Following on from “Retaining Top Talent Part 1”.

By thinking of your employees as human capital – something in which you invest and that pays dividends – you can look beyond output and production to determine their real value to the organisaton.

Making the investment

While employees understandably want compensation equal to their skills and effort, they also want to feel invested in as people and professionals. To retain top talent and knowledge while maintaining employee engagement, loyalty and commitment, companies should consider the following:

• Training, beyond skills development to include more indirect programs such as communications, motivation, time management, problem solving, team building and other areas applicable to everyone in the organisation.
• Assessment, not only of employee’s skills, but also competencies to help uncover unique aspects of each individual’s abilities and character that brought to bear more effectively in the workplace
• Job duty and performance mapping to determine the exact skills, competencies, qualifications and attributes required for each job role to be successful
• Competency matching to ensure the right employees are in the best position for their competency and skill levels
• Career path and succession planning, which serves the best interest of the employees and the employer – a fine balance that could and should work
• Comprehensive talent-management tools that can integrate all of these functions – from HR and training to career and succession planning to measuring and understanding the performance effect on business success

In the modern employment setting, every internal function touches another: the days of looking at HR, payroll, sales etc, as individual silos are behind us. With a more integrated perspective, backed by solid, integrated tools, employers and employees can achieve the level of success, satisfaction and fulfilment required to move forward, even amid an uncertain future.

Evaluating, nurturing, cultivating and measuring the effect of talent is an absolute must for reducing the risk of losing your most valuable human capital once normality in the job market returns – if there will be ever such a thing again!

To do so requires the right set of tools that can expand human capital management beyond the traditional set of HR and training functions to integrate career path and succession planning, as well as training and skills, competency and motivational assessment. Crucially for all this to happen requires inspired leadership and the right mindset.

By overlooking any of these areas, one can only wonder how many of your most valuable and talent employees already have one foot out the door.

And, you may never know what you’re missing until they’re gone.

This article was written for Netregistry by Paul Smith, CEO at Carnegie Management Group. Carnegie Management Group provides executive mentoring, transition managers and facilitators for Australian businesses of all sizes.