Talent Strategy No more a Supplementary Task

Sushil Eapen

The challenge for organizations today is to implement frameworks for talent retention and development that will address the changing face of competition

While global issue centers around talent retention and development, the Indian industry is specifically facing one of its biggest challenges – how to retain talent and bring out the best in talented employees. The Indian economy has grown at an average rate of over 7% in the last decade. This growth has led to new opportunities for employees in both private and public sectors. We have a free market economy where employees can choose to change jobs with a relatively short notice to the employer. Employees are now also open to geographic relocation for better opportunities. During the last two decades, the Indian economy witnessed an unprecedented entry of foreign-origin companies that established offices either to provide back-office support for the western markets or to cater to the growing Indian market. This expansion has fueled a demand for quality employees. The rising aspirations of over a billion people looking to better their position from bigger salaries present a major challenge to businesses in the country. In such a scenario, how do companies retain their talented employees? When talented employees leave, they take away valuable institutional knowledge, dampen the momentum for growth strategies, and not to speak of the time, cost, and energy, that senior members in the organization spend in seeking replacement – valuable time and energy that could have been better spent in driving growth strategies.
The challenge for companies is to devise innovative programs to retain their talented employees. Interestingly, one of the statistics available in the public domain shows that a leading reason for people leaving their jobs is because of dissatisfaction with their immediate managers. In a country like India, we have a young working population that produces many managers with relatively short work experience and they manage large, diverse groups of employees. How competent are our managers to lead the young breed of employees who have high aspirations with lucrative jobs options in front of them?
There is a need to assess whether we have the bandwidth to develop managers with strong leadership capabilities that include mentoring, motivating, and leadership in a manner that will encourage employees to build a career in the organization as opposed to perpetually seeking jobs outside. In a market-driven economy, where everything is viewed in the short-term, are our business managers myopic about the most important asset of the organization - talented employees who work towards the company’s goals? It is very important to understand the abilities and personality of employees when employee-related decisions are made. Most employers limit their recruitment process to job interviews. What needs attention is how much do we really know about an individual through interviews? Are we able to motivate them? Do we have a good job fitment for the individual? Are the current rewards programs in organizations leaving a lot of employees feeling dissatisfied? Monitory rewards give only transient satisfaction, and many are not motivated solely by monitory consideration anyway. Perhaps recognition, achievement, learning, or a challenging work environment, are drivers that motivate them to wake up in the morning and cheerfully report to work. Some of the personality dimensions and values that drive employee behavior can be assessed at the time of recruitment, and such information will be extremely useful as employers make hiring and employee development decisions.
A less-than-adequate education system, that emphasizes rote learning over intellectual development, might be creating an army of semi-qualified individuals entering the workforce every year, while technically sound and otherwise talented employees depleting in number. The high demand for this limited pool of talented employees gives rise to the propensity to change jobs frequently. Although employers view frequent job changes in a resume as unfavorable, given the talent shortage, they sometimes do not have the choice but to hire such frequent job-changers even when these employees have a greater likelihood of leaving the company and contributing to high turnovers. The most pertinent question then is whether companies tend to be reactive to crisis situations of employee exodus or do they view the issue of talent retention and development strategically.
The challenge ahead for businesses, small and big, is to implement frameworks for talent retention and development that are informed by factors such as the changing face of competition, limited talent pool and personal variables of employees. Talent retention and development today is not a supplementary task that enjoys a passing mention in HR practices, but a core activity deserving serious attention and resources, and upon which lie the present and future success of the business.


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Sushil Eapen, MD, Pearson Clinical & Talent Assessment.
As appeared in People Matters, on 15th April 2011. The article is available at: http://peoplematters.in/articles/leadership/talent-strategy-no-more-a-supplementary-task

Preparing for the future: Succession Planning

Saurabh Singh

Succession planning is a process of identifying and developing current employees with the potential to fill key leadership or high-stakes positions in an organization. As a formal concept for talent development, succession planning has high relevance in a competitive market. Through succession planning, Human Resources works in tandem with top management to select, train and empower a specific individual to undertake a job with higher authority and responsibility. Traditionally, succession planning has been viewed as aimed at filling the CEO or the highest position in an organization. However, given the growing challenges of managing today’s complex workforce, maintaining a talent pool of middle to senior management has become just as important as ensuring a plan for the topmost leadership role.

