Imagine having a job that did not play to your strengths or belonging to a team where you did not fit into the culture. How optimally do you think you would perform? And how long would you remain in that organization to contribute to its goals?
Although many organizations, agree that their people are their greatest asset, they are still at a loss on how to integrate people strategy with business strategy and make the most of (optimize) the people to achieve amazing results – this, in my opinion is what Talent Optimization is really about.
One common denominator that drives all talent optimization efforts is the use of data to provide insight for better informed and strategic people decisions ranging from hiring the best candidates to building high effective teams and generally supporting employees to perform at their best in order to achieve organizational goals.
Talent optimization requires weaving the people strategy into the fabric of the business strategy right from the point of designing the company culture. Of what use is a cutting-edge business strategy if employees are not in tune with it and each other?
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In practical terms, I believe talent optimization can contribute to company growth in these ways:
• Enabling people managers hire purposefully by clearly defining and communicating job requirements, using valid and reliable assessment tools and people data (like behavioral & personality traits) to match candidates to roles where they would thrive.
• Using data from employee engagement metrics (e.g Officevibe) to help identify the causes and areas of disengagement and guide the actions that would improve employee experience.
• Understanding the unique learning needs and styles of employees to support the design of tailored learning content which will help employees constantly refine their skills towards personal and professional development.
• Using data from employee feedback/reviews to help employees become more selfaware and empowered to take charge of their own careers by collaborating with other team members to achieve their goals.
• Monitoring industry trends and using data and insights from employee records and HRIS dashboards to understand the employee landscape, forecast talent changes and plan for succession.
In conclusion, even with the best intentions and efforts of the people operations/HR team, Talent Optimization cannot succeed and deliver company growth without the buy-in of company leadership in collaboration with line mangers and individual contributors at every level of the organization, so all hands must be on deck!