Talent management initiatives and employee training and development programs are the backbones of organizational development and talent retention strategies. The 21st century belongs to innovative thinkers with creative ideas for workforce development.
A McKinsey & Company research suggests three drivers of a successful talent management strategy:
- Quick allocation of Talent (Moving the talent across different strategic positions)
- HR’s involvement in the employee experience (Facilitating the employee journey)
- Strategically minded HR team (Understanding organizational strategies and business priorities)
A Gartner survey identifies that only 13% of employees are fully satisfied with their experiences at the workplace.
Dissatisfaction with the workplace experience could lead to unsustainable financial performance or a potential business failure.
A study published in the Harvard Business Review suggests that customer experience and employee experience are now two of the driving forces of business.
Hence, HR’s involvement in the employee experience is the most important and relevant driver.
HR leaders and managers need to provide:
- A roadmap for learning and growth
- Innovative talent management initiatives
- Mentoring sessions to increase employees’ confidence and motivation to outperform in challenging situations
- A correlation between the professional and personal objectives
Another critical factor for employee growth and development is the in-house learning ecosystem – a combination of the company’s technology, culture, and people and their influence on the learning environment.
The effectiveness of an ecosystem depends on technology-based HR tools and methods. The fact is, you cannot make bricks without clay.
A traditional HR system cannot collect employee performance data, thus decreasing the company’s ability to introduce new employee growth and development initiatives.
Employee engagement and satisfaction levels depend on the number of new employee-centric initiatives. A lack of HR data could eventually result in incompatible management strategies.
Therefore, an organization’s first and foremost priority is to invest financial resources in a technologically advanced HR system – a compulsion for improving data collection procedures, identifying skills and engagement gaps, and developing training initiatives to achieve excellence in workforce development.
Our company, Sense HR, introduced SaaS HR software for companies with an ’employee management, HR administration, and performance improvement’ challenge. Our technologically advanced HR software help companies in areas like:
- Onboarding employees and contractors
- Direct ‘on document’ e-signatures
- Pre-starter login area for welcome messages
- Automatically calculate gross pay for payroll
Lastly, the transition to a better HR system becomes easy by adopting the approach of excellence and neglecting the mindset of perfectionism in workforce development.
Perfectionism is not practical because it limits an individual ability to grow. On the other hand, excellence is openness to being wrong, accepting new ideas, and making relevant changes to adapt to continuously changing market trends.
The HR manager’s urge to achieve excellence depends solely on their knowledge and know-how about employee performance.
Only data about employee performance enable the HR department to conduct a need assessment process for change management. Hence, the key to a great HRM depends on three simple words, data, data and data.
Strategies/ Recommendations for a successful workforce development
The more efficient the company utilizes the deployed HR system, the higher the chances of developing new skills and professional experience in employees.
1. Personalize the employee learning experience
Adopting a technologically advanced HR system helps develop new in-house data collection, analysis, and management capabilities. The significant insights from analyzing data can help develop personalized learning and development (L&D) strategies for decreasing the employee skills gap.
The employee’s learning experience becomes personalized if their opinion becomes an important part of the company’s in-house learning ecosystem.
Follow the 10-step approach for developing a personalized L&D program:
Step 1: Identify the training needs and requirements of employees.
Step 2: Collect employees’ suggestions through surveys for their training priorities.
Step 3: Analyze the data collected in the HR system database to identify employees with the most inefficient performance.
Step 4: Develop a customized personal improvement plan for every employee with the highest skill gap.
Step 5: Allocate funds for developing training initiatives.
Step 6: Make a monitoring team based on senior and mid-level managers.
Step 7: Implement the L&D program.
Step 8: Compare employee performance in pre and post-era of the L&D program.
Step 9: Conduct a face-to-face meeting with employees.
Step 10: Suggest new training and development options if any employee fails to meet performance improvement objectives.
The 10-step approach can only be effective if the company is willing to invest financial resources in a modern HR system that provides data to the company’s strategic think tank or policymakers for developing new policies.
2. Become more responsive to market changes
Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, once said:
“The only sustainable advantage you can have over others is agility, that’s it.”
Become an agile organization with a fast learning curve and short decision cycles to quickly capture the market opportunity to maximize benefits.
Again, what will make your company an agile organization?
The answer is simple, an investment in a compatible HR system that quickly provides real-time information about the company’s workforce and helps identify areas for performance improvement. A lack of knowledge about organizational activities decreases the management’s ability to adapt quickly to market conditions.
3. Don’t let uncertainty prevail
The last but most important point is that deploying a new HR system in a comparatively traditional work environment can generate employee resistance. Potential reasons are lack of knowledge to operate SaaS software, inability to manage tasks, and non-tech savvy users. Our 24/7 maintenance and support service is always available to help you with any HR system-related problem.
However, you also need to take certain steps to ensure that the deployment of the new HR system does not create any uncertainty among the workforce.
Here are some strategies:
- Communicate with employees about the benefits of the HR system
- Train employees to operate the system efficiently
- Take help from our support team
- Share HR-related reports to employees to increase their confidence in the new technology-based HR tools and methods
- Most importantly, conduct regular discussion sessions with employees to help them understand how an HR system can help them in identifying skills gaps, implementing performance improvement plans, and increasing professional experience by maximizing the use of the company’s in-house resources
Conclusion
An urge to continuously learn new methods, tools and processes can help HR leaders succeed in their respective professional careers. The sole objective of an HR manager should be to improve the employee experience at the workplace and help make the whole employee journey a great one. Investing in an HR system is one of the first initiatives or steps to achieve excellence in workforce development.