peoplestrong

1. Talent Management
Strategy Playbook
7 Game-Changing Ideas
To Win In Today’s
Talent Economy
Vikram Kohli
VP – Product Management
PeopleStrong

2. 2
Introduction
Human beings are evolving fast and so is their
sense of self. We can attribute much of this
acceleration to the pandemic.
If most of your employees fall somewhere in the
middle as per Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, they
are asking tough questions of themselves almost
every day.
Questions like:
“Why should I continue doing this job?”
“Will it help me in my long-term growth?”
“Does this job fulfill the meaning or purpose of
my life?”
Self-Actualization
Esteem
Social Belonging
Safety
Physiological
Independent,
Takes the Lead,
Has Opportunities
for Advancement
Has Recognition &
Feeling of Accomplishment
Good Work Relations &
Feeling Seen, Heard & Supported
Job Security &
Safe Work Environment
Salary, Benefits, Basic Wellbeing
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs For
Employees in the Workplace

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Ask the right questions to re-invent
your talent management
1. How can I enable my employees and managers to
become much more self-aware, from the context of
work and probably beyond?Are there any high-potential
employees who are stuck with static job profiles?
2. How can I give more freedom to business units to run
the kind of talent initiatives they want to run?
3. Who are those managers that are sitting in between
the individual and their true potential?
We are not trying to give you a consulting framework here. Most of
the time, although these frameworks make sense at a high-level,
they are difficult to implement in practice.
Read on for simple strategies that you can execute to help your
people and your business succeed in today’s talent economy.
Since the industrial age, the default modus operandi of employers is
to extract maximum value from employees and pay them for the
hourstheyhaveputin.Overtheyears,asjobsbecamemorecomplex,
specialization in every area of work increased. People started
spending more time at work and started searching for their purpose
or are trying to define the meaning of their lives through their work.
At the same time, because the number of jobs in the market have
grown, and most of the jobs have become complex with increased
specialization, employers have lost control over how people should
behave at work and what they should do. But as a company, you still
have to innovate fast and build efficiency using the power of the
same people in your company.
Even today, companies at large are rarely interested in helping their
people evolve through their job. Talent Management initiatives fail
to deliver the required return that the CEO asked for. Perhaps,
because many of these projects and initiatives are planned keeping
the company at the centre, not employees. Traditionally these
initiatives were defined around how to ‘hire’ the right people, how to
build people capability, and how to retain high performers. Rarely
initiatives are defined with intent to help employees evolve as
individuals, as professionals, and as human beings.
What if we start asking different questions from ourselves that we
can then answer through the implementation of better talent
management practices?

4. 4
01
02
03
04
Define Skills Across The Company
Based On Designations
Get Insights On Skills Across
The Company
Enhance Capability Across The
Company Based On Skills Assessments
Run HiPO Programs For Different Personas
05
06
07
Manage Your Talent Initiatives
& Programs
Simplify Talent Mobility
Share People Insights Beyond HR
Your Talent Management Strategy
For 2022 & Beyond

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From what we have all seen over time, designations function like
social badges given to employees based on the value they create
for the company.Rather than getting intothe complexities of defining
job roles - define technical and behavioural skills for those
designations.
There are many problems with the traditional approach of
defining the job roles and then defining competencies under
those job roles. First, once the competency framework is defined,
it never delved deeper into the various processes of the company.
Employees and managers were hardly able to relate to those
defined competencies. And lastly, that competency framework
ends up like the treadmill that you bought to get more fit, but is
now just sitting in a corner of the house without being used.
So how can we better define future-ready skills for designations
across the organisation?
01
Define Skills Across The Company
Based On Designations

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To define and keep your skill framework up to date,
here are the high-level steps
1. Assign a senior HR Manager the role of maintaining the skill
framework or delegate this task to HRBPs. Every year, the skill
framework must be updated along with business readers and
published across the company
2. Each year the HR Manager, along with Business Unit heads, and
key managers within those business units will validate and refine
the skills for each designation
3. Publish the skill framework across the company and collect
feedback from all employees and managers. Conduct an analysis
on which skills are under proficiency levels across the company
01 Define Skills Across The Company Based On Designations
3.

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To get skill insights and create spider gap charts,
run 360° assessments on those skills for each
employee. Ideally, the assessment should be
conducted away from the performance reviews.
Oncetheassessmentisover,transparentlyshow
theskillinsightstoemployeesandmanagers.Let
them identify which skills they need to work on
based on feedback from peers, managers, and
colleagues across the teams.
The generated assessment data will also be
more authentic if the communications sent
before and during the assessments are well-
organised, creating more awareness and
engagement. This will reassure employees that
it is indeed for their betterment.
02
Get Insights On Skills Across
The Company

8. 8
Once the assessments are done and the derived skill insights are
shared across teams, it’s time to suggest courses and training
programsthatwillenhanceyourpeoplecapabilityacrossthoseskills.
For that to be achieved, you need to define the training programs
and courses in your LMS, against each skill in the job role.
Now that may be a huge ask of your L&D team, if you have one or if
they require more budget. Generating content or getting content
across the company is indeed a big challenge. One solution is to
leverage the creator economy and let your HiPOs create content
aligned with those skills. If people can create content outside the
company on the TikToks and Instagrams of the world, why can’t they
create content inside the company? Or to generate and get more
variety of training courses, integrate your LMS with two or more
content providers like LinkedIn Learning and/or Udemy.
Once the content is ready, which will definitely take some time to
develop, let your employees define the IDPs with development
activitiesalignedwiththecoursesonyourLMS.Lettherebefeedback
and assessment on those IDPs along with your business goals in the
performance reviews to enhance accountability among employees
to finish those courses.
03
Enhance Capability Across Company
Based On Skills Assessments
Even if all this is achieved with 80% success, it will bring much more
capability depth to your company.

