The results of a study by Saratoga and Dr. Richard Beatty—based on 300 phone surveys and 13 in depth face-to-face interviews—were put together in a paper presented by Convergys. With such brainpower we were expecting a study that would give us a bit more of comparisons and benchmarks, but here it is.

The key message is: you have a strategic gap between your business strategy and your workforce strategy. You should fix it, because it costs you as much as 10% on overspending and 10% on underperformance.

The key reasons for this gap are: limited access to actionable workforce data and intelligence, rigid policies, workforce organized around jobs and tasks rather than skills and competencies, and hard to retain top players.

The similarity with the other outsourcer’s assessment (see Is HR Still Stuck in the Middle?) is the rigidity or the lack of vision for a talent-centric organization. While the previous report was centralized around the HR organization, this one overlays a company wide philosophy around talent management even more. Convergys tries to give a rough sketch of what it could look like.

The key idea is to organize the workforce around skills and competencies rather than simply job title. The results from their survey are that about 2/3 see data to identify skills as important to very important, while only about 1/3 mention they are proficient at obtaining this data.

A quick example may highlight the point. At Taleo we promote our internal employees a great deal using our own platform. Our legal department at one stage needed a new staff member. They promoted the need internally first and to many’s surprise, at the end of the cycle someone from marketing ended up with the job. Why? She had the skills (in this case even the certifications as she is a lawyer) and it was easy to locate her and for her to locate what skills were required.

The beauty of this as described in the report is that “retention becomes a sourcing strategy …[and]… knowledge capital not only remains intact but grows”.

So agile companies of tomorrow, you may want to re-assess your skills inventory strategy!