Benefits for Key Stakeholders

Talent Management from Three Key Perspectives

To make comprehensive learning and talent management work in your organization, it can be helpful to explore the impact that talent processes have on end users – more specifically, managers, business leaders, and employees. Looking at talent management from these key perspectives helps us all better understand the specific needs of and challenges faced by these important stakeholders. In this section, Cornerstone discusses the varying challenges faced by these key stakeholders:

• Managers
  
• Business Leaders
• Employees
  

The Manager Experience

In the contemporary workplace, managers are stretched thin, often required to perform in several roles and to meet aggressive performance goals for their operating units. Integrated talent management platforms like Cornerstone OnDemand provide deep support for managers facing these challenges.

Benefits for your managers can stretch across a range of areas including task automation and consistent availability of critical data. Importantly, integrated talent management gives managers immediate access to the information they need to make good decisions around employee development, performance, compensation, and succession. When these types of decisions are being made systematically and in line with organizational objectives, the advantages cascade to the bottom line.

Key talent management areas for managers

• Goal management: aligning employee activity with business goals
• Career development: coaching and leadership development
• Employee productivity: getting the most out of employees
• Learning and development: using training to drive performance
• Performance appraisal: consistent evaluation and feedback
• Pay-for-performance: ability to link rewards and performance
• Succession and workforce management: keeping a healthy leadership pipeline

The Business Leader Experience

The time for “talent” is now, with senior leadership routinely discussing human capital as top source of competitive advantage. But moving business leaders from talking the talk to walking the walk remains a challenge. It’s a critical challenge too, as talent management programs need to be driven from the top to ensure lasting success.

Business leaders have the opportunity to define core elements of any strategic human capital initiative. From defining high-level business objectives (and cascading them down through the ranks) to identifying critical roles and competencies that will end up defining the very nature of the talent culture, senior leadership plays a fundamental role. But the business leader needs operational processes and technologies to transform vision to reality – a integrated talent management platform is one vital piece of this puzzle, delivering a unified view into talent data, workflows, and process.

Key talent management areas for business leaders

• Goal management: communicating high-level business objectives with an understanding for organizational competencies
• Critical roles: establishes which roles create competitive advantage
• Learning and development: makes organizational learning an efficient tool for remediating identified performance gaps
• Workforce planning: tracks skills gaps and models the future state of the organization
• Retention & Succession management: ensures organizational leadership pipelines are filled with top performers
• Succession planning: keeping a healthy leadership pipeline
• Leadership development: manages coaching and development of top-level leadership

The Employee Experience

Employees are highly mobile today, often switching employers multiple times in the span of a few years (this is especially true for the emergent Generation Y). Employees want to develop their own career goals, seek out career possibilities, participate in active development plans, and engage with the organization.

For HR leaders and line managers alike, this trend presents a series of tricky challenges around keeping critical roles filled, planning for the future of the workforce, and keeping collective knowledge from routinely walking out the front door. Alongside the troublesome issue of high career mobility, organizations routinely wrestle with how to make best use of their current employees, trying to match skills with the needs of the business.

In both cases, organizations that make proactive career development part of their integrated talent management strategy will find that the rewards are higher retention, loyalty, productivity, and long-range workforce health.

Key talent management areas for employees

• Goal management: clear understanding of personal goals and how they map to the business unit or organization
• Development planning: working in collaboration with managers to develop sensible plans for the future
• Career preferences: options to register specific career and location preferences
• Career paths: ability to explore alternative career paths within the organization, including non-linear career shifts
• Feedback: receive and provide consistent feedback on performance and expectations
• Collaboration: opportunities to network and collaborate with other employees, including employees with similar interests, possible mentors, and career enablers