This Workplace Wisdom article featuring Sean Conrad, Halogen Software ran in the Richmond Times Dispatch February 23, 2015

---

Sean Conrad Halogen Software

Q. How can I answer my CEO’s most pressing questions about talent management?

A. Smart CEOs know the biggest competitive edge for any organization is its people. Companies invest a lot of time and money to attract the best talent — and CEOs want to make the most of that investment.

There are compelling reasons CEOs should be concerned about talent management. A Gallup report on The State of the American Workplace found that nearly 70% of the workforce is not achieving their full potential.

In addition, the Corporate Executive Board found that two-thirds of employees don’t understand how their work relates to overall organizational performance . These statistics raise red flags for CEOs and HR managers.

Your C-suite has questions about talent retention, succession planning, and learning and development – but do you have the answers they need?

In order to have an accurate picture of your workforce, you need to be able to compile and compare data from job descriptions to performance review details to succession planning. That’s not easy if you’re working with a manual talent management process or a system of spreadsheets. Yet without this data, you don’t have the insight into your company that you need in order to ensure its success.

Let’s look at some of questions CEOs are most concerned about and the information HR leaders need in order to provide answers.

1. Can our business achieve its goals with our current staff?
You need to be able to provide your C-suite with details on how your current talent base is performing against key competencies and goals. With this performance data, you can identify where the skill gaps are within your workforce and help realign objectives to ensure that all employees are helping your organization move forward on its objectives.


2. Are we retaining top talent?
A recent PWC report found that voluntary turnover among high performers is on the rise. You need to be able to identify your top performers and find out if there is a retention risk. A critical part to doing this is being able to compare data from across multiple platforms, from performance management to succession planning. Those details will help you determine a strategy and a learning and development program that will engage your top performers and mitigate retention risks.


3. Is our investment in learning and development paying off?
A Gartner CEO and Executive Survey found that CEOs see talent as the number one constraint to growth. Many organizations are investing in learning and development to improve organizational performance and support growth plans. With that said, you should be able to measure whether your organization’s investment in learning and development is actually helping to close skill gaps or develop a critical competence that is critical to your business success. And provide your CEO with hard data. With these measurable results, you’ll know if your learning programs are yielding the results your organization needs to compete and grow.


4. Is our existing talent base ready to become the leaders of tomorrow?
You need to know how deep your talent pool is. The ability to track and report on your employees’ performance and potential means you can easily see who have, or could be developed to have, the skills needed step into leadership positions down the road. Having a talent pool based leadership succession plan rather than a mere replacement plan makes your organization proactive rather than reactive — and that gives it a competitive edge over the long term.

If, like many others, your CEO is already asking, or starting to ask these questions, consider it a good thing. C-level leaders need the right information about human capital and talent management in order to understand the impact of its people on the company’s strategy and to guide business decisions.

As a strong business partner, you’re tasked with not only helping answer those fundamental questions about your talent, but with aligning your talent programs to your organization’s business strategy. Ultimately, even more than better insights, your executive team wants better outcomes. Aligning your talent programs to address the company’s business strategy will not only help you better report on news about your talent, but will help you ensure that it’s good news.

Author Bio
As a senior product analyst at Halogen Software, Sean Conrad helps HR teams improve their organization's performance management processes, so everyone gets more out of them. He's a regular contributor to the Halogen TalentSpace blog, often writing about talent management trends and best practices.

Halogen software offers an organically built cloud-based talent management suite that reinforces and drives higher employee performance across all talent programs – whether that is recruiting, performance management, learning and development, succession planning or compensation.

---

ⁱ O’Boyle, Ed; Harter, Jim. "State of the American Workplace”, Gallup, 2013
_ii Engler, Scott, "Stop Cascading Strategy”, Corporate Executive Board, 2014
_iii Shah, Nik; Pollack, Scott; Dutta, Ranjan and Burton, Jon, "PWC Saratoga 2012/13 US Human Capital Effectiveness Report,” PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2012
_{iv Raskino, Mark, "Gartner CEO and Senior Executive Survey,” Gartner, Inc., 2014}