With organisation increasingly utilising a wide range of talent types, HR professionals face a major challenge towards balancing the employed and non-employed (temporary, contractual and independent consultants) workforce.
A detailed report by the Staffing Industry Analysts and ERE Media outlines a new total talent management model for organisations to meet complex challenges with respect to talent acquisition and management.
The Total Talent Management (TTM) model integrates and engages the full range of talent sources, from traditional employees to a wide variety of non-employee workers to include temporary workers, independent contractors/consultants/freelancers, volunteers, outsourced resources, and even non-human options such as robots, drones and cognitive computing applications.
According to findings by the report, “The median usage of non-employed workers is 16 percent but, for the heaviest users, nearly half their talent comes from non-employed workers.”
“The concept of Total Talent Management is in its infancy with only a few leading-edge examples of practical implementation,” said Barry Asin, president at Staffing Industry Analysts. “But as more companies adopt this strategy, instead of making sourcing decisions in silos, they’ll be able to tap into the full range of available talent resources, both employed and non-employed.”
Asin added: “By using a properly managed blended workforce, companies will be better able to optimize competitive performance to meet spikes or reductions in demand as well as balance labour costs and workforce agility.”
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Many organisations even today lack visibility into their talented workforce. Less than half of the organisations surveyed have good understanding on the employee’s motivation, skills and productivity, while the majority of companies aren’t aware of the number of workers they have or the number of open positions and total labour costs.
The TTM concept involves proper engagement of both the employed and non-employed workforce to ensure that they support learning from each other and collaboration for motivation is established alongside. The TTM approach will help organisations to:
While organisations generally believe they should be working harder to motivate the employed workforce, they generally carry an indifferent attitude towards motivating the non-employed, temporary or contractual workers. Only 10 percent to 20 percent make significant efforts to motivate their non-employed workers.
Furthermore, decision making on the type of talent to be used is rather decentralised. In most cases, managers make decisions with very little guidance from the top management or by blindly following the policies. The report states, “This is likely to reinforce the status quo rather than result in a strategic resourcing decision.”
Organisations face many barriers towards seeing the bigger talent picture to include conflicting departmental policies, priorities, inconsistent operating process, inadequate systems and more. It is time for HRs to drive the evolution to a TTM approach. For when it comes to talent acquisition and management, HR manager is on the driver’s seat.
However, the TTM approach for HRs will likely be of a different type with different DNA to accentuate this hazy vision to reality. To gain a competitive edge in the ongoing war for talent, its only those inherit, develop or retain this uniquely different DNA will set benchmark for the competition.
Also read: HR Trend Next: Talent Management on Smartphone
Image credits: joshbersin.com
