Nurture Your Employees – An Open Secret to Success
Services businesses can only deliver value to their customers successfully if they address two important aspects, namely: talent management and operational efficiency. Most companies fail to implement either, and end up incurring higher internal costs. These costs can grow due to employee turnover and deprecation of service quality, leading to customer attrition. It is important for businesses to understand how they can maximize the value they provide to their customers through talent management, and use it to increase overall efficiency and productivity.
When you are a small business, it is relatively easy to hand-pick great software developers. The reason is that you have the time to pick and choose the candidate that really fits the profile and company culture. However, when your software development services business is expanding rapidly, managing talent becomes one of the most challenging aspects. Without proper measures, software development services firms can lose their customers’ confidence in their ability to perform, affecting the overall health of the business.
Talent Management is a Strategic Investment
Talent management is more than just having the right recruitment, compensation and retention strategies. It consists of integrated processes designed to attract, select, engage, develop, inspire and retain the work force in an organization. The end goal of talent management is to create high performance, sustainable teams that propel the business to achieve its strategic objectives.
The process of talent management starts with recruitment of new employees. The Human Resources department needs to be viewed as a strategic investment versus being just a cost center. Human capital managers must be trained to appropriately identify and approach suitable talent that not only meet job requirements, but are also a fit to the business culture.
While it is necessary to have a formalized interview process requiring testing and qualification, it is equally important to look for emotional intelligence in candidates. For more junior candidates, specific patterns can be identified that can shed insights to a candidate’s hidden talents that may not be revealed on their resume.
Talent Management Requires Continuous Investment
Training and re-training is an essential part of talent nurturing. Just like “unschooling”, there are times when it is necessary to ensure that past unproductive patterns/ learnings be broken down. This is not trivial and usually involves giving the opportunity for contributors to learn by “throwing them at the deep end”. Pairing newly-hired employees with successful employees that have a longer tenure with the business accelerates in harnessing all the available skills of the workforce.
Last, but not least, all employees not only want to be paid fairly, but they also want to feel inspired and valued. Rewarding and appreciating employees is essential, and managers need to understand that recognizing their direct reports and colleagues only helps create a more friendly and productive environment.
Culture is Critical
The culture of camaraderie, learning and excellence is not trivial to establish. It requires strategic focus and investment by the business with the understanding the immediate benefits may not be apparent. When employees are engaged, they tend to be 20% more productive, and 87% less likely to leave, according to research.
Ultimately, it is the responsibility of businesses to provide their employees an exciting environment of growth, where they are working with great brands in solving interesting challenges, and progressing professionally, intellectually and personally both individually and as a collective team.
Embrace the Talent Management Mentality
Nurturing employees and viewing them as an asset (Talent Management) is a mindset. It is important that the management of businesses not just understand, but honestly believe in Douglas McGregor’s Theory Y that employees, and more broadly, all humans are valuable and need to be intrinsically motivated. Strategic leaders spend countless hours in designing talent management strategies. These strategies should be translated into actionable programs and be implemented in true spirit. All talent management programs should be results-oriented and measured periodically to ensure that specific outcomes are being achieved.
At 10Pearls, the entire management team leads by example in making sure that we are creating a culture of excellence, learning, self-improvement, respect, and most importantly fun. We are focused on providing opportunities to our employees to engage and develop their skills on a variety of areas. We provide training opportunities, mentoring/guidance and exposure to situations to foster employee growth. Our commitment to emerging technologies, such as Machine Learning, Gaming, Big Data and Amplified Intelligence plays a large role in our mission to nurture our employees.
