Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/73199
Workforce Leadership Talent management in world-class organisations is not a standalone process, but should be linked enterprise-wide to strategic planning. and learning, but maintaining a best-of-breed approach where strong preferences or significant investments in certain products make it hard for them to move to a common platform across talent management." Simon Constance, a partner at Orion Partners in London, has a similar view. "The most important change of the last couple of years has been the recognition that people need to join up talent management practices across areas like resourcing, development, and reward," he says. "There are few that have cracked this." Smartening Up Other talent management best practices currently practiced by world-class organisations include global consistency and standardisation of processes. Aon Hewitt's clients and prospective clients, according to Franci, continue to express interest in a global approach to talent management to attract, motivate and retain high-caliber people across the organisation. Additionally, the firm's clients seem to want more of a strategic model—less concerned about "time-to- fill" as the key metric, and more interested in a consultative model focussed on the quality of hire, she says. Ambrose shares this view, noting that effective learning "is not a database—it's a business process." He explains that when talent vendors speak of learning, they are referring to the presence of a learning management system. Real behavioral change, he says, only occurs when learning content is effectively integrated and consumed as part of the workflow. "Organisations need to think holistically about the learning experience, which is how the user interacts and ingests relevant content whenever and wherever needed to perform at a higher level," Ambrose contends. Talent management in world-class organisations is not a standalone process, but should be linked, enterprise-wide, to strategic planning, i.e., human capital aligned with strategic business plans and objectives. "The most advanced companies don't even make a difference between planning and budgeting and managing talent," Barenholz says. Ambrose concurs: "Ideally, talent management needs to be part of the DNA of the organisation, touching every employee and every manager, which is why it is critical to build organisation support and momentum." Bragar similarly cites the impressive and ever-growing options for multimodal learning delivery today, including social media, gaming, virtual worlds, simulations, video learning via You Tube, in addition to more traditional online learning programs—much of it now accessible on smartphones. Indeed, the expanded use of mobility platforms is another key and quite recent evolution in talent management. "Candidates, employees, and managers are looking for access to talent management systems wherever, whenever, and however they want," says Franci. "For instance, managers want to approve a requisition via a smartphone, candidates want to opt in to a talent community via text messaging, and employees want to view their talent information via a mobile device." Linda Merritt, NelsonHall HRO research manager, says the various social networking and mobility platform advancements are making learning a "more interactive, collaborative and engaging user environment," which she contends is especially important to newer generations that are accustomed to mixing technology and social interactions. Perhaps most interestingly, these developments might promise a more cost-effective learning strategy for companies to deploy, as learning can be accessed "more frequently, anywhere, in smaller bites, and as needed," Merritt explains. That could conserve company learning resources, allowing for more traditional, face- to-face classroom interactions "where it can have the greatest impact," she says. Yet, the most significant change in learning technology, Franci argues, is not necessarily social networking or advanced mobility, but the movement by vendors to provide a solution based on Other best practices include implementing a sound social media strategy for recruitment initiatives, one relying less on traditional sources such as job boards, and more on managing talent communities via Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn connections. Once employees are onboarded, these connections do not end. Many savvy organisations are leveraging social networking to connect employees within the organisation, thereby enabling heightened social collaboration and learning. "Work has always been a social activity, but the workforce is finding its own ways of connecting online that organisations cannot ignore," Constance says. Social networking tools also are assisting employees to find mentors, share experiences, and take greater control of their own development, while providing employers with the means to create this dialogue. Constance advises organisations to further tap social media to "facilitate the sharing of knowledge between high-potential [employees], rather than solely produce content." [32] HRO TODAY GLOBAL | SPRING 2012