9. 9
04
Running HiPO Programs For
Different Personas
HiPOs are those people in your company, who generate maximum
revenue and value for your customers. But data points to identify
HiPOs are broken in most companies. What if you combine the skill
assessment data along with the performance ratings, and get the
list validated by business unit heads for additions and deletions?
Once this HiPO list is validated, you can then run different programs
customized for different levels of HiPOs.
For Early Career HiPOs, their need is to get more money and move
faster to the next role. They are the ones, who want to take on more
challenges. They are ambitious and ready to switch jobs if their
expectations are not met. Assigning them gig projects, extra targets
and a few more training programs will help them evolve. If they are
able to achieve those projects, targets, and complete those training
programs, move them on to the next role right away. Don’t wait for
your annual performance review activity.
For Mid-career HiPOs, in addition to giving them additional gig
projects and targets, conduct extensive leadership development
programs for them that bring in those required behavioural changes,
which will then enable and empower them towards the next level of
leadership roles.

10. 10
04 Running HiPO Programs For Different Personas
One mistake which we have seen HR leaders doing is,
setting up HiPO programs for an exceedingly long
duration. When done this way, HiPO employees don’t
see how it will add value and enable them to grow faster
as professionals. Another mistake is that the training
programs which are allocated are of sub-standard level.
As humans, we are all quite good at feeling sense and
intent.
For the people in your leadership team, who are HiPOs,
take them through training programs on how to coach
people. And then set in targets for them to coach
employees at all levels.

11. 11
05
Manage Your Talent Initiatives
& Programs
In addition to running your HiPO programs, you probably have to run
many other talent programs and initiatives. These programs may be
on the lines of, ‘Preparing Next level of Store Managers,” or maybe,
‘EnablingManagerstoimproveengagementlevelswithintheirteams.’
These programs can be managed successfully by following a
standard process of:
Identification & Short listing of Talent
Development of Talent, and
Placement or Rewarding the Talent
Identification of talent can be democratized
by enabling managers to nominate their team
members based on given parameters. The
developmentofsuchtalentcanbeeasilydone
by giving them standard IDP activities. And
then once the talent is ready, they can be
placed in the relevant internal positions down
the line.

12. 12
06
Simplify Talent Mobility
Finding and hiring talent is already a huge
challenge for most companies. When we ask
companies if their employees can apply to
IJPs easily and move freely within their
department,mostofthetimetheanswerisno.
Finding an opening and applying to a current
opening is difficult for an employee. And even
if it’s easy to find an opening, the managers
don’t allow team members to move to another
department.
An ideal process and system will be one that
suggests relevant openings to relevant
employees, regardless of their position in the
company’s structure. And employees can
apply to those IJP without any restriction or
bureaucracy because if an employee has
decided to leave the team, retaining him by
moving to other teams (if skills somewhat fit
in) is still more cost and effort-friendly than
hiring a new person.

13. 13
07
Share People Insights
Beyond HR
Connectingthedotsbetweenpeopledataandthebiggerpictureofthecompany’s
strategic vision, mission, leadership, values and goals is not an easy task. You
havetogoonestepfurtherandaskyourselfwhatbusinessoutcomesyou’retrying
to impact. Once you do that your people analytics goes beyond solving people
problems and starts addressing tangible business outcomes, helping translate
insights into action. And of course, you have to enable your managers and
business unit heads to get those people insights in real-time.
We’re not talking about general aggregate graphs like number of people in a team,
here, or their performance ratings over the year, and so on - those are basics.
The insights we’re talking about are more on the lines of:
Are your HiPOs well-engaged?
Which skills are lacking in your team? And are people enrolled in those training
programs that will enable these skills?
What is the cost of your consistent low performers and are they assigned PIP
plans?
Hiring recommendations to managers across the team like from which
companies and qualification levels they should hire
Which people managers are not performing well?

14. 14
Many HR leaders have these thoughts within their heads on what
needs to be done but fail when they pass on the baton to their
HR teams for implementation. Hopefully, with these high-level
steps, you can take your talent strategy to the next level.
A Talent Operating System
For Your Entire Organisation
PeopleStrong’s AI-powered, Integrated Talent Management
platform helps you recruit, mentor, retain, and engage a
future-ready workforce. The AI-Powered platform creates
a trifecta of data, capability, and performance to bring
insights into an employee’s journey from recruitment to their
growth, and beyond. With this patent-ready technology,
PeopleStrong uses data from multiple systems to build a
centralised black box of skills and applies a layer of Artificial
Intelligence to deliver a Talent Strategy that enables
companies to manage their talent better, for today and
tomorrow.

15. 15
Let’s Talk
PeopleStrong is Asia Pacific’s leading, and the most comprehensive
Human Capital Management SaaS platform. Our technology focuses
on delivering a unique employee experience, drives data-driven
decisions and agility for businesses.
We have simplified worklife for over 500+ large enterprises across
the emerging economies of Asia Pacific. Today, PeopleStrong
empowers the lives of 2M+ employees with a mobile-first, AI and
ML-powered talent operating system. Our tech capabilities span
across the lifecycle from hire to exit, including Human Capital
Management, Payroll, Talent Acquisition & Management, and
Collaboration.
We are rated among the Top 5 in the Asia Pacific on Gartner’s Peer
Insights and voted as Asia Pacific’s Choice for HR Tech in Gartner
‘Voice of the Customer’ Report for 1000+ employee enterprises.