An organization’s people strategy is the single most critical plan for accelerating business performance.

Most Important Strategy to Accelerate Business Performance

                            Source: 2016 Brandon Hall Group Talent Management Study

Yet 60% of organizations responding to Brandon Hall Group’s 2016 research survey said their approach was not at all effective or largely ineffective. When asked why, senior leadership said because the vast majority of hiring, managing, developing, mobilizing, and rewarding decisions are made on mere intuition.

Just 16% of organization surveyed have matured their analytics strategy beyond gut feel and ad hoc reporting.

And, a mere 7% are top performing organizations (Level 4 organizations) using data visualization to predict and prescribe talent actions and decisions that make a business difference.

A 4-Level Model of Analytics Impact

Brandon Hall Group High Performance Analytics Impact Model

                                                                  Source: Brandon Hall Group, 2016

Data visualization goes well beyond static reports or spreadsheets. It presents data in graphical or pictorial format readily exposing customer behavior patterns, top talent turnover trends, employee engagement risks, potential dips in productivity, and other critical business and talent information.

With interactive visualization, business leaders and other key decision makers create “what if” views of data, explore data implications real time, and understand data to scientifically inform talent decisions to accelerate achievement of today’s and tomorrow’s business goals.

Level 4 data visualization organizations yield, on average, 60% higher returns on their business metrics than lower performing peers.

‘Very Good’ or ‘Excellent’ Business Results: Level 4 vs. Level 1 Organizations

                              Source: 2016 Brandon Hall Group Talent Management Study

While the uptake of analytics usage is recently on the rise, analytics impact opportunity lies not in the availability or historical reporting of data but rather in its visibility and ability to interact real-time with it – data visualization that is.

Key characteristics of data visualization are:

• Ensuring the data is of high quality
• Telling the story behind the data
• Offering interactive self-service dashboards

Ensuring the Data Is of High Quality

Data visualization assumes data integrity. An effective, sustainable data quality plan includes at least the following three elements:

1. Data governance

Data pours into organizations in tremendous volumes. Mining billions and trillions of data elements can be overwhelming to an organization’s analysts, leaders, and employees and particularly when the integrity of the data is suspect. Despite the potential business value of data visualization, it is of zero value if the data is not of high quality. Level 4 analytics companies use a data governance process to raise awareness about why data quality is a business imperative, to document the quantifiable costs associated with the use of poor data, and to ensure clean, high-quality data avoiding subsequent issues tied to bad data.

2. Data outliers process

Graphical representations of data made possible by data visualization can highlight data outliers or errors more quickly than tables and spreadsheets filled with numbers and text. While removing outliers is essential before final analysis, analysis of the outliers themselves may reveal potentially valuable insights. Without data visualization, identifying outliers is extremely challenging.

3. Data accountability

Analyzing data, identifying data patterns, and creating insights is not a task for the inexperienced. Managing data requires expert resources and automation tools. Organizations that assign dedicated ownership of data and data visualization, even if only in a part time fashion, outperform those without dedicated accountability.

Poor data quality has a significant business cost – in time, effort and accuracy. On average, data analysts spend 20 to 60 percent of their time trying to understand, fix, or eliminate poor data. Organizations that use data governance, execute a process for spotting data outliers, and assign ownership of data to expert resources, completely eliminate – or at worst significantly reduce — the number of occasions they are plagued with bad data.

Telling the Story Behind the Data

Today, we have a visual trend on infographics. Infographics share information and are effective at showcasing a critical message. Take a look at the infographic below on turnover. It tells us that in large organizations, turnover costs are greatest in entry-level positions.

Infographic: Turnover

Source: www.globoforce.com

This infographic does not, however, offer critical turnover insights like: (1) Is the turnover coming from a certain geography? (2) How is turnover changing over time? (3) Is our turnover pattern different among the three employee levels (i.e. is one increasing at a higher rate than the other)?

This infographic and associated tabular reports and chart masks, even hides, the critical and actionable insights necessary to make intelligent business decisions.

Now, take a look at the following data visual on turnover.

Data Visualization: Turnover

Source: www.visier.com

The graphic above identifies specific employees who are at flight risk within the next 18 months, and offers attribute information on each employee. It offers imminent turnover information, suggests specific employees with whom targeted attention might be essential, and suggests locations and/or job roles that might be at risk and worthy of investigation.

This data visual allows leadership to proactively explore organizational risk areas and execute risk mitigation plans before business continuity is threatened, unveils insights that lead directly to actionable business decisions, and puts talent decision-making power in the hands of the managers.

Offering Interactive Self-Service Data Dashboards

Top-performing organizations are prioritizing analytics expertise in house, but not everyone has to be an analytics expert to use and have a need for data. Self-service data visualization dashboards allow all stakeholders to see and interact with data to identify sales patterns, predict talent turnover, or anticipate elevated service support times. In other words, self-service data dashboards maximize data insights, are fully interactive, and allow users (regardless of analytics expertise or lack thereof) to:

• Manipulate complex data sets and generate multi-tiered dashboards in seconds
• Drill down in to the data for querying, analysis, and reporting
• Set up alerts to trigger data update or change notifications
• Share dashboard data real-time with peers for team projects and simultaneous joint decision-making
• Track key performance indicators and conduct queries 24×7 from mobile devices

There are key business benefits to interactive data visualization dashboards:

• Improves efficiency by eliminating the need for multiple static reports
• Lowers operational costs by reducing the need for user training
• Improves decision making by empowering users with “what if” querying
• Facilitates the ability to easily identify negative trends

Despite the business value that data visualization tools and technology offer, nearly half of organizations do not yet have workforce analytics tools or technology. Fortunately, however, 86% of organizations acknowledge the business risk and have plans to replace existing technology or acquire technology that ensures their ability to have better workforce analytics and data visualization capability.

