The blog has been initiated to help existing business owners and would-be business owners begin to re-evaluate their thoughts about how best to engage their employees to build a vibrant enterprise. Another reason is to demonstrate a strong link between developing an enterprise strategy, highly engaged employees and great enterprise performance in the industry where the company operates. Lastly the articles will demonstrate the contribution of talent management – its acquisition, development and deployment – to the growth of a vibrant enterprise.
Definitions:
Enterprise: is collectively used to mean the companies or businesses that is engaged in productive activities or services to meet a need in the society.
Human resources: the employees as human being, their natural aptitude or skills and abilities
In the ‘Practice of management’ Peter Drucker mentioned these facts: an employee is first a human being, and second, he has special skills and abilities. It is the skills and abilities they possess and their willingness to deploy it to the benefit of the companies they work in will be accentuated in this blog.
Talent: Talent consists of those individuals who can make a difference to organisational performance, either through their immediate contribution or in the longer-term by demonstrating the highest levels of potential. (Sammy)
Talent management is the systematic attraction, identification, development, engagement/ retention and deployment of those individuals (employees) who are of particular value to an organisation, either in view of their ‘high potential’ for the future or because they are fulfilling business/operation-critical roles. (Sammy)
We will be working with the above definitions throughout the entire series of articles in this blog.
The starting point to attracting great talents into your business is to develop your enterprise strategy. In this blog I will apply the balanced scorecard methodology and how it works in developing your organisation or enterprise’s strategy and managing talents. This methodology is applicable to all industries. The only reason why it will not work in your company is your unwillingness to use the methodology.
Soon after my training in the balanced Scorecard performance management methodology I have been at the forefront in its implementation in an insurance company, a dry-cleaning company and a media production company. The success rates have been outstanding.
The benefits far out weigh the stringent requirements of the methodology. Companies running on this model know where they are going. They will also know when they arrive there. Properly implemented, all the jobs in your company will be aligned to the mission and vision statements (part of the enterprise strategy) and directly improves employee engagement and performance. Each staff will be compelled to be self accounting and responsible for delivering assigned targets. Each job can be measured and rewarded according to their contributions, etc.
Developing your company’s strategy:
Most business owners may have had about the need to have a mission and vision statements. How many of these people actually sat down to craft these statements? Is there any fundamental reason to pay particular attention to this requirement? The size of your business does not matter; it does not also matter whether or not you want to remain small.
Glenn Smith (2016) informs us that a clear written mission statement: determines the company’s direction, forms the basis for alignment, shapes strategy, facilitates evaluation and improvement among others.
What then are the characteristics of a clear written mission statement? It must be measureable, has a time frame, target audience and its main purpose. Same applies to the Vision statement.
The mission answers the question “Why do we exist?” Vision answers the question “What will the future look like as we fulfill our mission? What will be different?” While mission is about today, vision is about the future, what we will become, (Glenn Smith)
Assignment:
Craft your mission and vision statements and forward it to me to review. I will give you a feedback within 24 hours. Remember to tell me the purpose why you are in business, your target customers and the purpose of that business. It’s free!
A dry-cleaning company, whose performance was poor in 2015, engaged us to “… to strengthen its strategic performance management system to better prepare it for future challenges and to support future planned growth.”
The core challenges were that salaries were paid from borrowed money from outside the business, recorded losses during the period, staff morale was very low, customers bore the brunt of poor service delivery and poor quality of customers’ garments.
We observed, during our diagnoses, that there was no enterprise strategy from where to generate measurable parameters. The result was that all employees were lumped together, irrespective of their performance. The hard working ones decided to join the lazy ones and offer just enough to get by. The cumulative result was poor trading result for 2015.
We rebuilt the enterprise strategy. We crafted a new mission and vision statements. This was how we saw the assignment and our approach:
“Rising Light Global Company Limited (‘Rising Light’) by its experience has deployed the balanced scorecard strategic performance management system as the framework to drive the planned growth and facilitate strategy execution.”
Organisational Assessment:
Having done the organisational assessment, challenges and enablers, Customers Segmentation & Their Needs, Customer, Stakeholder & Shareholder Planning Matrix, Customer Value Proposition, etc., we arrived at the mission and vision statements:
An example:
Mission
We provide laundry and dry cleaning solutions to delight our customers.
Vision
We are the most valuable laundry and dry cleaning provider in our industry
Do these templates match the characteristics set above?
The process could be daunting but it is worth every effort put into it.
From this point we started to formulate the strategy. From the organisational assessment:
- The results of the organizational assessment, customer needs analysis and the customer value proposition formed the basis for the review and revalidation of…. strategic themes, which collectively define the company’s enterprise strategy.
- The strategic themes are “pillars of excellence” in which the company must excel in order to deliver value to its customers, be able to live up to its mission and achieve its vision.
- Three “pillars of excellence” were developed:
- Business Growth
- Operational Excellence
- Customer Service Innovation
Your company must excel in the above three pillars to overcome the challenges faced in the past. The current economic recession presents an opportunity to set things in motion if businesses must survive and grow in this period. Lets not deceive ourselves, businesses grow during recession periods.
Observation:
The immediate challenge for this company was poor revenue, resulting from not having enough customer base, poor customer service, poor quality jobs, etc.
To redress these there was need for massive business generation, retaining over 90% of the current customers, etc. This was captured in the ‘business growth’ pillar.
To improve quality of output, increase the number of garments processed per time, improve delivery time, etc. there was need for operations excellence. This gave rise to improving the capacity of the machines and automating the processes that reduced processing days from three (3) to two (2).
The customer service excellence took care of the inadequacies in the rendition of great customer services across the five (5) outlets.
Each of these pillars is then measured against the four perspectives of finance, the customer, internal processes and learning & growth. To achieve your desired goals you need to develop objectives and initiatives on the critical elements, which forms the basis of the quality and quantity of the job required to be done.
The result:
New job descriptions with their key performance indicators were designed in line with the new organogram. In addition each staff now have his/her scorecard, which is now used to evaluate performance. The scorecard has been designed in such a way that every staff has contribution to make towards the enterprise strategy.
Identifying Talents:
From our definition of talent above, you will identify the skills required and at what skills level – basic, advance and professional.
Under the learning and growth perspective you will need to determine the particular skill sets that will deliver your strategy. You are not likely going to have the right talent without well-documented enterprise strategy. The strategy must also form part of your business plan.
Kindly leave a comment on your perspectives of this article