Why Workforce and Talent Management is critical to today’s digital organizations
People are not only our most valuable asset; they are the organization. As such, it’s important that we get the people side of our organization right – from finding and interviewing great candidates and teams to onboarding and developing our staff, to providing innovative ways to learn and grow, and engaging ‘hearts and minds’ around the vision and purpose of the organization. The adages are true: great teams make great products and services, and happy employees make for happy customers.
What This Blog Article Covers
What we do as part of Workforce and Talent Management is at the core of how we develop as an organization and, when done well, allows us to better serve our customers and move miles ahead of our competition. This article will discuss some of the key concepts in Workforce and Talent Management (based in part on the ITIL 4 practice guide) as well as what our team at Beyond20 has seen work well when it comes to recruiting, interviewing, onboarding, evaluating, and developing individuals, teams, and leaders.
The Purpose of the Workforce and Talent Management Practice in ITIL 4
Let’s talk about what the ITIL 4 Workforce and Talent Management practice is all about:
The purpose of Workforce and Talent Management is to ensure that the organization has the right people, with the appropriate skills and knowledge, in the correct roles to support its business objectives. This practice covers a broad set of activities focused on successfully engaging with the organization’s employees and people resources, including planning, recruitment, onboarding, learning and development, performance measurement, and succession planning.
The Difference Between Workforce and Talent Management
This practice is about making sure we’ve got a good structure in place for our people—a thoughtfully designed employee and team journey—that starts with building relationships with potential employees and continues even beyond the time that they work with us. The practice divides these concepts into two distinct areas, namely:
- Workforce Management, which is focused on making sure that we have enough of the right people in the right places, filling the roles needed to achieve our organization’s current and future-state needs, and ensuring employees have a good experience.
- Talent Management, which is focused more on the competencies, skills, knowledge, as well as overall learning and development.
Here is a diagram from the Workforce and Talent Management practice that breaks down the different areas of the practice. Starting with recruitment, we will discuss what each area entails, why it’s important, and include some recent trends as well as technologies that can provide support for each of these areas.
How Workforce and Talent Management Fits into Service Management
The Workforce and Talent Management practice is brand new in ITIL 4 and did not exist as a practice in ITIL v3. It’s a welcome addition to the ITIL framework as the ITIL v3 framework focused more on processes and ways to implement said processes rather than on the people side of things.
Another new concept in ITIL 4 is that of the 4 Dimensions of Service Management, essentially factors that need to be considered and that contribute to delivering great products and services that bring real value to our customers. Workforce and Talent Management speaks specifically to the Organizations and People aspect of the 4 Dimensions (pictured below).
The Employee Journey and Experience as Part of Workforce and Talent Management
Let’s define a few terms that are used in the Workforce and Talent Management practice, starting with what we consider to be an ‘employee’:
Employee: [any] members of staff, contractors, volunteers, and members of another organization’s staff who are working under the organization’s authority. Also referred to as a ‘member of workforce’.
Anyone that performs work for an organization can be considered an ‘employee’; they have an ‘experience’ with the organization in some sense.
Employee experience: The total of the functional and emotional interactions with an organization as perceived by an employee.
There are also some useful terms based on the concepts of ‘customer personas’ and ‘customer journeys’ that come from and are used in product development/management circles. ‘Employee personas’ and ‘employee journeys’ are defined here:
Employee journey – The complete end-to-end experience that an employee has with the organization through touchpoints, relationships, and interactions.
Employee persona – A fictional yet realistic description of a typical or target employee of an organization.
Getting our leadership teams together to discuss and map out employee personas and employee journey models can be extremely helpful in ensuring consistency across the organization, and ensuring that our employees, contractors, partners, suppliers, etc. have a great experience from beginning to end. In fact, employees can sometimes become customers, volunteers can become employees, staff can become partners, and so on. As part of doing this exercise and having a discussion around the employee experience, you will identify gaps, and new ideas will emerge.
Finding and Recruiting Top Talent
Let’s start the ‘employee journey’ at the beginning – with finding, attracting, recruiting, and hiring great people. In today’s digital environment, finding great talent will always be a challenge. It’s important to start building relationships with potential employees and communicating what makes the organization different. Essentially, we should illustrate the larger mission that we’re working towards and how we bring value not only to our customers, but to our people too. There are lots of ‘recruitment marketing’ strategies and tactics that can help us form relationships with prospective customers and employees alike; and there are lots of tools that can help in this area, including but not limited to: recruiting videos and video interviews, social media and mobile apps, chatbots, collaborative and interactive interviewing techniques, and even artificial intelligence.
Hiring for soft skills and ‘future-proofing’ the organization
There is a growing trend in hiring people for roles outside of their field, emphasizing transferrable skills and ‘future-proofing’ an organization with diverse abilities, voices, and experiences. For us at Beyond20, we put a significant emphasis on hiring for soft skills – people that have a great attitude, can jump in and learn quickly, are inquisitive and creative, work well on teams that ebb and flow, are humble and helpful, and like being in a highly transparent workplace (in an environment with daily scrums like ours, there is no ‘hiding’ when we discuss what we’re each going to accomplish that day and what we accomplished the prior day). We look for the right people ‘for the bus’ first, and then, based on team members’ skills and interests, get them into the ‘right seat on the bus’. What I’ve found in my own experience is that teaching technical skills is much easier than teaching ‘be a helpful and supportive team player’ kinds of skills.