Data visualization is the key that turns “Big Data” into actionable data – data that provides the critical insights and understanding leaders need to make informed and intelligent business decisions.

Until next time…

Laci Loew, Vice President and Principal Analyst Talent Management
Brandon Hall Group
@LaciLoew

The post Data Visualization Is the Data Analytics Power Play appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

Building a great place to work is about putting people first, and not just saying so. That means developing a positive and productive culture that is built on trust and teamwork, nurturing great relationships between managers and employees, promoting innovation, valuing employees’ differences and uniqueness, and offering choices to employees from work arrangements to paid time off for participation in philanthropic activities. But before those accelerators, a great place to work assumes that organizations unequivocally honor employees’ basic needs and welfare.

Therein lies the fundamental problem. Assuming that foundational needs are met proves to be a false assumption. Too many organizations have yet to provide a polite and respectful environment with safe working conditions and the basic resources to get work done. Add to that, rudimentary talent actions and decisions that employees find intolerable—lack of recognition or recognition perceived as unfair, compensation packages that fall tiers below that of competitors, and an arrogance of disregard or indifference some leaders have for their employees’ welfare.

On average, 41% of organizations report that their employees are disenchanted or not satisfied with essential workplace and employee practices.

Those organizations seek course correction guidance, and in so doing are studying the 5% of organizations, on average, that report their employees respond positively to these fundamental practices. That small and elite group of employers has begun building a great place to work. Employees of these choice employers often do seem happier with their jobs and are more productive than those at other companies. And that’s because “great companies” do have something over a lot of other employers – at a minimum, they have met the basic needs of employees and are working toward growing the roots a great workplace environment.  First, they:

• Keep employees safe. There’s nothing more important. In today’s turbulent world, workplaces are not necessarily safe havens. Employers have to be diligent about putting checks and balances in place to ensure that employees’ physical and mental health and safety is not at risk. There is zero tolerance in this expectation. There isn’t a single company with incident – regardless of how small – that has ever made it to the “great place to work” list.

• Act with respect, always. Beyond common courtesy and polite behavior, this also means embracing those who look, act, and think differently from senior leadership and collectively represent the customer base. If diversity and inclusion is not on your list of business priorities, I am quite sure that you won’t find yourself on the “great place to work” list.

• Pay well. The data shows that attractive benefits and compensation are not the only drivers of top talent retention. It also shows that without them, you are guaranteed that top talent won’t choose you as their next employer. Appealing and competitive pay and benefits are requisite to preventing prospects and employees from turning their head to look at your competition or handing in their resignation to work for your competition.

• Provide requisite tools. If you want employees to get work done, enable them with tools. Put processes in place that ensure updates to hardware and software happen regularly. In today’s digital world, dated technology (from personal devices to HR platforms) is imperative for all employees — regardless of generation.

• Be fair. At employers of choice, it isn’t about equality; it’s about fairness. In other words, there is no such thing as all senior level engineers with performance ratings of 3.2 to 3.7 getting $10,000 bonuses and a “great job” email from the CEO. Fair acknowledgement is about disproportionate reward for those whose contributions make a meaningful contribution to business results. So does that mean that two employees with the same title/responsibilities and same/similar performance levels – but a big difference in the significance of their business contributions – should get different levels of recognition? YES!

• Care. Leaders at the best employers have genuine care for their employees. They are intentional about understanding unique life needs, and make it easy for employees to do the very best they can at both work and home. They provide as much flexibility to the most junior employee as they do the most senior. They create policies and procedures that enable employees to exercise choices in manners that accommodate personal needs rather than forcing employees to come forward and ask for an exception in order to accommodate life’s hurdles.

It’s not easy to achieve all of this, and that’s only the beginning. The very best of the “great places to work” also execute on three “great place to work” accelerators:

• Continuously develop. Today’s employees, particularly Millennials, expect ongoing coaching and development. They want to learn how to achieve elevated positions of responsibility and status quickly, and expect their employers to meet their developmental needs. This means “great places to work” will place less emphasis on offering learning programs and more on a learning experience; less emphasis on periodic performance discussions and more on continuous real-time feedback; less emphasis on one-time annual engagement surveys and more on regular culture assessments exposing critical performance gaps and creating experiences to close them. Organizations that opt for any development alternative but continuous and experience-driven not only have written off the “great place to work” distinction, but they have also written themselves out of any opportunity to attract and retain top talent. Candidates and employees will always opt for an organization that offers continuous development.

                                                  Source: 2015 Brandon Hall Group 2015
Employment Value Proposition Study

• Show how. Continuous development includes showing employees how to get work done. Sharing personal stories of success and failure, suggesting approaches to work, helping to build and cultivate internal and external networks, and taking time – every day – to “show them the ropes.” Employees, particularly Millennials, want a coach they can count on to “show them how” to get work done in the best way. Developing managers’ coaching capability is an opportunity most organizations have when it comes to “great place to work” accelerators.

Our Managers Coach to Show Employees How to Get Work Done

Source: 2015 Brandon Hall Group
Employment Value Proposition Study

• Create an experience. “Great places to work” immerse people into the organization in a holistic, end-to-end experience. Talent actions and decisions are purposefully and carefully knitted together, leveraging technology and the digital nature of today’s world to create a full experience and real interaction between the organization and the people.

The real learning here is about beginning at the beginning. Too many organizations attempt execution of the accelerators before locking in on the basics. That’s like trying to go faster before you’ve taken the time to put the vehicle in gear.

