As we slowly begin to emerge from recession, a mass of disgruntled, unmotivated and disengaged workers will be trying to change jobs. But will this represent a threat to organizations or an opportunity?
Has it ever occurred to you that responsibility for the vast bulk of an organisation's assets is typically in the hands of people without the aptitude, desire or capability for the task? No? But sadly, its true.
Organizations that have sat out the recession with the attitude that their best people have no choice but to stay because of the scarcity of other opportunities are going to be in for a rude shock when the upturn finally arrives.
Rather than just clipping the wings of older 'snow bird' workers, managers should use them as mentors, give them access to learning and be more flexible about how they work
Just because we're deep in a recession doesn't mean the war for talent has gone away. As we'll see when the recovery starts, the stories of its demise are greatly exaggerated.
I'm not normally one of those people who slams HR. Not this time, though. I can forgive a lot, but there's a special place in hell for the HR person who ruined my kid's introduction to the workplace.
Surviving the recession requires creativity, flexibility and making the most of the talent in your workplace. So it's a shame that so many managers prefer rules, bureaucracy and silo working.
Getting to the top can be hard enough for any women. But it's made all the harder because many talent management programmes are inherently biased against them.
There's no mystery or silver bullet to assessing the value and potential of your organisation's human assets. It's simply a case of how interested you are to find out and how much you care.
With the news full of yet more job losses, it's not surprising that worries about job security are having a significant impact on productivity, engagement and the general working environment.
Reducing your workforce is never a pleasant task. But failing to take account of the needs of those left behind can turn an already difficult situation into a disaster.
Instead of making the sort of mass job cuts that characterised previous recessions, many organizations are now taking a more intelligent approach to cutting their costs.
In the current climate, you might have thought that organisations would focus on containing costs and managing employees out of the door. In fact the opposite is the case.
HR pros might love the phrase 'human capital', but most of their colleagues think it's just another piece of jargon which undermines HR's chances of getting the high-level management support it needs.
With businesses facing a critical shortage of experienced managers, now's the time for HR finally to stop being an 'outrider' and become a valued, strategic business partner.
If, like me, the phrase 'Our people are our most important asset...' makes you cringe because you know just how empty, meaningless and normally downright untrue it is, then bookmark (or frame) this post from Roberta Matuson's excellent new blog, Generation Integration.
HR may tell you that effective talent management is about managing your top talent. But in a rapidly-changing working world, that's about as wrong an approach as you can get.
HR is still thought of as a 'necessary evil' in many organisations. But its hardly a surprise when just a fifth are considered to be any good at what are meant to be their basic tasks.
Why do organizations have so much trouble hanging onto talented people? At the heart of the problem is the fact that talent and their managers are often competitors who are each striving to climb the same ladder to higher levels of the organization.
CEOs believe most of their problems boil down to a lack of good people. But don't expect them to trust their HR departments to do anything about it.
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