Taleo Research Recommends postings describe and link to some of the best content – articles, blog posts, research, and more – that we have come across in recent weeks. We focus of course on Talent Management and its particular practice areas, but at times also include items of more general interest to HR professionals and technologists. This edition has a focus on employee engagement and retention, followed by a series of “quick hit” items of interest.

The September 10th issue of The Economist included a special report on the Future of Jobs. The eight articles in this report cover the subject from a variety of angles, from the combination of high unemployment and a talent shortage, to the changing nature of work and careers, and much more. One of the articles in the series, “Got Talent? Competing to Hire the Best and Motivate the Rest,” provides some impressive data from Manpower’s latest global annual survey on the war for talent:

• 46% of senior human-resources executives said that their talent gap was making it harder for their firm to implement its business strategy.
• Only 27% said they felt their business had the talent it needed.

The article notes that in many organizations and regions, demographic realities are likely to make the situation worse, not better. A further challenge is employee engagement, and the article cites a global Gallup survey that found that at the average big firm:

• 33% of employees describe themselves as fully engaged in their work
• 49% say they are not engaged
• 18% say they are “actively disengaged”

Those are some scary numbers. At what Gallup calls “world-class” companies, the proportions are much better: 67%, 26%, and 7%, respectively. This indicates a strong correlation between employee engagement and organization performance. As the article notes, keeping employees engaged is “easily done when the work is inherently interesting. But what if it is not? If employees find their jobs too boring, they will soon become demotivated and leave, and finding replacements is time-consuming and costly. So companies are doing their best to keep even people doing routine jobs engaged in their work.”

This issue of employee engagement and employee retention is the subject of “Holding on to Your Flight Risks” by Andrew McIlvaine at Human Resource Executive Online. This article notes the following further data:

• PricewaterhouseCoopers Saratoga’s 2011/2012 U.S. Human Capital Effectiveness Report found that among employees overall, the voluntary separation rate — which represents both retirements and resignations — has continued to trend downward, from 10.4 percent in 2007 to 7 percent in 2010.
• However, for employees rated as high performers the turnover rate increased from 3.7 percent in 2009 to 4.3 percent in 2010.

This means that for many organizations, while overall retention may not be as great of an issue as it was several years ago, retaining their all-stars is not just a concern but an issue needing to be addressed. Further data from a survey earlier this year of 426 business leaders from companies of various sizes and industries by the Institute for Corporate Productivity and Human Resource Executive found:

• Only 9 percent strongly agreed that they do a good job of identifying and tracking high-potential employees.
• Only 20 percent agreed or strongly agreed that their organizations have formal, transparent processes to identify and develop high-potential employees.

So what is the solution? How can more organizations join the minority who do a good job of identifying, developing, and tracking their high-potential employees? James Harvey, VP and General Manager of Taleo Performance and Compensation, was quoted as saying “Until HR begins to unify or better coordinate the functional centers of excellence, it’s going to have a hard time solving the retention of star performers. It’s not a problem that one center of excellence, like compensation or recruiting, can solve — they have to be coordinated.”

The article notes that integrated talent management software can be a huge help — but only if the organization doesn’t use such a platform to simply digitize processes that never worked well in the first place. In particular, software such as Taleo’s talent management suite that provides broad and deep individual talent profiles can give the organization the talent intelligence it needs to identify and save high potentials before they walk out the door. An example noted by Harvey is the flagging of an  employee with a high performance rating who has a low compensation ratio and then pushing that out to the line manager for consideration.

This article provides several additional examples and benefits from this kind of approach, so I encourage you to read the entire article.

Quick Hits

Performance Management – A document? A module? A compensation tool?
The answer from Jason Averbook, CEO of Knowledge Infusion, is none of above. In this blog post, Averbook makes the case that the practice of performance management is not the same as completing a performance appraisal, nor is it equivalent to getting the right performance software module, nor should it be owned by the compensation function. At Taleo we’ve been stressing these same messages. Organizations that have once-a-year performance appraisals driven solely by compensation or compliance mandates need to evolve to true performance management practices that involve ongoing feedback from a range of colleagues, focused on supporting business objectives (not just validating raises), all enabled by performance management technology that is integrated into where people work (e.g., email integration available in Taleo Anywhere). Such modern performance management practices should be integrated not only with compensation, but with all aspects of talent management, including recruiting, onboarding, learning and development, and succession planning.

The Road to Recovery
While the prospects for the macro-economy are not looking very strong, the most recent data for spending on learning and development indicates a rebound is still underway, with a more focused approach to performance and technology. That is the primary message from Cushing Anderson’s reporting, in the September issue of Chief Learning Officer magazine, of the latest survey of the magazine’s Business Intelligence Board. All areas of L&D budgets indicated a higher percentage of enterprises increasing spending rather than decreasing, with the three strongest areas being learning strategy, learning technology, and content development. Within the technology area, the biggest jump from 2010 to 2011 was reported as being in Learning Management System spending, with CLOs reporting “their desire to have an enterprise-wide learning management system that is inexpensive and user-friendly.” There was also indicated to be a “consistent desire for a performance management system as an addition to the LMS suite” — and indication that more L&D leaders see the critical need to tie learning to performance, and therefore the need for an integrated platform to enable this connection.

Making Sense of PowerPoint Pandemonium
Speaking of learning technologies, if you are in the market for a new or upgraded “rapid e-Learning” authoring tool, the good folks at Learning Solutions Magazine have provided an excellent article by Mark Simon that compares the top standalone tools on the market today. Simon provides the key features, positives, and negatives for Articulate Presenter/Articulate Studio, Adobe Presenter, Lectora Snap!, and iSpring Presenter. A very useful review if you are looking for this kind of tool for your e-Learning development!

14th Annual HR Technology Conference 2011 Attendee Tips
Although there are always some industry events during the summer months, the conference season picks up significantly in September each year. At Taleo we were delighted with the energy and record-breaking turnout (1600+) at TaleoWorld 2011 last week in San Francisco. But the industry calendar marches on, and October 3-5 is one of the big ones, the 14th Annual HR Technology conference. To help you prepare for this event, industry expert Naomi Bloom recently provided her Top-10 list of attendee tips. While valuable for HR Tech, these tips are actually applicable to any major industry conference — so I consider them a must read!

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