Talent…Next?

The focus on talent (workforce, individual competence, employee) continues to gain attention. In the last year, there have been some talent-related themes that shape how people think, act, and feel within their organization, including unconscious bias (evolution of diversity agenda), types of workers (evolution of full time vs. part-time/contractor employees agenda), use of digital technology (talent apps) to innovate employee interactions within the firm, and employee analytics to predict employee behaviors.

Many have and will comment on these, and other talent-related innovations.

My bias is to look forward and envision the next talent agenda. 

1.    Employee guidance.  

Many of the talent initiatives listed above focus on employees to help them have a better experience in their organization. We have found that a key to talent sustainable experience comes from thinking about talent from the outside/in to better justify talent investments. Talent choices, practices, and activities deliver value to customers and investors or seeing talent from the outside/in. Some of this outside/in logic correlates employee experience with customer experience (usually in the .6 to .8 range) and investor confidence (intangible market value).

This outside-in logic should lead to better employee guidance. Guidance is a fascinating concept for many groups: For students wanting career guidance, families wanting investment guidance, or investors seeking corporate guidance. In these and other settings, guidance implies setting a direction (career goal, financial independence, or corporate performance), then building a pathway (or pathways) in that direction. 

Going forward, I envision more focus on employee guidance than activity. In this scenario, HR might propose a host of talent-related investments (staffing, training, career planning, communication, performance management, and so forth), then an assessment can be made as to the relative impact of these investments on stakeholders who matter (customers, investors). This combines digital HR and HR analytics into a forward-looking, outside-in perspective on talent. When HR has limited resources to invest in talent, they should focus on those talent-related activities that deliver the most value to key stakeholders through a talent guidance logic.

2.   Employee experience

Employee experience has become the new mantra for how employees respond to work.  While it builds on previous work on employee motives, motivation, commitment, and engagement, there are a few trends for employee experience that should emerge going forward. One evolution will be employee responsibility for their experience.  This has led Marshall Goldsmith to add the personal choice antecedent (“Did I do my best…?”) to traditional employee sentiment questions about a boss, friends at work, pay, and working conditions. Employee experience may also open the way to synthesize more clearly how to help employees respond favorably to their work setting through the essence of their experience—the extent work increases their ability to believe, become, and belong. 

• Believing: An employee finds personal meaning from organizations because employees realize that their personal values derive from and align with the organizations’ purpose and values.
• Becoming: An employee learns and grows through participation in organizations because they enable employees to pursue new talents through opportunities.
• Belonging: An employee has a personal identity and develops new relationships because organizations put employees in contact with others.

By meeting belief, become, and belong personal, employee needs, organizations increase employee sentiment that delivers value to customers and investors.

3.   Worktask planning 

Today’s work world sees an onslaught of technological innovation. The speed and power of computing increases, producing digital concepts that include cloud/big data, social media, gamification, internet of things, robots/chatbots, virtual or augmented reality, blockchain, artificial intelligence, cognitive automation, machine learning, deep learning, and so forth. Through these digital tools, the use of technology has evolved from focused reasoning to statistics to deep neural learning systems. Technology is an assistant (enabler, supporter, partner, helper) and not a replacement for people. Though it will not match neurological brainpower, as technology evolves, it will have the capacity to use data to make decisions and to learn (e.g., IBM’s “Watson” learned to play chess as well as or better than a human being).

What does technological and digital revolution have to do with workforce planning? In today’s companies, work can be accomplished in many ways: by full-time employees, part-time employees, contract employees (outsourced, consultants), and now AI (robots, augmented reality, machine learning). With this variety of ways of doing work (including technology), the focus of talent management is less on planning a workforce than on accomplishing worktasks. The logic of worktask planning has six steps, as shown in figure 1.

Worktask planning brings technology into the talent world. Workforce planning is about placing people in the right job at the right time with the right skills. Worktask planning focuses more on how to accomplish a take either with people or through technology.

4.   Culture over talent

Talent matters, but organization matters more to key results. In the Academy Awards, about 20 percent of the time, the movie that includes the Best Actor or Actress wins Best Picture. In the NBA, about 20 percent of the time, the team with the top scorer wins the NBA championship. Further, when Michael Jordan led the league in personal scoring but his team did not win the NBA championship (3 times), he averaged 34.55 points per game. But when Jordan led the league in personal scoring and his team won the championship (6 tines), he averaged only 30.5 points per game. When he personally scored less, the team won the championship. Teamwork wins.

Like movies and basketball (all sports actually), business today requires teamwork. In our research (see Victory Through Organization) on 1200 businesses, we discovered that organization capability had four times (yes four times!) more impact on business results than individual competence (talent). Organization capability may occur in a plant, in a function, in a division, in a business unit, in a geographic unit, or enterprise-wide.  

So, talent advocates will be increasingly sensitive to the organization settings where they work, with attention on organization capabilities like innovation, collaboration, agility, customer centricity, external sensing and to creating the right culture.

I am sure that these four future-focused agendas are a small snippet of future-oriented talent focus. They are conceived to continue to invest in talent as a way to help both people and organizations grow.

Dave Ulrich is the Rensis Likert Professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan and a partner at The RBL Group, a consulting firm focused on helping organizations and leaders deliver value.