Succession planning is an important HR mandate today. Organizations spend significant resources in sourcing and developing a talent pool which can successfully meet present and future business challenges. Stiff competition drives organizations to differentiate themselves – not only with their product or service offerings but through their talent pool as well. Business leaders and high potential managers now define how organizations are perceived in the market and society at large. The threat of talent poaching combined with a mobile workforce propels HR to ensure existing talent is utilized optimally and contingency plans well in place to meet the challenge of unanticipated exits at mid to top levels. Succession planning then becomes an imperative where the organization proactively prepares to tackle such contingencies by creating a pool of future performers. More recently, succession planning-enlightened organizations are integrating succession planning with their strategic planning processes and corporate policies. This integration is taking place not just at the top level but has become a proactive management strategy all levels of management. Integrated with HR processes, procedures and components such as assessment, talent management, performance and potential appraisal, and leadership pipeline development, succession planning today extends beyond the realm of filling vacant roles created from vertical employee movement in the organization. Effective succession planning enables the deployment of an organization's talent on demand, as needed, currently and in the future. 

A well thought-out succession plan is vital to the growth of the organization because the individuals identified in the plan will eventually be responsible for ensuring the business’s success. This process entails an overall development of employees at any level to make sure that they can effectively handle responsibilities they will be given in the next few years. Organizations with a clear vision for their future should equip themselves to handle career progressions to ensure that employee performance and productivity do not get adversely impacted from internal movements and exits.

Succession planning begins with identifying critical positions and understanding their behavioral and technical fitment criteria in detail. This involves the process of role study and analysis that delineates the parameters for success on the role. In general, sufficient time needs to be devoted to identify abilities, personality & behavioral dimensions and communication skills that are required to hold a particular position, besides technical and other skill sets. After identifying the desired attributes, it is essential to select candidates from the talent pool who possess those attributes. The objective is to identify those with the potential to assume greater responsibility in the organization. HR needs to closely involve managers and leaders to identify high potential talent since these individuals will know where the hidden talent lies outside the inner circle. At times low employee performance might be more an indication of their potential being underutilized than a case of not having the right set of attributes.

Assessment is a key practice in effective succession planning. There are many assessment tools and approaches available to identify the future potential of employees, ranging from personality, ability and communication assessment tools, team-based interviewing, job simulation techniques to full-fledged assessment centers. However, the role of assessment does not end with identifying the right talent for development. In many organizations, assessments are a key component of a larger framework for talent management, known as succession development. Succession development incorporates assessment in the development plan as a key exercise for developing high potential talent. Development activities will enable identified candidates consolidate them strengths and work on areas of improvement as they pertain to the new role.

An effective succession planning and development process will result in both short and long term benefits to an organization. In the short run, organization-wide knowledge of a succession framework creates a positive and definite context for talent to flourish and individual career aspirations to be nurtured. It also ensures that managers at all levels understand the processes in place that will reward desired behavior at the workplace. As a systematic and long-term approach preparing high potential talent to handle the responsibilities of next higher levels in future, it is a logical, standardized, objective and scientific method towards achieving business sustainability. Succession planning offers a clear perspective on who should be selected, why they should be selected, what skills and competencies these individuals currently possess and what is required to be developed in them. Answers to such questions are critical and differentiating factors while identifying candidates for succession. Moreover, a well-implemented succession planning and development strategy reduces the randomness in an organization’s processes and managerial development movements. It also anchors the management’s focus to developing talent internally. Developing existing organizational talent is not only more cost-effective but also results in creating a more effective and readily available leadership pipeline.

A formal succession planning process is a proactive approach that helps HR professionals anticipate problems in the process before they get started, which in turn helps avoid negative and dysfunctional situations from incorrect assignments to key roles. It fosters cross-functional development since individuals in critical roles will need to possess a well-rounded knowledge of the business. Lastly, succession planning has a positive and lasting impact on the organizational culture by ensuring transparency in the succession and development process, giving talent priority over subjective preferences.

A few caveats to be kept in mind while implementing succession planning. An ineffective or flawed process may result in successors with inadequate competencies for the role. A comprehensive assessment strategy needs to be instituted in this process to ensure objectivity and accuracy in the search for a best fit. Valid and reliable assessment will help in understanding the strengths and areas of development for candidates, in order that appropriate critical development experiences may be offered to those identified for succession. Second, a myopic view of talent development may lead to core competencies being missed in the evaluation process. Third, an organization should take into account different ways of developing people internally. The focus should be on developing people in important competencies like critical thinking, decision making, planning and organizing, strategic thinking and problem solving as well as making them aware of their behavioral strengths and weaknesses, in individual and team contexts. There are competencies and behavioral skills essential to hold key leadership positions that need to be identified early on in the planning process. Finally, a successful succession planning program will depend on the support from the current leadership. Explicit support with implicit anxiety about being looked over for succession will only create a façade that does not truly address leadership requirements for a long-term impact on the organization. In the right hands and with the right set of infrastructure, succession planning is a valuable vehicle for organizational change that leads to positive growth for the organization.