Creating a great onboarding experience – both before and after “day one”
Onboarding starts before an employee even walks through the door. With pre-boarding, we have to make sure new employees have everything they need, sending them an awesome welcome packet, and getting everything squared away before they set foot in the building. The best organizations provide a great onboarding experience that lasts, in some cases, up to a year after a new employee’s start date and includes things like tailored learning, job shadowing, and ‘culture assimilation’, the equivalent of turning untrained recruits into marines. By doing so, everyone understands and internalizes the organization’s values, beliefs, guiding principles, and is better equipped to make decisions in keeping with the values of the organization. Zappos does an exemplary job of communicating their core values and what they stand for, thereby ensuring a continuation and extension of their core values with each new person that comes on board.
Enabling Learning and Development Opportunities – and Managing Performance
The Workforce and Talent Management practice includes several concepts under the umbrella of personal development, overall learning and development, and performance management. I see these concepts as going hand-in-hand. Providing an environment of knowledge sharing, collaboration, and communication through learning and development opportunities helps support how teams are performing and contributing to the organization and our customers.
Creating continual learning and development environments
The very best organizations embrace a culture of ‘continuous learning’ and development. They believe that knowledge never ends and are thoughtful in how they provide an overall structure and opportunities for their employees to learn and grow. This can include more formal, relevant, individual or group training courses for staff to learn new skills. It can also involve learning management platforms to help manage these types of courses, as well as less formal ways of collaborating and learning like daily huddles, sprint retrospectives, cross-functional team interactions, mentoring and coaching, internal centers of excellence, and job shadowing. Here are some additional articles with ideas on fostering knowledge sharing and continuous learning environments.
Providing a variety of training opportunities to “upskill” teams
Organizations are also finding that, in addition to teaching the digital skills of tomorrow (like data literacy, analytics, and security) or ‘upskilling’, it’s also important to build leaders and strengthen how people work with one another. The best organizations offer a myriad of ‘soft’ or what are now being called ‘power’ skills to teams and leaders alike, including topics like: business acumen and having an entrepreneurial mindset, effective communication and managing difficult conversations, active listening and giving/receiving feedback, critical thinking/problem solving, collaboration, creativity, creating a ‘safety culture’, ethics and global/cultural awareness, facilitating effective meetings, mentoring and coaching, as well as other leadership and relationship management skills.
Giving real-time feedback and measuring team performance
In Agile organizations where team-based work is being performed, individual employee evaluations and rewards are being replaced by team evaluations and rewards. Further, studies have shown that formal annual reviews are not as effective as (and are being replaced by) real-time feedback – where employees can learn, adjust, and improve immediately. We’re also seeing the use of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for improving individual and team performance, engagement, and retention. Additional research has shown that employees are actually motivated and excited by three things: autonomy (the ability to be self-directed), purpose (working in support of a compelling organizational vision), and mastery (getting better at what they do over time). If you have not yet seen this Daniel Pink video on Drive: The surprising truth on what motives us, it’s extremely worthwhile to watch.
Mentoring, Coaching, and Succession Planning throughout the organization
Lastly, successful organizations coach and mentor their staff, building these capabilities internally and hiring external coaches as needed, not only at the team level, but for leaders as well. They are also intentional about putting succession plans in place for the next wave of leaders. The top organizations are intentional about leadership development programs for ‘high-potential’ staff, and they also open these programs up to anyone who has an interest in developing these skills, ensuring diversity and inclusion in future leadership teams. Studies also show that diversity isn’t just a nice-to-have, but makes business and financial sense.
Where to learn more about Workforce and Talent Management
The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) has some fantastic resources available online: https://www.shrm.org/. AXELOS’s Workforce and Talent Management practice guide has some additional details on these topics and is available for free as part of a MyITIL subscription for those who have obtained their ITIL Foundation certification.
If you hold the ITIL 4 Foundation credential, you have the necessary pre-requisites to take any of the advanced ITIL 4 courses that discuss concepts from this article:
- 3-day High Velocity IT (HVIT) course and exam, which covers Kanban boards, safety culture, and Toyota Kata.
- 3-day Drive Stakeholder Value (DSV) course and exam, which covers Simon Sinek’s “Golden Circle” and the importance of clearly defining and communicating our organization’s “Why” as well as building trust
- 3-day Create Deliver and Support (CDS) course and exam, which covers developing T-shaped and Comb-shaped skills, employee satisfaction management, giving and receiving feedback, servant leadership, and service empathy.
- 3-day Digital & IT Strategy (DITS) course and exam, which will cover developing digital leadership skills (lots more to come on this topic in coming months)!