What is talent management?

What can talent management do for you?

Employee turnover is a very high and often an underestimated cost for employers. This cost does not simply represent wages and materials, but also includes recruitment costs, loss of productivity, impacts on team morale, new training costs, and other more subtle expenses. Managing your talent well can mean you don't have to struggle with these challenges.

The benefits of talent management

Managing your star performers effectively offers many benefits. With a talent management plan, you will:

• Fill open positions efficiently
• Keep track of training-based requirements and skills for employees
• Match up people and positions, and manage successions
• Help employees understand and align with organizational strategy, structure, and goals 

Retain your star performers

While some turnover is unavoidable and to some extent even desirable, turnover among your top performers is largely avoidable. And it is certainly worth investing in talent management, given the extraordinary expense of replacing them. A high turnover rate is likely due to a combination of reasons. Thus, increasing employee retention also requires a combination of measures.

Employees will be motivated to stay at a company when they are comfortable, well-respected, fairly compensated, and (dependent on position and character) can see possibilities for growth and personal development. But how can you do this? Make sure your employees are part of your talent management program. 

Improve employee engagement

Talent management strategy and planning are among the hottest topics among business executives and are core components of today’s workforce approach. Engaging the workforce engaged is one positive effect of investing in modern talent management.

However, talent management is more than just a performance appraisal tool or process. A modern or total talent management solution also addresses:

1. Alignment with business goals

A company needs to make sure its business is aligned around its strategy. In a recent study, Timothy Devinney, a professor of strategy at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, reported that only 29.3% of people can correctly pick the strategy statement of their own organization.

Given that 15.7% of people can randomly guess the correct strategy statement for any given organization, the number of people who actually know their organization’s strategy is certainly much lower than 29.3%. Skilled workers only become top performers when their goals are aligned with business objectives and their energy is directed at the right targets.

2. Employee performance

A business that uses performance appraisal and management software shows a reduction of low performers, while the percentage of high performers in the company increases.  A talent management solution may also include functionality to plan and track employee training and development. Acquiring new skills can improve employee performance and boost employee engagement.