Wednesday, May 25, 2016

How to Innovate Talent Management

It’s important to find an adequate way of assessing the “creative workplace,” appropriately.

With the increasing speed of changes and advanced digital technologies, organizations large or small is also facing the challenges to innovate talent management and take care of their most important assets - people more effectively. It starts with mind shift - from treating people as cost and resource to plug in, to thinking them as human capital to invest in. Researches show that the foundation of business success is innovation. Creativity is #1 skill needed in the digital Era, how can organizations build a creative working environment and unleash their talent potential as well as the full business potential?


Leveraging the latest digital thinking, technology, and methodology to invest talent smartly: The traditional hiring or training programs are costly, and often outdated due to silos thinking and overly rigid processes in HR which stifle innovation. There is too much focus on searching for static knowledge and maintain the cost, not done enough to capture insight and build talent competency. It is understood that talent management and performance management have been made complicated using means of traditional approaches and outdated processes. With the abundance of information and shortened knowledge cycle, it is more strategic imperative to develop digital talent pipelines and hunt for the right mindsets and dynamic capability for making smart investments. It is also important to not just train your people with "one-size fits all" program but to understand your people of being "who they are," develop them, grow them, and well-align their career goals with strategic business goals to achieve business prosperity. Employees will do better work for an employer that invested on them. If an employee feels that enterprise invests on the people, both for their personal development and the enterprise interests, they would fully be grateful and more engaged in contributing fresh ideas and putting extra effort for solving problems creatively.


Encouraging cross-functional communication and collaboration: Creativity is about connecting the dots, not just within a functional box, but often more effectively across the functional boxes, even across the business and industry. People, have to work more closely with other functions in order to provide tailored talent solutions across business ecosystem. Digital is the age of empathy with the power of information, good information is always a good place to start improvement and innovation. To innovate talent management, IT and HR should work hand-in-hand to manage information, analyze talent trend and capture business insight. Then coupled with the personal touch, engagement, resolution, and development can follow. Doing innovation, especially radical innovation takes guts and vision. Innovation is about emerging practices. However, most of the organizations seek the safety net far too quickly in the planning, rather than allowing the innovative spirit a freer reign. The needs to be able to justify seems to have taken precedent over the challenge associated with pioneering innovation. Or many organizations are holding back or being uncomfortable with applying technology to enhancing cross-functional collaboration, and ultimately encouraging innovation, due to bureaucratic culture and tunnel vision. Looked at positively, this reflects the increasing strategic importance of talent management innovation and how some HR processes need to be transformed into digitized business processes which underpin innovation capability of the organization.
Top leaders and talent managers need to become the culture shaker: Outdated systems and processes drag down talented people every time. To shape the culture of innovation, performance management needs to be well integrated with talent management and culture management via building an effective framework of processes and guidelines dealing with dynamic, fluid, unpredictable pool of corporate mentality and behaviors. The culture has to invite and encourage innovation. Create a measure that assesses the different dimensions of organizational creativity adequately while keeping it general enough to assess this in a wide range of organizations and job roles. Otherwise, after a while, even the most outspoken, creative, innovative people stop offering improvements, ideas, etc. because they get the "that will never work" mentality, or other bureaucratic roadblocks. People have to be given the opportunity to be creative, they have to become empowered. Reward creativity, not mediocrity; reward "thinking productivity" to improve business agility and maturity, not just “working productivity” for achieving efficiency. Business leaders and talent managers obviously aware that a quantitative measure would not be a perfect solution, but the importance of creativity for organizations is well-known, it’s important to find an adequate way of assessing the “creative workplace,” appropriately. This, in turn, is a motivating factor for their staff engagement, output capacity improvement, and it needs to be a reality in any forward-thinking and innovation-seeking organizations around the world.


To be successful, business leaders should know that they need to learn quickly as to how they can assign the right person for the right position at the right time, and fully unleash their potentials; the “hard” business processes should enable the soft success factors such as building the culture of innovation. Talent management innovation can only be achieved via innovative leadership, integrated processes, and creative & self-driven employees. The top leaders should be change champions and talent managers are change agents. The organizational talent management, performance management, knowledge management and culture management need to be integrated in order to well align organizational vision with staff engagement. And then, innovation becomes a daily routine to run a high-performing digital organization.

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