I applaud those who are willing to give this a go. While the effort will likely seem overwhelming and much more “give” than “give and take,” I promise the principle of “basics first, accelerators next” will give you a position in the same playing field as those who have already earned the “great place to work” status.

Until next time …

Laci Loew, VP and Principal Analyst, Talent Management, Brandon Hall Group

@LaciLoew

The post Building a Great Place to Work: 6 Statistics That Inspire Change appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

When is the last time your employee said, “Oh I love that new social media policy we just announced — it just makes me so engaged!” Uhh, I’m guessing not so much. Think of employee satisfaction and engagement with employers in a similar context as personal relationships with spouses, domestic partners, significant others or the like. Before you put the engagement ring on the finger, I bet you first make sure he makes you wildly happy!

If you are not in the business of being OK with losing your best performers, then making your employees happy is your responsibility even if “it isn’t in my job description” as one senior leader told me last week. Our research finds a correlation between employee satisfaction and productivity. We are not alone. A recent study by the economists at the University of Warwick corroborated our results, finding that employee happiness led to a 12% spike in productivity and unhappy workers were 10% less productive. Neuroscience experts and psychologists confirm the same notion that our brains simply work better and we get more accomplished when feeling positive and satisfied.

So in looking at the evidence, I feel safe in subscribing to the “happiness first, engagement next” principle. Assuming you go with me for a moment on that one, let’s talk about that which makes employees happy at work.

Give Me Choices

Most folks – regardless of age, profession, or experience level – like choices. That includes our employees, particularly Millennials. The more choices you give them, the happier they are: Do you want to work at home? Or in the office?  … The customer feedback hints at quality and inventory issues. We need to fix both. Which one do you feel is more relevant to accelerating achievement of our business goals? The more choices you can reasonably offer, the happier your employees will be – and this principle relates to everything from work arrangements to benefits.

Choices motivate employees, empowering them to do their best work. I might even suggest that the business value of choices goes beyond prompting best work  — it encourages discretionary effort.

Make It Fun for Me to Work Here

Workforces are happy when their workplaces are fun. It’s that simple. In Brandon Hall Group’s 2016 State of Talent Management Study, “build a great place to work” made the top five 2016 business priorities, and was less than 10 points behind the number one priority of improving revenue.

Top 5 2016 Business Priorities

          Source: Brandon Hall Group 2016 State of Talent Management Study

During our 2016 State of Talent Management Study, executives’ definitions of  “a great place to work” sounded like this:

• “We have a great onboarding process; new hires know what to do on their first day.”

–CIO “Jack” at Silicon Valley technology startup

• “I think we have a great compensation package.”

–HRBP “Evelyn” at a global manufacturer

• “We just got this new performance management software and the managers said it is easy to use. I know the employees will love it—way more efficient for everyone than the paper-driven process we used previously.”

–CEO “Alicia” at an enterprise pharmaceutical

And, employees’ description of a “a great place to work” went like this:

• “This place is just awesome. It’s funky and our managers respect us for who we are.”

–Software Analyst “Manish” from large technology firm

• “We are allowed to be weird. No dress code, no expectations. Just get your work done. That’s all. We can play foosball in the lunchroom or throw the football outside and no one looks at you funny even though it’s 10 a.m. What could be better?”

–Marketing Coordinator “Ariel” from a global hospitality company

• “It’s our ‘make it home by dinner time’ philosophy. We work hard, and play hard too. I’ve never worked anywhere else like this. I’ll stay here forever. Our leaders are cool … not arrogant. They are always stopping by to see how we are doing and how they can help. And, they even let me build my own merchandising display. I’m not taking orders from them – I’m learning from the insights they share with me. Working here is cool.”

 –Fashion Merchandiser “Angel” in a large clothing retailer

• “This isn’t a cookie cutter corporate office. We work in a rave. We are all ravers!”

 –Call Center Rep “Skip” from a large Internet retailer

Do the descriptions look markedly different? I’ll let you decide. Would you rather work with Manish or Ariel, Angel or Skip OR work for Jack, Evelyn, or Alicia? Again, I’ll let you decide!

45% of organizations described their cultures as dysfunctional – specifically internally competitive to the demise of the overall organization and very controlling as well. I’m encouraged to know, however, that 30% of those organizations told us that they plan to focus on ‘enhancing corporate culture’ over the next 12 months.

Share Your Personal Attention with Me

Employees expect to work with great leaders because they provide the best opportunities for development and growth. Talent begets talent. And the happiest employees work in organizations where great leaders across the entire enterprise freely give personal, dedicated, one-on-one time, sharing private stories of success and failure and exposing the what and the why behind how meaningful work gets done.

In organizations where employees described leaders as genuinely caring about employees’ welfare and providing personal development as well as offering individualized work that leverages their strengths and makes a business difference, employees’ happiness scores were approximately eight times higher than in peer organizations with leaders who neglect to build authentic, personal relationships with employees.

Source: Brandon Hall Group 2016 State of Talent Management Study

Cultures that infuse choice, fun, and personalized attention enable and nurture employee satisfaction, and satisfied employees are happy employees. Happy employees are motivated, inspired, passionate, delivering discretionary effort at rates that far supersede any disgruntled, unhappy co-worker. Sounds a bit like what a CEO might describe as employee engagement!

So where is your organization on the happy employee continuum? Do your leaders embrace flexibility and choice? Do they model an authentic sense of personal care and concern about employees? Do they foster a fun environment? Or is the tone at top inflexible, rigid and punitive, thus trading away productivity, high performance, happy employees…and business performance?

Until next time….

