Employee Layoffs – Handle Carefully
The term employee layoff is referred to as temporary separation of an employee from the employer. However, these days it is also used for permanent termination of an employee for business reasons. According to section 2 of the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, the employee layoff is the failure, inability or refusal of an employer to […]
Benefits of Employee Engagement
History records how Alexander was able to march on and conquer hitherto unknown lands due his valour and his motivated troops. However, the same history also records, how dissent amongst his troops towards the latter part of his career, cut short his ambitions of supremacy in Asia. Alexander started hiring more outsiders, laying off his […]
Performance Appraisal Process
For many employees working in the organized sector, the term appraisal process conjures images of hope and fear simultaneously. Hope for a better grade and fear about potential downgrading or a bad rating. The weeks leading up to the appraisal are filled with hectic activity when the employees get down to evaluating themselves and prepare […]
Hewitt Employee Engagement Measure
Headquartered in Lincolnshire, Illinois in United States, Hewitt Associates was a global management consulting and HR outsourcing firm. Established in 1940, the firm delivered a wide range of HR and management services to the companies across the world to in managing their Human resource operations, policies and procedures, enhancing the level of employee engagement and […]
Knowledge Management in the Information Age
Knowledge Management Systems and the Internet We are living in an information age that is characterized by increasing information about everything and anything available anywhere and everywhere. In this context, knowledge management has to be done in a structured and organized manner if redundancies and information overload are to be avoided. The point here is […]
Organizations globally are one in their view that managing people in a strategic priority. Yet something somewhere seems to be going wrong and research has it that it is the human factor that is big impediment in talent management processes. Is it something in the implementation or lack of people participation at the top level? Let’s try to understand.
McKinsey conducted one research in this direction in the year 2006 and found out that the obstacles preventing talent management programs from delivering business value are too human! Either the top management holds business line managers responsible for not giving enough time to the issue of people management or the executives blame the top management for failing to align their business strategies with talent management strategies.
Senior managers blame the apathy of the top management towards the issue and also that the line managers are not sufficiently committed to people development. According to the survey it was found out that 54 percent of the respondents believe that senior managers don’t spend enough high quality time on talent management. Perhaps the senior managers fail to recognize the strategic importance of the process in their business and therefore don’t see the point in spending so much time on talent management or maybe they are not managing their time well.
Business line managers, according to the survey are equally responsible. Fifty two percent of those interviewed contributed that line managers were not sufficiently committed to people development. Understandably because lower the organizational hierarchy the focus remains more on the present than on the future; additionally it was also found out that line managers do not want to differentiate their employees are top, average and underperformers. Add more to it, forty five percent reasoned that the managers failed to deal with the underperformers.
Another forty five percent people in the survey believed that some part of it could be attributed to silo thinking i.e. focusing on the interests of only one part of the organization. Silo thinking results in immobility of talent across the organization and also hinders knowledge sharing across various departments.
Apart from the above mentioned factors succession planning and lack of understanding of critical jobs in the employees is another impediment to talent management.
We may begin from the bottom or start from the top, because both have a stake. Beginning from the bottom would mean performance management for line managers and employees with self service convenience. Performance management systems with superior user experience will increase the use of the system. Business line managers need to be trained on various aspects of delegation and dealing with underperformance and reporting the same. Employee rotation within the organization may help and this needs to be conveyed.
Similarly a top down approach would mean aligning talent management strategy to the business strategy. Intelligent reporting system has some answers perhaps because the results are seen immediately. If the problem is of conviction and belief in talent management as strategic tool rather than a mere cost center, perhaps intelligent reporting may solve it for the organization. For talent management to be successful a though participation and belief in required up and down the organization hierarchy.
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *
