help them work better with colleagues. Using data in this approach would give employees the tools to address communication issues and problems that arise when working in groups. The four steps include:
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- Create new jobs and career paths
- Develop your leaders
- Create high-performing teams
- Reinforce your culture
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Continuously working to inspire workers and protect company culture is essential to maintaining business success. Magic happens when everyone gets along and feels inspired by culture.
Many companies make an error to build a business strategy that determines the desired results without highlighting the people strategy to make it happen. Essentially, they fail to intentionally, consistently, and strategically design a company culture for high-performing teams. Furthermore, they are unsuccessful in managing people to motivate or inspire them to be at their highest potential. Sadly, employees continue to be disengaged by not making human capital investments, although research has proven the necessity for high engagement to maximize ROI.
It is these companies that suffer the consequences of the talent gap. Teams in these organizations are tense, unhappy, burned-out and halfway through the door. At the core of every company, people are the greatest asset – and yet are the first to be overlooked. Talent optimization allows leaders to close the gap between business issues and talent issues.
It starts from the top.
Although anything related to talent management is the responsibility of HR, leaders should be at the captain – demonstrating the change in work culture you’re looking to see. Ensure that HR employees have the knowledge or resources necessary to hire top talent. Educate yourself on aligning your employees with your company’s strategy, and arm yourself with tools that provide crucial people data insights. Taking a data-driven approach to hiring the right team, designing your culture, diagnosing engagement with help manage employees effectively, and potentially close the talent gap.
Taking responsibility for putting your talent in the optimal position will get you the results you want – while showing everyone around and below you – the accountability and investment you’re looking for as a leader.
Realities behind Talent Optimization
- Business context frames talent optimization; it goes hand in hand with business strategy to produce desired business results. It provides the crucial context necessary to guide everything you do, that includes designing your organization’s structure to evaluating the abilities of your senior leadership team.
- People data drives talent optimization. Putting people analytics at the center, can make informed objective decisions.
- Everyone in the organization must embrace talent optimization. Giving everyone access to people-data offers an opportunity to be self-aware and builds to create a healthier workplace.
- Talent optimization goes against poor job and team fit.
Companies that optimize their talent should always consider these factors when it comes to hiring. If you still have questions about talent optimization, we’re here to help.