–Laci Loew, VP and Principal Analyst, Talent Management

Brandon Hall Group

@LaciLoew

The post Make Me Happy, Please appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

Data to Consider

As you reflect upon your talent supply and demand requirements, are you finding it relatively easy to attract new talent to your organization? Or, are you experiencing the same hiring challenges that hundreds of others do: difficulty attracting talent, challenges putting together competitive offers that candidates find attractive, and improving your overall quality of hire?

Today’s Top Hiring Challenges

 Source: 2015 Brandon Hall Group Talent Shortage/Hiring Practices Study

What happens after they are on board? Are you developing new hires in meaningful ways? What about the incumbent employees?

Are employee satisfaction and engagement indices trending up? What about your talent retention rate? And how about your revenue?

If not, I’d guess your employment value proposition (EVP) is broken, fractured, or certainly suffering some unhealthy bend. You know all about EVPs. EVPs describe the reasons prospective hires and employees choose you over all other employers and why you want to hire and keep them — because they are top performers.

If you have hiring challenges and your engagement and retention scores are trending down, you are probably looking for some quick and lasting fixes right about now. Well, fortunately, I have one to share with you: Develop your employees.

Most Critical Factors in Deciding to Join/Stay with an Organization

Source: 2015 Brandon Hall Group State of EVP Study

Though employees rated development opportunities first, and more than 30 points above any other attraction or retention strategy, organizational leadership doesn’t always assign the same level of priority. In talking with senior business leaders, HR and talent leaders, and learning professionals, they lament their talent budgets, particularly when it comes to ongoing L&D investment. These three comments reflect the overall tone I heard from these discussions:

“We don’t have the money to sink in to developing employees right now — our revenue was lower last month than expected.”

• “We hired that new sales guy last month so the budget is a little tight right now.”
• “We just have so many other priorities right now. We’ve put off the new web site for a few months already and it really has to get done. We do have the online eLearning courses they can take. Anything more is just going to have to wait for now.”

Well, here’s the deal — your employees won’t wait.  If you don’t invest in their development, they will invest their services elsewhere.

The employment value proposition embodies nearly every aspect of the employee’s experience with your organization – not just talent attraction — and development prevails in each element:

• Vision — Do you sell something that excites others? That solves real problems?  Can employees see how their work is aligned with what and how you service your customer? Are your senior leaders pointing out the clear line of sight for employees? Are you developing your employees’ organizational knowledge, helping them to understand the value proposition of your products and services, and specifically how their daily work contributes to that value?
• Culture – Are your leaders trustworthy? Do they communicate transparently? Are you actually building and nurturing an inclusive institution where employees feel listened to, valued, cared about, and have access to meaningful choices in their work? In their working arrangements? In their career options? In their development?
• Alignment — Do you empower your employees to lead meaningful and challenging work? Have you told them how their work has a direct relationship to how you service your customer? Do you regularly coach in the spirit of showing them how to get work done? And point out how their efforts directly align to achieving business goals?
• Reward/Recognition — Do you acknowledge unique and scarce talents, knowledge, skills, and experiences? Do you reward the contributions of the unique few disproportionately for their disproportionate contributions to your business goals? Do you stand for fair (not equal) pay? Are you rewarding and acknowledging those few who have successfully completed development to accelerate their contributions to your critical few business goals?

The Development to Offer

Assuming you have, or are now, subscribing to the value of development in driving your employees’ productivity, motivation, engagement, and intent to stay, it is helpful to be reminded about learning modalities that are most effective. Brandon Hall Group’s 2015 State of Training Benchmarking Study offers critical insights:

Most Effective (and Under-Used) Learning and Development Modalities

Experience is the Greatest Currency for Development

Offering regular access to senior leaders and other coaches who “show how” and share an insider’s insights, embedding learning in the context of one’s normal work responsibilities, encouraging networking – both inside and outside of – the organization, and even offering formal classroom training and on-demand learning tools, are some of the most impactful approaches to building employees’ skills and growing their opportunities. The best development is shaped around the long-standing 70-20-10 learning framework.

70-20-10 means a real blend of learning among all development solutions. It doesn’t mean that blend has to occur in each and every development solution. Further, the percentages are guidelines, not hard and fast rules. And more importantly, by design, it goes well beyond training.

A learn-by-doing learning culture starts with the organization’s leadership. Leaders set the tone, shape the culture, and model the organization’s commitment to developing employees’ capability. Those who execute on the commitment attract and keep top talent. Those who don’t have themselves to blame. They are guilty of giving development lip service, relegating it to words on a dusty learning strategy, and marginalizing its business criticality.  They rely on training programs to take the place of one-to-one relationships. They do not personalize their interactions and conversations. They do not take the time to give their dedicated attention to employees, and they don’t share insights for getting work done. In so doing, they tell employees they don’t matter.

When that message becomes the standard, employees don’t hesitate to affiliate with another organization – perhaps even your competition — and show their allegiance where they find a personal relationship with leaders who are authentically committed to their development and growth opportunities for the mutual advance of employees’ aspirations and businesses’ goals.

Is your organization committed to employee development? How do your leaders show it? Do employees see and feel leaders’ commitment?

Until next time…

—Laci Loew
VP and Principal Analyst, Talent Management
Brandon Hall Group
@LaciLoew

The post If You Want to Keep Them, Develop Them appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

Let me explain. Year over year, when our research surveys ask which strategy is most important to achievement of business goals, the number one prevailing answer is business strategy.

Not this year. For the first time ever, the organization’s people strategy supersedes the organization’s business strategy, and in fact all other strategies, in regard to its importance in meeting business goals.

In Brandon Hall Group’s 2016 State of Talent Management Study, key results of which will be released the week of Jan. 4, 30% of organizations held up people strategy as the single most important conduit to business success. Business strategy took the second spot at a full 10 percentage points behind.

People Strategy Is the Most Important Lever For Business Success

Source: Brandon Hall Group, 2016 State of Talent Management Study

Plain and simple, talent is the key differentiator between a business plan and effective execution of a business plan. And this year, the best organizations will take a stand to create high-performance workers, leaders, and teams. And who’s driving this stand? The C-Suite and the Board of Directors. No longer are they just the owners of talent strategies; they are driving them.

3 Talent Imperatives Most Organizations Are Overlooking

Within the very best people strategies, there are three ultra-essential dimensions that most organizations are overlooking.

Know Your Workforce

The foundation of all people strategies is intimate knowledge of your talent segments — full-timers, contingent workers, alumni, Millennials, women leaders, emerging leaders, high-potentials, and seasonal help. This includes savvy about the nuances that come with each segment – or what I call personas, including:

• Boomers are not necessarily retiring now as predicted. When they do retire, they aren’t planning to check out completely like traditional retirees have.
• Millennials aren’t the only ones who expect open use of mobile devices and other technology in the workplace and during the workday. So do more senior peers, believe it or not.
• Contingent workers are not the traditional 1099 contract worker. They expect to be treated just like any other full-timer, offered the same developmental opportunities and rewards.
• Hiring Millennials doesn’t mean posting job openings on job boards or web sites and hoping for applications. It requires your acquisition team’s participation in Millennial-specific events and immediately following up with texts on next steps, not emailing days later.
• Recognition is important for everyone and often looks different for each persona. Boomers may enjoy a periodic spot bonus; Millennials want regular attention, appreciation, and social recognition.

Effective execution of people strategies requires that you have intimate and precise understanding of your existing talent supply, its capabilities, and the future demand for each talent segment. That intimacy comes from the use of predictive analytics – in other words, forecasting turnover and knowing key sources of high-quality talent, and predicting revenue by talent segment or key job role. Here is why this is such an opportunity:

64% of organizations told us that using talent analytics is important or critical to the business

 

4% are prepared and ready to use talent analytics

Organizations with the best business results are in the court of intimacy with their workforce and take responsibility for using predictive analytics to appropriately and sensitively develop and energize each talent segment; they are not in the corner of operational hiring to fill open requisitions breeding mediocrity and acting with ignorance hoping employees and leaders bloom.

Create an Employee Experience

High-performance talent management as traditionally defined is all about the integration of all workforce and talent management processes – acquiring, developing, managing, and optimizing the performance of your people. At Brandon Hall Group, we prefer to think of high-performance talent management as perpetually better performance with perpetually lower risk. That means designing your talent strategy and talent processes as a true end-to-end employee experience. It isn’t about the steps an applicant goes through to apply for work at your organization, or the courses that your supervisors complete to get their new supervisor certification, or the career interest inventory that your employees access on your career portal, or annual talent calibration meetings and what names land in the upper right hand box.

I’m talking about how your employees, or a prospective employee, experiences your organization:

• How do they come into your website?
• What does it feel like to navigate your website?
• Does your website amplify your core values?
• How do your employees describe working at your organization?
• Do they feel proud to be an employee there?
• Do they feel appreciated?
• Do they describe your workplace as fun?
• Are they given personal attention?
• Do they feel they have a leader who really cares about them?
• What about your retirees? Are they truly alumni with a significant role still to play in your business? Or are they basically out of sight, out of mind?

Designing and implementing your talent strategy and talent processes as a perpetual end-to-end talent upgrade and with the “applicant-employee-alumni” experience at the heart is the make-or-break of high-impact talent strategies.

Offer Employees Choice

At the core of the highest impact talent retention strategies is choice. Choice appeals to individual differences and desires and unlocks capability. Choice is relevant and unique to every persona in your workforce – choice for Boomers, for Xers, for Millennials, for emerging leaders, for new hires, for all. Each persona has different needs and expectations and desires.

Consider flexible working arrangements. The Boomer may want it to care for aging parents; the Xer may want it to attend their kids’ functions; and the Millennial may want it for travel or to balance the addition of a new baby to the family.

Or maybe it is about technology – some want to use mobile devices more and some will only use mobile devices. So what does your technology policy look like and is it sensitive to the needs and expectations of each of your talent segments? Have you figured out how to let those who want to check Facebook during the day do so without giving them the proverbial black mark? Have you equipped or enabled your more senior employees to have mobile devices or just assumed they are not interested?

Sure, every talent process should have some degree of consistency across all employee groups and the enterprise. But at the same time, every talent process should build in choice – to one degree or another — around working arrangements, development options, work assignments, performance goals, and everything. The bottom line is this: the more choice you offer, the happier your employees. The happier your employees, the better your talent retention metrics. And the better your retention of top talent, the better your odds of business success.

Talent Retention Rates Still Struggling

Source: 2016 Brandon Hall Group State of Talent Management Study

Taking Action on 3 Talent Musts

It’s one thing to be aware of the changes ensuing, it’s quite another to act on them. The best organizations are already taking action on these 3 talent management “musts.” Here’s what they are doing:

Using predictive analytics. At the root of intimately knowing your workforce is the use of internal and external data to support predictive analytics. Predictive analytics creates a well-informed senior leadership team that drives the talent agenda; a team that recognizes its accountability for the people strategy, not HR.  Accordingly, as talent and HR leaders, we have accountability to arm leadership with science-based research and benchmarks that educate about the nuances, expectations, and experiences of all the diverse groups within the organization.

