Strategy and Measurement

Do You Want to Know More About:

• Establishing plans to successfully align your organization around a common vision?
• Ensuring that your business strategy is supported by your human capital strategy?
• Measuring the impact your Human Resources function has on business results?

Talent Strategy and Planning Is the Key

Talent strategy and planning is a process used to ensure that an organization’s human capital supports desired business outcomes. Talent strategy and planning often includes:

• Clarifying the organization’s mission, vision and strategic objectives.
• Developing an actionable strategy to achieve desired organizational outcomes.
• Identifying and forecasting the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics needed to fulfill the talent strategy.
• Establishing success metrics to assess the contribution of the Human Resources function to business outcomes.

How Can I/O Psychologists Help?

1. Facilitation. I/O psychologists can successfully facilitate meetings with senior leaders to identify, clarify, and articulate the organization’s mission, vision and strategic objectives in measurable terms
2. Alignment Meetings. I/O psychologists can help business leaders align talent strategy with organizational strategy.
3. Identify KSAOs. I/O psychologists can work with subject matter experts to identify the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other personal characteristics required for a specific talent strategy to succeed.
4. Metrics Development. I/O psychologists can develop reliable and valid methods to measure desired organizational outcomes.
5. Change Management.I/O psychologists can design and deliver a change management program to implement new approaches to talent planning, attraction, and retention.
6. Workforce Planning. I/O psychologists can identify and plan for future workplace talent needs.

Talent Strategy and Planning Needs: An Example

The following is an example of an organization facing talent strategy and planning challenges:

• The merger of two electric utilities created one of the nation’s largest energy providers.
• The new organization was challenged with integrating two different business strategies, disparate corporate cultures, two geographies, and two different regulatory environments.
• The industry itself was experiencing transformational change.

Talent Strategy and Planning Needs: The Solution

I/O psychologists helped this organization by:

• Designing an off-site meeting for the leaders of both organizations to discuss the strategy and goals for the combined organization.
• Partnering with the head of Human Resources to map out a talent strategy to support the newly adopted, post-merger strategic focus.
• Identifying the knowledge, skills and abilities necessary for key positions within the organization.
• Completing a talent inventory to reveal gaps in key skill sets, such as financial acumen and marketing.
• Closing talent gaps over an 18-month period through a combination of training and external hiring with rigorous selection criteria.
• Designing a system by which employees were kept aware of the intentions of the company to retain employees, in order to avoid the deleterious effects of rumors and mitigate the realistic stress that arises from speculation over their future with the company.
• Designing and implementing science-based strategies to unite the two corporate cultures to avoid the common merger pitfall of having “a house divided” or warring entities within the company, which inhibits productivity when employees feel marginalized or react against changes their job duties or routines.

Talent Strategy and Planning Needs: The Results

This organization benefited though the following results*:

• Alignment on priorities established a culture of collaboration and trust.
• Limited turnover during the merger process due to the clarity of the organization’s direction.
• Increased market share in a deregulated marketplace.
• Cost synergies that exceeded expectations and revenue growth that surpassed forecasts.
• Increased bench strength for leadership positions through the improved ability to attract top talent.
• Market expansion through more efficient systems and improved talent placement.
• Employees feeling more “buy-in” and experiencing less stress, and less negative attitudes toward the new company and corporate culture.

*The results above are an example of potential outcomes using the solution delineated above.