Keep a gameplan ready to win the talent war

Beef up for talent war

Over the past few years, the resilience of organizations has been stress tested across various parameters — from remote working to climate disruptions, changing customer behavior and supply chain dynamics, to high employee turnover.  

 These near-simultaneous disruptions forced organizations to calibrate their response to these crises in a short time. It required business and HR leaders to collaborate more closely to address the rapidly emerging and mutating challenges, especially on the people side. 

 A broad and holistic approach to people and performance management will help build a future-proof resilient organization. This article explores the various dimensions of talent management required for global organizations to flourish.

Pay inequality

New business demand and the additional need which has arisen due to attrition have created a significant resource demand-supply gap resulting in a sharp increase in the salary expectation of job seekers. Organizations are recruiting in large numbers and paying a premium, causing a significant pay inequality within the organizations. They need to control these outliers and ensure loyal and trusted employees are also proactively addressed with the right incentives to retain them.

Multi-skilled by design

Organizations that invest in cross-skilling their employees are the most resilient to attrition as the risk posed by knowledge concentration in a few key individuals is systematically addressed. While this improves the motivation level of employees, a planned resource churn in the project also helps reduce the people-related uncertainty and creates new opportunities and an accelerated career movement for employees.

Employee sentiment analysis

Enterprises should have structured listening channels such as internal social platforms and formal surveys to feel the pulse of the employees, enabling pre-emptive and bold interventions. A significant portion of the reasons for quitting a job is not compensation-related; therefore, the HR department can address such issues through deeper employee connections and empathetic responses to grievances and concerns.

Skill-based compensation

Several large companies have flat grade-based compensation systems. While these offer ease of policy deployment, it gives limited ability to incentivize high-performing talent. However, digital technology can personalize compensation structures based on role, capability, and personal impact on the engagement. Organizations should build institutional frameworks around compensation personalization to reduce inconsistent actions.

Agility in salary refitment

Most organizations work on an annual compensation revision process. While this time-tested process is still relevant, organizations should consider budgeting a salary refitment component within their project budget to carry out compensation revisions in a structured way for top talent and reduce inconsistent behavior.

Keep a gameplan ready  

There are many external factors beyond the control of a company. However, resilient organizations should have a plan to deal with the talent war that the industry is witnessing. A layered approach to talent engagement with different levels of tolerance for attrition at various performance levels will enable organizations to channel their attention to retaining top talent. Each organization will need to discover its risk appetite to build mechanisms to deal with attrition, hiring and retention at different levels of their performance band. A comprehensive training plan to create multi-skilled, full-stack teams coupled with planned job rotation will help organizations mitigate people-related project risks and prepare the project teams to live with this new normal of people churn.