Creating an “it just feels good to work here” organization. The key to accomplishing this type of organization is a commitment to empowering employees to be proud of their personal contributions and the contributions their organization makes to social responsibility. Start with understanding what interacting with your organization looks like and feels like from the perspective of the candidate, the employee, and the alumni. Some examples:

• Offer developmental opportunities that are immersive and thought-provoking, going well beyond the traditional learning events bound by time and space of traditional classroom-based events.
• Empower employees to give and get thanks regularly, often, and in ways that have meaning for each individual.
• Communicate regularly and be sensitive to how your messages are engaging each persona in your workforce.
• Build a collaborative culture and do so by inviting your employees to help shape what fun looks like in your organization.
• Engage your alumni to spread their commitment to your brand and “great place to work” culture.
• Be committed to making a contribution to society and empower employees with time to “give back to the community” or contribute to social responsibility in any other way personally appealing.

Giving every employee the best shot at great performance every day. At the root of offering employees choice is an agile, flexible, and nimble culture that embraces change, innovation, diverse thinking, and inclusion:

• Are you knowledgeable and sensitive to what choices each talent segment aligns with?
• Are you providing development opportunities that build experiences and have real meaning to each employee and each persona?

This doesn’t mean that if you have 6,000 employees, you need 6,000 different development options or 6,000 different benefit options. It does mean that you create options that have an element of consistency and have a broader element of choice in every dimension of your people strategy.

If you are serious about business success, get serious about these strategic talent decisions and actions. Leadership in the best organizations is paying attention to what most everyone else is now ignoring:

• Knowing your workforce intimately
• Creating an end-to-end employee experience
• Empowering choice at every opportunity

Until next time …

Laci Loew
VP and Principal Analyst Talent Management
Brandon Hall Group
@LaciLoew

The post 2016: The Year of the People appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

This knowledge enables informed decisions about the right number of employees, with the right knowledge, skills, behaviors, and experience. It allows organizations to place the right person, in the right role, at the right time, for the right cost. These decisions and actions are called workforce planning. Workforce planning is informed by talent analytics.

Almost all CEOs — 97% — as reported from early findings in Brandon Hall Group’s 2016 State of Talent Management Study, agree that talent analytics is critical or important to the business. Just 38% report that their approach to analytics is effective or very effective. More worrisome is that one-third of organizations have yet to take even an initial step to use talent analytics. I suspect that the execution gap is likely due to challenges that often accompany talent analytics.

The Challenges of Using Talent Analytics

Implementing talent analytics is not hampered by data availability. Organizations have data coming from everywhere – new hire surveys, engagement surveys, performance reviews, talent reviews, customer satisfaction surveys, exit interviews, career assessments, etc. These sources generate data such as time to productivity, performance ratings, rewards cost, successor readiness, pipeline health, retention rate, and flight risk by employee, manager, job type, level, division, region, and more. Data is not limited to these internal sources. External market data is also readily available: talent availability, competitive pay, cost of living, skills readiness, quality of talent, depth of candidate pool by job type, level, function, region, and more.

With this volume of data at hand, what then are the challenges in talent analytics? The answer lies in knowing the resolutions to these four questions:

• What data and metrics should organizations be looking at?
• How do organizations get access to the most informative data?
• How do organizations go about analyzing critical data?
• Do we have expertise in-house to make findings actionable?

As you contemplate your responses to these queries, consider these empirically-driven insights:

Isolate Data that Makes a Difference

Analyze only data that is essential for making critical business decisions (predicting customer behaviors, anticipating market trends, etc.) and taking critical talent actions (hiring more Sales Executives, moving the Operations team to China, etc.).

Knowing exactly what data to analyze is contingent on knowing what question you wish to answer. For example:

• What is the probability that hiring a systems engineer from “source A” will yield a top performer or high-potential that stays at least 3 years?
• Can we expect to fill open IT positions within 30 days? Start by defining the question you seek to answer.

Get Access to Invaluable Data

After knowing exactly what mission-critical data is needed for analysis, now you need access to it – and just it! Relying on a third-party provider (e.g. Gild, IBM Watson, Vestrics, Visier, etc.), using the talent analytics of your existing talent management technology, hiring an internal data scientist — or some combination of all – are your best options.

Analyze Data

Now that the critical data is available to you, you need to do something with it – analyze it to inform action plans. Leveraging workforce intelligence requires rigorous data analysis skills. This is a high-priority skill set that many high- performance organizations are beginning to add to staff in the form of a data scientist or analytics expert role. Alternatively, organizations can opt to contract with a 3^rdparty analytics tools or software provider – one of those named above or another.

Have In-House HR Talent Analytics Expertise

To leverage talent analytics, HR professionals develop actions plans to address findings yielded from data analysis. This translates to the following HR professional skills:

• Strategic business knowledge
• Data analysis with organizational context
• Financial knowledge
• Understanding of cost impact models
• Project road mapping skills
• Change management expertise

HR operational knowledge, talent management program delivery, and service support of line leaders will no longer be enough. Two-thirds of organizations say HR is not prepared to support implementation of a talent analytics approach to talent decisions and actions. While that statistic is certainly a gap, I prefer to look at it as an opportunity for most organizations to jump-start their commitment to talent analytics.

Getting Started with Talent Analytics

There is an urgent need for HR functions to help business leaders connect workforce intelligence into talent management so “right person, in the right place, at the right time” can be achieved to impact the results of the business.

HR functions start by knowing what question needs answered, understanding the analysis of what has happened, participating in discussions with senior business leaders about what should happen, establishing a plan for what leadership wants to happen, and then continuing that cycle over and over.

