Understanding talent vitals, the heartbeat of your business — you don’t often hear the term “vital signs” applied outside healthcare, but in my Leadership and HR circles I’m hearing more people talking about “talent vitals,” so the term appears to have crossed the chasm. I’m all for bridging gaps between your people talent and metrics. Because it has, and because we’d like to know what you all think, talent vitals will be the topic for this week’s World of Work #TChat.
If we go with the healthcare root of the term, a vital sign is one that indicates a state of health in a critical system. To dive into metaphor, blood pressure might equate with workplace culture, pulse might equate with workplace analytics, weight management might equate with career development, and so on. You can see how every aspect of HR, talent management and HR technology might have an analog in the physical world, which makes it easier to get a sense for the theme of talent vitals.
Take HR technology. It’s the annual check-up of talent vitals for leaders. HR tech, done right, is transformative — it helps Leaders and HR pros find new, more efficient ways to recruit, retain and train with technology. But don’t fall into the trap of viewing the automation of existing HR processes as a big improvement — far from it. So it’s vital to make sure any HR product or service is built right, appeals to practitioners and delivers business value.
Skills, competencies and talents are also vitals. Identifying and monitoring these, kind of like keeping an eye on body temperature, enables HR to know the organization is in a healthy place, with the right tools, people and processes.
Analytics are a big deal right now, too, so that topic also makes the vitals list. But beware: Having information is not the same as analyzing it and being able to infer trends from data sets. If your needs for analysis are basic, maybe it’s best to stick with spreadsheets. We’re going to talk about when analysis demands tools more powerful than those Excel has to offer.
Finally, we’ll discuss how to scale a company by monitoring talent vitals. The skills required to manage a 10-person enterprise are not the same as those necessary for a 1,000 company.
So please join us Wednesday, April 18, from 7-8 pm ET (6-7 pm CT, 4-5 pm PT, or wherever you are) for a talent vitals #Tchat, when we’ll explore the following questions. There with me (@MeghanMBiro) will be @KevinGrossman, this week’s moderator, as well as KC Donovan, Sean Charles, Salima Nathoo and Maren Hogan, all hanging out with us on the Twitter back channel. We look forward to chatting!
Q1: You conceived it and designed it (product/service). So how do you know who to hire to “build” it and why?
Q2: What methods should companies employ to identify the right competencies, skills and talent they need and why?
Q3: Is allowing your employees to participate in their own career development important to biz success? Why or why not?
Q4: Workforce analytics are hot. But how do you make the business case beyond using Excel to analyze your talent vitals?
Q5: How do HR and business leaders scale talent vitals from a startup of 10 to a company of 10,000?
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