Devoting
attention to how much your employees are engaged and motivated when they
execute their daily tasks is crucial if you want to make your
company as efficient as possible. Estimates show that a highly
engaged workforce can lead to over 20 percent increase in annual profits,
which is a staggering improvement considering the resources that need to be
invested for achieving your business goals. For this purpose, we will discuss a
matching and influential strategy to maximize your employee productivity - Talent Optimization.
What is
Talent optimization?
It is a data-driven framework that leverages information on employee characteristics
and performance. It helps leaders and managers to accurately assess
individual behavioral traits to help choose the right person for a particular
job or task. Thus, you can ascertain the skills and characteristics necessary
for the task at hand. Based on this finding, you can place the right person for
the role, evaluate workstyles of the team, increase cohesion among the team
members, align the team with the work to be performed, and provide timely
guidance for further improvement. Thus, you can increase productivity to help
improve your company’s bottom line.
Why do I
need talent optimization?
Workforce
disengagement is potentially an insidious issue that can significantly
undermine the progress of your company. Most organizational strategies fail to
consider that most employees do the bare minimum that is just enough to keep
their job. Hence you must pay attention to the behavioral traits and needs of
your employees.
Layoffs
and terminating staff are practices that would be best to avoid if you consider
the overall costs of employee training that amounts to a considerable sum
depending on the given position and industry. In most cases, hiring a new
employee entails a lot of upfront investment in the first year. In addition to
the salary, an amount equal upto 40% of the worker's annual salary needs to be
invested in recruitment, proper training, and adaptation to the work dynamic.
Hence, periodic layoffs and termination can put a lot of strain on your
profits. Luckily, good workforce management can alleviate this problem.
How do I
improve employee engagement?
By implementing talent
optimization to align, motivate, and engage employees according
to their behavioral drives and needs. Let us take a deeper dive into this
subject.
Talent
optimization enables you to:
- Measure and create worker profiles
- Create a scalable people strategy
- Choose top talent for the job
- Create efficient teams
How does
talent optimization improve employee productivity?
There are
three main areas to consider:
1.Talent
optimization takes the business context into account
Depending
on the specifics of the business context, talent optimization helps achieve
projected business goals. You need to align your business operations for
creating a viable working climate, informed by talent optimization and the
immediate work context. Since talent optimization 'sorts' people according to
their skills and performance metrics, it is possible to track how well a given employee is suited to work in a particular context and/or team.
2. Talent
optimization takes employee behavioral traits and performance metrics into
account
As
mentioned, workforce analytics is a powerful driving force for restructuring
your organizational and operational strategies. Moreover, talent
optimization is data-driven in that it predicts how an individual employee will
fare based on their skills, character traits, cognitive & behavioral
characteristics.
This
predictive metric is an optimization solution that reduces unwarranted
bias or misjudgment, minimizing human error in the operational process of
hiring employees, assembling teams, and assigning tasks & responsibilities.
3. Talent
optimization facilitates employee engagement
Essentially,
the main benefit of this approach for organizing your talent is that it is
centered around reducing worker disengagement.
Good
leadership must use prudent and effective strategies to promote a good working
environment. In fact, employee engagement is the number one contributor to
workplace productivity. Hence, when it comes to maintaining productivity in
your company, actively promoting employee engagement is a more efficient and
long-term strategy in comparison with just giving out financial incentives and
bonuses. Employee engagement and good rapport contribute to increased
motivation and productivity on a sustained basis.
What type
of issues could be solved through talent optimization?
1. Employee
misalignment with the work culture
Talent
optimization can help you hire workers that are more in tune with your work
culture. Furthermore, this optimization strategy can reveal aspects in
which your workforce is imbalanced and, in some cases, synergistic. Thus,
talent optimization can help in pinpointing solutions for recurring issues and
systemic problems in your company.
For
instance, when transferring to a new premise you could assess the
alignment of the team to significantly improve engagement and adjusting to the
new environment.
2. Job
misfit with the employee.
Reference
profiles help assign people to jobs they will do conscientiously and
diligently. In companies that conduct mass hire campaigns to recruit hundreds
of employees, it is easy to overlook that a particular employee does not work
well under pressure or that team members are incompatible with each other.
Talent optimization helps you to assign reference profiles for people.
Therefore, with a dataset that shows you the employee behavioral stats and
metrics, you can easily see if the person is analytical, extroverted,
cooperative, rules-driven, etc.
3. Manager
and employee misfit.
Sometimes,
the team leader may not have the requisite leadership style to match with the current
objective, and thus could be less effective in leading the team towards success
in a specific situation. You can use talent optimization to fine-tune your
organizational structure to leverage natural leadership strengths, flex your
team strengths to address the gaps, and augment the team in accordance with the
collective needs and the situation or project.
4. Teams
that don’t get along well.
When you
have larger projects with more than one team working on them concurrently, it
is essential to implement a cohesive approach to teamwork. Also, traditional
organizational techniques are frequently time-consuming in the sense that you
need to do extensive scale efficiency assessments for every new project from
scratch. Once you have a detailed dataset, talent optimization allows you to do
this quickly, without new workforce assessments, team compatibility trial runs,
and resulting productivity delays and deficiencies.
As you
can see, talent optimization provides you with particularly useful information
and enables you to increase productivity and help solve issues that have been impeding
your business functioning. By gathering insight into your team’s functioning you will be
able to take the requisite decisions and actions to bring your business to the
next level.
In a
nutshell, talent optimization connects your people strategy with your business
strategy to facilitate the achievement of your goals!
