The Rise of Talent Engagement for Managers

Analyst Viewpoint

Engagement is essential to empower every employee to perform his or her best, which is a key priority among HR and business leaders. It’s critical for ensuring that the workforce – almost always an organization’s most valuable asset – is delivering maximum value to the organization while valuing its own role in the organization’s success.

Unfortunately, though, discussions about employee engagement often do not focus sharply enough on two key concerns: how to enable management to optimize a team’s potential and how to implement practical steps toward improving employees’ overall experience by providing opportunities for professional and personal growth. Typical performance reviews rarely deliver useful insights on either.

To be sure, talent management applications can help improve many facets of human capital management by automating the attracting, hiring, onboarding, reviewing and compensating a workforce. But today’s technology alone cannot motivate the best possible employee performance, leaving many organizations searching for the secrets that will help them to adapt their processes in a way that will enable managers to motivate their teams of employees to engage and contribute at the highest levels.

One key step forward is to facilitate more continuous formal and informal team communication and collaboration.

One of the key steps forward is for HR leaders to work with managers to ensure they utilize every employee’s strengths and facilitate formal and informal team communication, collaboration and coaching in a way that is aligned to how managers and employees most easily interact. In many if not most instances, a team’s and individuals’ performance can be improved by facilitating more frequent and focused interactions among managers and employees – a more collaborative dialogue. To accomplish this, though, requires technology that provides the medium for dialogue and centralizes the storage of information.

It is vital that organizations develop this more comprehensive approach, but an understanding of this is slow to emerge: Our next-generation HRMS benchmark research finds only 10 percent of organizations saying that their current systems fully meet their business needs.

The traditional vehicle for evaluation of employee performance, the annual performance review, typically does not focus on communication or team interaction and so does not help managers in this regard. Understanding employee strengths and knowing the needs of the team can help managers collaborate in finding ways to improve performance. The backwards-looking nature of performance reviews doesn’t require managers to listen to and engage with team members. Organizations need talent management processes and supporting applications that provide more than just reviews – they need applications that can adapt to a performance-engagement approach to help managers better coach and mentor their team. And to effectively manage employees’ performance, managers need easy-to-understand measurements as well as time to assess improvement.

Talent initiatives will begin to deliver better performance when organizations adapt how they support managers in their team-leading efforts. But that support must be part of a changed approach to activating their talent, one that enables and even inspires them. This approach of talent activation needs to be focused on improving the employee experience by enabling them to understand and appreciate their contributions to team and department performance. Clearly it’s an approach that moves beyond just rating employees on a routine basis, to getting them to assess their contributions and where they believe they can help achieve objectives. It’s reorienting the organization so it is more focused on engagement and increasing the dialogue among managers and workers through the use of applications designed for this purpose.

An organization will be able to realize the full potential of its talent only if it provides managers with the processes and applications that support their efforts to engage their team. Our next-generation HRMS research finds that only half of organizations (49%) have a talent-management system in place today, limiting these organizations’ ability to optimize their processes, let alone activate their managers and teams. The good news is that the top reason organizations are investing into new technologies is to improve the effectiveness and quality of work, followed by improving alignment of employees to company objectives.

This new and more refined approach to performance evaluation and feedback engages talent in a focused conversation so they feel – as both individuals and part of a team – that they are contributing to realizing a company’s full potential. It’s a model in which managers are enabled to be true team leaders, facilitating a collaborative and more continuous approach that focuses on successful business outcomes. Examine your organization’s approach to activating talent and determine if you are empowering managers to coach and engage talent by using applications designed for this purpose in ways that lead to the best possible results.