Saurabh Singh heads the Talent Assessment division at Pearson Talent Assessment.
He can be reached at Saurabh.Singh@Pearson.com for queries and comments. The article appeared in People and Management magazine, December, 2011 issue.

Spoken English Skills: The Backbone of the BPO Industry

Prashant Banerjee

Picture this - A customer service executive in an Indian BPO works in a business process that requires investigating customer problems related to retail banking. The investigation involves written and verbal correspondence with overseas customers, who are native speakers of the English language, in order to give updates, assurances, and eventually a resolution to their problems. Customers who contact the parent company of the BPO tend to be upset and expect a speedy resolution of their query.  Calling a customer is always a faster option to wrap up a query, as compared to writing a business letter.  Calling also saves the customer the suspense of knowing whether they’re receiving a resolution, besides the opportunity for the customer service executive to offer real-time verbal assurances about quality. However, despite the obvious desirable outcomes of a telephonic interaction with a customer, this employee rarely picks up the phone to talk to customers. His unwillingness to talk to a customer is rooted in his limited language and communication skills. Nevertheless, this limitation remains under the management’s radar with no grave concerns raised about his performance since this person is able to function in his role reasonably well by adhering to business procedures and policies, including religiously writing largely scripted business letters to customers!   Customers who do not receive calls from this person have a service experience which is different from what they desire.  The ultimate consequence for the company is loss of business as some of these customers are not completely convinced of assured service standards and hence decide to do business with the company’s competitors.   

The above vignette highlights an important aspect of employment in a BPO business – there are often ingenious ways to get around personal limitations in communication skills when interfacing with customers who are native speakers of the English language. Even as employees manage to perform as per the company’s expectations, they might not be doing what is best for the business – talking to customers.  The stark and simple fact about the BPO industry is that business process outsourcing tends to take place from English-speaking countries to those where English is not the first language.  This entails that a BPO employee who is required to invest a significant amount of time and effort in speaking to customers, actually has adequate facility with the English language. While language training programs and online self-learning modules can help build telephone etiquettes and drive home the importance of standard parameters of communication skills such as avoiding fillers, varying one’s acknowledgement,  appropriate greeting and closing lines etc, these methods cannot teach an employee spoken English language skills. Especially, the ability to understand and respond verbally to native speakers of the language is not something that can be taught in an induction program before an employee hits the floor.  Let’s face it – although communication goes beyond language skills, the latter is still a core competency within communication that cannot be substituted justifiably!

                With the multi-billion dollar Indian BPO industry being attacked in recent times by political rhetoric reflecting anti-outsourcing sentiments from the US as well as actual outsourcing bans as in the case of Ohio, there is a need to relook standards of spoken English language proficiency that BPOs in India are willing to accept for incoming recruits. This relook is pragmatic because customer satisfaction over the telephone is intrinsically linked to communication and language skills of the employee. A collective build up of dissatisfaction with customer service from non-English speaking countries will only serve to fuel further anti-outsourcing sentiment in the west.  Adding to this urgency is rising competition from other hotspots for outsourcing such as the Philippines, China or countries in Latin America. In these countries, overall standards of English proficiency might be higher or improving rapidly due to factors such as more concerted governmental efforts to promote the English language and greater cultural familiarity with the west.

Traditional methods of assessing language competency by language trainers are cumbersome and are often fraught with subjective decisions.  What progressive BPOs that rely on language and culture training programs need to understand is that the steady stream of hopefuls seeking BPO jobs should be screened in a standardized, efficient and reliable manner that reduces or even better, eliminates human involvement completely.  Given the wide range of business processes within a company, each with varying ratios of non-voice to voice components, such a screening would also eliminate wrong matches between language capability and the business process requirement. The cost of a wrong match is not apparent right away or even in the long run, as in the case of the employee in the vignette. However, when more and more such individuals, who are skilled in other aspects and would be better suited to other responsibilities, find their way to speaking roles they are unwilling or incapable of performing, the end result for the BPO will be a disconnect with customer needs, eventually leading to loss of brand reputation and business.

Clearly, the Indian BPO industry needs to take major strides in the direction of upgrading the pool of proficient English-language speakers in order to stay ahead of the race and achieve their business goals for their parent companies in the west.

- The author is the Marketing Head, Pearson Clinical and Talent Assessment. He can be reached @prashant.banerjee@pearson.com for queries and comments. The article appeared in Deccan Herald in August, 2011. The article is available at: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/features/newmanager/article2424221.ece