Building talent
Talent is a complex asset to manage. It’s diverse in many ways, responsive to incentives, capable of great passion or great apathy, and contributes in vastly different ways to the success of the enterprise as a whole.
But there are steps you can take to build the talent to drive your future business success no matter where it is located.
Tip 1
Develop innovative solutions that suit your firm and your situation
In the Gulf – especially in manufacturing and industrial segments – talent mismatch or shortage is forcing companies to search for new ways to upskill their national workforces. Knowledge transfer could alleviate this pressure.
Tip 2
Develop ‘talent leaders’ who know how to deploy talent strategically
While those adept at inspiring and coaching others are essential for engaging employees, they also need to be able to make talent decisions and sound judgements about people.
These include how to best fill critical roles by moving talent through the organisation and teaching new skills.
Tip 3
Use facts and data to boost strategic talent management
Look at your workforce as a portfolio of talent, with different parts of the portfolio requiring different levels and types of investment. To be successful, organizations need hard facts to support decisions and objective measures to track results.
Tip 4
Collaborate internally and externally to reduce skill gaps and talent shortages
Recognise that the problems of widespread unemployability and skills scarcity are too big for you to tackle alone. Partner across business and functional silos and with schools, governments, NGOs and even competitors to increase and upgrade the available talent pool.
A recent report by Mercer and the World Economic Forum found that collaboration is proving effective in moving people to the right jobs, moving jobs where the right talent pools exist and moving the unemployable to employment. Increasing mobility in this broad sense holds the most promise for correcting labor market imbalances in these relatively early days of globalization. It also ensures businesses have the talent they need to drive growth.
Tip 5
Win the hearts and minds of your workforce
By truly engaging with your employees, you can boost their productivity, innovation and commitment to the success of the organisation. This leads to improvements in service quality, customer satisfaction and long-term financial results.