Faced with a recession, what are the key HR challenges confronting organisations? Find out how talent management and retention platforms can support.
For those of us in the UK, the economic forecast is gloomy as we sit now in recession.
Business leaders are reconsidering and adapting plans and strategies. How will this impact talent management?
Here are our thoughts on the key 8 areas of impact – and what to look for in your talent software to help ease the load.
Some HR leaders will need to re-evaluate and reconsider job roles and organisational structure. There may be new talent coming to the market; however, with unemployment already low, the talent pool may continue to be tight. Keeping hold of those employees in key and future-needed roles will be a priority for most.
How your talent management platform can help:
Develop new skills and competencies, signpost future job possibilities, keep people motivated and engaged, and empower employees to own their career progression. All of these help support talent retention - and all are made easier through talent software.
The competition for talent as well as the costs and time of hiring, onboarding and reaching competence when businesses need certainty and stability, will re-emphasise the focus on retention programmes.
Demonstrate your investment in your people by:
Change across the organisation requires agility. Individuals will demand greater ownership of their own re- and up-skilling, and seeking out development when best suits them rather than working within a fixed L&D timetable. Furthermore, companies will require employees to learn new roles and acquire new skills and competencies.
How your talent management platform can help:
360-degree feedback tools will come into their own – and will be deployed well beyond the typical leadership development use. Check that your 360 can accommodate new models, questions and languages – and that it can spot hidden talents that are not yet being put to use. This could unlock possibilities that the employee and their manager have not previously considered.
Skills management will no longer be HR-led, making the shift to ‘employee-ownership’. Employees will call for greater control over how they curate and share their skills, expertise and value across the organisation. Such a move will pay dividends for those organisations with the agility to bring people together for specific projects and disband them afterwards, knowing that those learned skills are captured and promoted by the individuals themselves.
How your talent management platform can help:
Not all skills management systems will be able to support you on this. Make sure the tool you choose to use enables and empowers your people to collate and update all their skills and expertise into one place. This can then be accessed by others as new skills are sought across the organisation.
Succession planning has muddled along for too long. In many organisations, it still remains a spreadsheet-based activity with little real value, failing to stand up to the challenges and rigour of a fast-changing talent landscape.
This is no longer good enough.
Employees are more empowered and demand transparency. They want to use their voice to put themselves forward for opportunities when the time is right for them – and for the business to accept that this changes across a career. Employees need to understand the commitment of the organisation to equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) and how succession planning is supporting this.
It means that HR and business leaders must have real time access to talent analytic data that can provide this information. They need to understand what talent is available, how talent gaps can be filled and how people can progress into new roles. You will need to work through the ‘what if’ scenarios and build contingency plans.
How your talent management platform can help:
Succession planning and succession management software can help. However, it needs to be accessible by those that need it, capable of interrogation and embedded in talent conversations.
Watch this 5-minutes video to see how Talent Successor meets this need and read how Talent Successor is used at HomeServe.
No longer following the well-worn path of single direction promotion and climbing of the career ladder, employee mobility and agility will be essential. Not everyone wants to be a ‘leader’, but they still want to progress and have the organisation value them for what they contribute.
Employees recognise they need to take control of their future. They have three concerns which are front of mind as they do this:
Each individual will require the space, tools and conversation to determine their own career progression; the skills they have, those they want to develop and how they can best contribute. Ownership of skills management comes into play. Employees will curate and internally promote the skills they have and ‘own’ their presentation within skills databases.
How your talent management platform can help:
Put in place the tools that employees need such as a skills and expertise management tool that individuals can access and update and a career path-mapping tool that enables individuals to explore, try out and plan different career paths within your organisation
Take a look at this short, less-than-3-minutes Talent Navigator video.
A concerted programme to engage, inform and motivate employees will be needed. A culture built on inclusivity, transparency and engagement will be required. Encourage more conversations and check-ins. Openly discuss career aspirations. Carry out – and act on – engagement pulse surveys.
How your talent management platform can help:
Check the capabilities of your talent management system. If it’s not doing what you need it to do, make the switch now and get the best help you can. Make sure your provider can support you as you wish and make the configurations your business needs.
Recession always brings about tough conversations. Train your managers to have these conversations and give them the tools to manage these – and employee expectations.
Upskill your managers to have those difficult conversations. Talent Performance can provide the backbone to such conversations. Take a look at Talent Peformance and how we do this.
Tough talent decisions will be taken. This is where the reams of objective talent data acquired over the years come into their own. Or will they if they are outdated, hard to access, difficult to see the story and impenetrable to use?
How your talent management platform can help:
Make sure you can access up-to-date data. Support transparency by enabling managers’ and employees’ access to talent data and be responsible for its accuracy.
Find out now what your system can do and, if you find it lacking, take action.
There are turbulent times ahead.
Now is the time to get your talent management system working for you, taking the strain and giving you the information you and the other business leaders need in order to adapt your talent strategy.
We can help. Book a call with us and let’s see what the first steps need to be.
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