‘Talentship’ is the term coined for decision science on staff talent resources. It is to HR what finance is to accounting and what marketing is to sales
Human Resource (HR) management is considered secondary to finance and marketing. Corporate leaders do not spare as much time for talent management as they do for investment allocation, customer service, marketing, product line and technology. Hence, the HR function is limited to delivery of programmes like skill development, incentives, hiring, learning, development and so on. This limits its scope exponentially. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a paradigm shift to enhance the function of HR managers to include decision-making about talent, as one cannot emphasise enough the importance of relevant human capital for the success of any organisation. Current business trends like globalisation, adoption of digital technology, labour scarcity, mergers and acquisitions, expanding and scaling down simultaneously and the changing demographic profile of workers make this transformation vital.
Even when it performs well, traditional HR function falls short of expectations. Unlike finance, operation and marketing, there appears to be no clear distinction between strategic and tactical HR. While strategic HR is more of a vision to be considered the best employer in the industry, tactical HR concerns the daily operations of managing employee benefit programmes and various rules and regulations. There are several areas that are left unanswered in traditional HR, like a thin plausible association between the core business principle and the talent management process. Employee management goals are mostly general in nature, such as headcount, labour costs, standard HR programmes and so on. These have no correlation with competitive success and shareholder value.
Although sizeable investments are done in HR management techniques, like balanced scorecards, analytics and so on to enhance staff capabilities, they rarely play a significant role in mergers and acquisitions and new market entries. They also provide insufficient understanding of a company’s competitive advantage developed through engaged employees. HR programmes are more like “one-size-fits all.” For instance, in marketing, it cannot be suggested that all products should have the same number of hours of advertising. Because, how can that be? Some may require it more than others. However, this way of functioning is prevalent in HR, that is, “50 hours of quality training” can be a standard statement for all workers. This type of training is less precise and may not be fully effective. Hence, traditional HR functions do not help leaders make better decisions about those resources to drive organisational effectiveness.
Where does the solution lie? Many researchers believe that the key is better metrics. As discussed above, HR measurements are limited to Return on Investments of programmes, balanced scorecards and improvement in Six-Sigma scores. Metrics like HR accounting, quality, branding and balanced scorecards are, no doubt, useful systems, if applied correctly, but they rarely address the fundamental challenge of improving talent decisions. However, according to the Corporate Leadership Council (2001), the two most significant and crucial areas of HR measurement, that is to augment decisions about human capital and associate HR to strategy, are seldom taken care of. Decision science has long been used in marketing, finance and operations and can be extended to HR functions too. It helps by providing a valid, dependable and steady framework that boosts the decision-making capability at all levels. Similar to finance and marketing function, HR helps in another critical aspect — talent. For organisations to achieve success, effective and professional decision-making is required in finance, marketing and talent markets.
“Talentship” is the term coined for decision science on staff talent resources. In fact, “talentship” is to HR what finance is to accounting, and what marketing is to sales. It is believed that from the point of view of HR, organisational success can be improved by enhancing the decisions on talent resources. As this concept of talentship evolves, success will come to companies not because of HR practices but due to the improved decision-making quality about talent resources throughout the firm. Similar to the finance and marketing department, talent decisions exist at various levels within a firm, with supervisors and managers deciding about the available staff and their personal talent. To gain any say in influential and strategic business planning processes, HR should focus more on a unique approach, focussed on talent, with a perspective of improving decisions and not just a process of implementing decisions. Every firm must make the “talentship” decision science workable by creating tools that facilitate decision-makers to make the right choices and develop interlinkages with strategic success. Without a proper framework, it is easy to get lost in myriad information and opinions and lose sight of the key issues, and therefore, the strategic vision.
(The writer is Associate Professor, Amity University, Noida)