The Continuous Cycle of Talent Analytics

Below are two examples of how the 4-step cycle of maximizing business performance using workforce intelligence works:

Source: Brandon Hall Group 2015

The Business Value of Talent Analytics

With more than half of an organization’s expense allocated to employees’ wages and benefits, on average, just a fractional improvement in people performance has significant bottom line upshots. Effective use of talent analytics is the answer to improved business results.

Until next time …

Laci Loew,
VP and Principal Analyst, Talent Management, Brandon Hall Group
@LaciLoew

The post How to Actually Start Utilizing Talent Analytics appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

Reasons underscoring its lack of effectiveness are broad, but too much focus on developing leader skills and too little emphasis on immersing leaders in experiences to build their understanding and know-how are two of the top reasons. Further, despite Millennials comprising about half of our workforce, with that number growing to 75% or more by 2020, a dismal 19% of organizations plan to focus development on this younger leader population. Add to that the under-utilization of leadership analytics to inform critical leadership decisions and actions for business success and a formula for ineffective leadership development becomes prominent. If organizations expect leadership development to play the role they need it to in achieving business results, a real commitment to leading practice execution needs to take hold now.

Join our monthly research spotlight webinar on December 16^th at 10am PT/12noon CT/1pm ET as I share an updated leadership development execution framework and explore the science and success stories validating the business value of a systematic approach to leadership that ensures the execution of leading practices.

During this webcast, you will learn about:

• Fresh insights about how to implement high-performance leadership development
• A framework for designing leadership development excellence
• Examples and success stories of organizations who are getting leadership development right
• Upcoming sessions on high performance leadership development at our the HCM Excellence16 Conference
• Exclusive leadership development and other research resources available through our Brandon Hall Group membership

Brandon Hall Group’s 2015 State of Leadership Development Study shows that the best organizations are establishing a true leadership strategy for the first time and/or modifying their leadership development effort from “ad hoc leader training programs” to “a look-forward focus on building leadership capacity, capability and culture.” A structured approach inclusive of assessments, analytics, and a focus on the Millennial population sit square in the center of the fresh approach to LD.

Our research documents the relationship between a systematized approach to leadership development and better business.  That relationship has real business meaning in the form of sharable and reportable business results in the areas that matter – revenue, brand, market share, and productivity.

I hope to “see” you at the webinar on Dec. 16!

–Laci Loew
VP and Principal Analyst, Talent Management
Brandon Hall Group
@LaciLoew

The post Fresh Insights on Leadership Development appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

Highly Skilled Worker Turnover Rates

In today’s hyper competitive talent market, highly skilled employees are highly sought- after and therefore have many employment choices. As the data shows, they are taking advantage of them. They are quick to pursue other opportunities when their first opportunity falls short of their development expectations. In fact, lack of development was cited by more than a quarter of organizations in our research as a “top 5” reason for their poor organizational results in talent retention.

Primary Reasons for Turnover

That turnover statistic is scarier when looking only at Millennials. Nearly 40% of organizations predict a higher or significantly higher turnover of Millennials in the next 12 months. Almost 60% of organizations report poor, or only fair, engagement of their Millennials.

The best organizations are careful about getting the turnover reduction and engagement increase balance just right by investing in employees’ growth and skill development. These organizations are investing to win the ultimate prize: the retention of engaged top talent.

For these high-performance organizations, career management is not a guarantee of promotion. It’s about planning (career exploration, personal interest inventories, skills assessments), development (building skills, experiences and relationships), and execution (completion of development plans and transitioning into new roles). Together these processes can dramatically improve alignment between employees’ capabilities and interests and the organization’s needs. The process today looks markedly different than its earlier version.

Career Management Practices Yesterday and Today

                                                                                                                  Source: 2015 Brandon Hall Group

Effective execution of today’s career management practices is a responsibility of organization, the manager, HR, and the employee.

The Organization’s Role

The organization is responsible for establishing and sustaining a culture that encourages and invests in continuous employee development and experience-building. Through governance, organizational leadership makes decisions about how best to develop managers as coaches, map multiple career paths (not just upward paths), and make career information readily accessible to employees on a variety of platforms, including mobile devices. The organization finds ways to reward managers who actively support employee development and encourage movement of employees to new roles.

The Manager’s Role

Managers are accountable for continuous coaching and mentoring and making time to provide employees with the attention and insights they seek about their development, their growth, and their next work opportunity. They actively support individualized employee growth and development plans and encourage mobility of employees into roles that will best leverage their skills. They serve as on-call advisors, offering insights to ensure the employees’ development plans and aspirations stay on track in alignment with business needs.

HR’s Role

HR stewards the career management process. It provides and clarifies career management information, and offers assistance to employees using internal career management tools. Staff members provide career interest inventories and skills assessments and offer advice to employees considering a career change.

The Employee’s Role

Employees take initiative to seek new work challenges. They cultivate and nurture relationships and build networks internal and external to the organization. They initiate dialogues with senior leaders to gain insights and perspectives. And they market their expertise, building their personal brand.

When all four constituents come together to implement contemporary career management, the results are an increase in employee engagement and retention of top talent. Employers who fail to prioritize career development and set clear paths for their employees’ continuous growth and development will continue to struggle with detrimental turnover and can expect significant sacrifice of business performance.

What is your organization’s stand on career management? Do you have all stakeholders rallied around it? What changes are needed in your culture to launch and sustain a modern-day approach to career management?

Until next time…

—Laci Loew
VP and Principal Analyst, Talent Management
Brandon Hall Group
@LaciLoew

The post At the Best Companies, Career Management Is In Sharp Focus appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

Yet, despite the ongoing talent priorities of productivity, engagement, and retention, 37% of organizations advise that their approach to managing talent is under-performing or low-performing. That’s no surprise when many organizations are still wrestling with defining exactly what talent management means. Is it executive development? Is it performance management? Is it all talent processes (talent acquisition, performance management, leadership development, etc.)? Is it separate from the people strategy?

