True story: a multibillion-dollar technology giant splits itself into discrete business units to play in different markets. The strategy for one of the new businesses, though, is fatally flawed. When dismal quarterly numbers roll in – and roll in they will – get ready for a flurry of bad press and a humbling strategic reboot.
But those numbers never did roll in. Why? Because the company’s experience management systems picked up on clues from the field – impressions and opinions of salespeople, marketers, and others – and provided what amounted to an early-warning alert. Executives pivoted within a couple of weeks before any real damage was done.
That story is about talent management only insofar as front-line talent recognized what was happening, and the company managed to collect those impressions and opinions and then package them such that leadership could act on them. But the anecdote illustrates the enormous potential of systems that can capture, parse, and synthesize the insights of employees and partners who are the beating heart of a technology business – or any business, for that matter.
The fruits of these systems, particularly when combined with more traditional information streams (in the forms of HR, sales, operational, financial, and other data) are increasingly empowering a far more advanced, vastly more strategic version of today’s talent management: talent engagement.
Talent engagement harnesses analytics to improve upon traditional talent management while enabling its extension beyond the company’s walls. My employer provided a nice example of its usefulness as an HR tool in March 2020. When the coronavirus pandemic struck, SAP’s 100,000 employees abruptly went from working in hundreds of offices around the world to working in 100,000 home offices. Many of us were comfortable with the transition. Others, though – for example, administrative assistants whose work had always been in the office – fretted.
We sent out a series of pulse checks to find out how people were feeling. What were they happy about? What stressed them out? How is working from, say, a kitchen table with their husbands working at the same kitchen table and toddlers tugging at their sweatpants, affecting them? We monitored that data, reacted to it, and found ways to address their concerns.
That’s just scratching the surface of talent engagement. Consider the broader possibilities with employee retention. Let’s say the financials don’t look like they should: costs are rising, revenues tanking. Drill down and you see that high sales-force turnover is blunting sales even as onboarding replacements increases costs. That’s the easy part.
Harder is understanding why the turnover is happening. Pulse checks may provide some insights; exit interviews also. The information coming from such sources is less concrete than the traditional corporate IT fare, but it’s data, and analytics can make it sing. Each exit interview may have come after a unique career decision, but in aggregate, patterns emerge.
Do certain personality types not work well for certain management types? Do generational differences – Gen-X versus Millennial versus Gen-Z – or even geographical or cultural ones translate into happier or less-happy workers in particular contexts? Is the company’s position on, say, sustainability improving employee satisfaction? Among which employees? Does that translate into stronger performers who stick around longer and, ultimately, deliver better bottom-line results?
Talent engagement systems not only track such factors, but harness machine learning and advanced analytics to let you model it and scenario plan. That, plus its ability to combine classic HR data with finance data and inputs from annual reviews, exit interviews, and the like, are what truly separate it from old-school talent management.
Talent engagement doesn’t stop at the corporate fence line, either – and in an XaaS world, it can’t. Beyond the need to engage 1099s as well as W-2s, talent engagement at its best extends to your channel partners. Many, many tech companies rely on their channels to go to market. For some, channel partners comprise the bulk of the sales force. In that case, you must train them, enable them, and make it easy for them. Because guess what? If you don’t, the channel partner’s sales force will be perfectly content selling the products or services of a competitor who can make them happier.
But you can’t keep them happy – “them” being all variety of internal or external talent you rely on – if you’re not tuned into their sentiments and then have a way to relate the insights distilled from those sentiments back into your business. That’s what talent engagement can do, and I’m confident it will soon play an immense role in not merely managing, but engaging the talent that comprises the tech industry’s most precious commodity.
David Dunn has a degree in chemical engineering and has spent his 35-year career in and around the chemical industry. In 2020, he joined SAP as global industry marketing lead for chemicals and has added the role of global industry marketing lead for high tech in 2021.