Add to that confusion the list of talent priorities that survey respondents highlighted as challenges: identifying key positions, developing leaders, aligning learning with business goals, creating opportunities to grow experiences, measuring outcomes, predicting talent requirements – and that is just the beginning of the list.

Finally, consider today’s economic, industrial, demographic, and technological sea change that influences talent decisions and actions, and the ambiguity about how to design and implement talent management can be overwhelming, and very uncertain.

Sometimes starting with “what not to do” or knowing the warning signs of failure are insightful to creating a high-performance strategy. After multiple conversations with business leaders in more than 10 industries, at least three signs of struggling talent strategies are clear.

1) Failure to Identify and Develop the Critical Few

The best organizations have the best leaders – at all levels. The best leaders have focus and are galvanized around mutual and complementary execution of business goals regardless of their level, their region, or the function they support. Further, the best leaders are committed to providing opportunities for growth of others – personally and professionally.  And, your best leaders represent a small fraction of the total organizational employee segment.

These critical few leaders likely occupy C-suite and other senior positions in sales and other critical functions, are select incumbents in the mid-level leader segment, are new supervisors with the most acumen and people skills, or are the highest performing individual contributors. The highest-performing organizations disproportionately invest in developing the strengths of these critical few. Targeted development of these few top performers is essential in optimizing the performance of all employees and the organizational at large.

Investing in the development of the highest-performing leaders starts with knowing who they are. Yet on average, two-thirds of organizations have not – or only in ad hoc ways — identified critical talent segments and those who have the greatest potential to assume next-level roles.

2) Business Brand Is Stronger Than Employment Brand

The best organizations attract and keep customers and attract and keep top talent. Business brand is all about consumers loving what your organization stands for and the products and services you offer.

Employment brand is all about attracting the best talent in the industry to work with you and keeping them after you have them. If candidates’ perception is not quite as top-box as consumers’ perception, it could be for any number or all of the following reasons: too little investment in employee development, non-competitive pay and benefits, undesirable location, inflexible work arrangements, and poor reputation. In short, employment brand is eroded when candidates perceive an organization’s culture is distasteful.

Developing an employment brand strategy helps keep organizations honest about their self-assessment of internal culture and exposes opportunities for improving it. Yet, 37% of organizations have yet to create an employment brand strategy. Another 19% say it needs improvement.

3) The Approach to Managing Talent Lacks Flexibility and Choice

Wooing top talent is hyper-competitive.  Keeping top talent is even more so. There is tremendous pressure for organizations to wear the “Great Place to Work Hat,” and it may start with a great employment brand, but it doesn’t end there. After the hiring and onboarding, employees want choices in what work they will do, how they will get it done, how they will be enabled and developed to get it done, and how their performance will be measured.

All employees – whether new in their career or veterans – are amplifying the demand for flexibility and choice in the workplace. This does not mean 6,000 different development solutions for your 6,000 employees. This does not mean eight different performance management processes for each of your eight different business units.

This means the entire organization marching collectively and in lock step with each other toward the achievement of common business goals yet enabling talent processes that are agile and can flex to some reasonable degree with the unique needs of the person, the business unit, and the region. Allowing a level of reasonable choice around common processes matters. Organizations that implement talent strategies that allow overlap of individual and team choices with the execution of the single mission of the business will outperform those that do not – in both talent metrics and business performance.

Could your talent strategy be optimized? If so, is there a need to focus on finding and developing the critical few? Is it about creating a collaborative and transparent, healthy and productive culture? What about enabling choice and flexibility without eroding enterprise-wide execution of your business strategy?

Until next time ….

—Laci Loew
VP and Principal Analyst, Talent Management
Brandon Hall Group
@LaciLoew

The post 3 Signs of a Struggling Talent Strategy appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

Despite the ongoing complaints and the majority (70%) proclamation that performance management drives no or little business value, I’m hard-pressed to find even a single organization that has scrapped performance management altogether. And, with confidence, I suspect I won’t find any such examples any time soon. Performance management has been around for 50 years, and will be for another 50 and more. However, executing on it in status quo fashion is not an option for those who rely on it to make a business difference.  If organizations expect performance management to play a role in achieving business results, a transformation of its approach is past due.

Join our webinar, Give Them the Best the Opportunity for their Best Performance, at 10amPT/Noon CT/1pm ET on Nov. 12 as we explore the science and success stories validating the business value of this topic with Linda Miller, Product Manager with DDI (Development Dimensions International).

Brandon Hall Group’s 2015 State of Performance Management Study shows that the best organizations are renovating performance management from “a look back to identify and fix individual weaknesses,” to “a look forward focused on building employees’ strengths to grow organizational capability.”

Conversations are at the center of the conversion. Our research documents the empirical correlation between regular and informal manager-employee conversations and better business.  That relationship has real meaning when executives and other senior business leaders evaluate their customer retention index, their engagement score, and their revenue numbers and share results that are much more favorable in a culture where managers talk regularly with their employees about how to do more of what they are already exceling at.

During our event we will:

• Share key research data shaping a new approach to performance management
• Understand the business value of conversations shaping the performance management agenda
• Learn about key dimensions that shape effective performance conversations
• Hear DDI’s point of view on the value of “performance conversations”
• Gain success insights as documented by organizations that have implemented effective “performance conversations”

See you next week!

—Laci Loew
VP and Principal Analyst, Talent Management
Brandon Hall Group
@laciloew

The post Performance Management – It’s All About the Conversation appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.