Hire vs inspire

Shouldn’t it be hire AND inspire, rather than hire VERSUS inspire?  If com­pa­nies were in opti­mal con­di­tions, then yes. But most com­pa­nies are not opti­mis­ing their tal­ent, and let’s clar­i­fy this upfront, it’s not HR’s fault.

As a cer­ti­fied tal­ent opti­mi­sa­tion con­sul­tant, I teach com­pa­nies how to con­nect the peo­ple strat­e­gy to the busi­ness strat­e­gy to opti­mise results.  Recent­ly, the two chief con­cerns among CEOs and busi­ness own­ers have been attract­ing and retain­ing top tal­ent.

Tal­ent acqui­si­tion and tal­ent reten­tion are not mutu­al­ly exclu­sive.  In fact, there is a sym­bi­ot­ic rela­tion­ship between attract­ing top tal­ent and retain­ing top tal­ent. Think about it for a moment… If you make bad hires, they won’t stick around very long and your exist­ing work­force will burnout and seek green­er pas­tures as well.

How­ev­er, the con­verse isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly true. Just because you hire a rock-star, that doesn’t guar­an­tee that they will improve your team’s chem­istry or per­for­mance.  So, let’s dis­pel the sus­pense, and end the chick­en-and-egg debate right now over which one you have to fix first:  tal­ent acqui­si­tion vs tal­ent reten­tion.  It’s tal­ent reten­tion.

Wait, what?  I hear you out there… “Dave, you don’t get it, I can’t find any good can­di­dates. I placed ads on the inter­net and no one qual­i­fied responds. I pay search firms and all I get are duds. There is a tal­ent short­age out there…” blah, blah, blah…

Not real­ly. Where are all the rock-stars? They are embed­ded in organ­i­sa­tions and high­ly engaged in jobs where they love work­ing on high-per­form­ing teams, kick­ing butt and tak­ing names day in and day out. They aren’t read­ing the job ads online and they aren’t respond­ing to the recruiters who reach out to them because their needs are being met at work.

Bear with me for a moment while I play this out… If you are focused on the lack of top tal­ent out there and your tal­ent acqui­si­tion prob­lems, you are only seek­ing to treat the symp­tom.  The cure lies with­in your exist­ing organ­i­sa­tion. Hire vs inspire…

Let’s say you are able to attract a rock-star and pay them more than your com­peti­tors. If you bring them into a sub-opti­mal envi­ron­ment, they will nev­er per­form like rock-stars, they dis­en­gage, and they won’t stick around very long. There­fore, you haven’t fixed any­thing.

In fact, you have made it worse, because rock-stars hang out with oth­er rock-stars, and in the day of Glass­door and LinkedIn, word about your com­pa­ny and its cul­ture get around pret­ty quick­ly. And now you’ll have an even hard­er time attract­ing just mediocre tal­ent in the future.

Let’s turn back the clock ten years. We were in the heart of the reces­sion and it was very much an employer’s mar­ket. If you were an employ­ee, you were lucky to have a job. And chances are, even if you were aware of that fact, you still got remind­ed of it often. Times have changed. It is very much an employee’s mar­ket now. Yet, many com­pa­nies still have prac­tices and meth­ods that imbue the “you are lucky to work here” spir­it.

Who is ulti­mate­ly respon­si­ble for this? Well, as we stat­ed ear­li­er, it’s not HR’s fault. It would be unfair to dump all of this at the feet of HR. Espe­cial­ly, when many organ­i­sa­tions (at their own per­il, mind you) still do not even let HR sit at the table when it comes to design­ing the busi­ness strat­e­gy.

There is one sta­tis­tic that has remained con­sis­tent for the past 25 years, from the days of the dot­com boom to the reces­sion through today’s surg­ing econ­o­my: the num­ber one rea­son some­one leaves their job is their man­ag­er.  There are mil­lions of peo­ple com­mut­ing this morn­ing to jobs they hate, work­ing for man­agers that suck. Peo­ple don’t quit their job, they quit their boss.

Pro­vid­ing a com­pet­i­tive salary and ben­e­fits, Fri­day piz­za lunch­es, and a cof­fee machine on every floor are no longer con­sid­ered exem­plary, they are expect­ed. It’s about team chem­istry, cul­ture, engage­ment, and empow­er­ment. Yeah, yeah, we’ve heard this all before, right?

Let’s look at the bot­tom line. Most lead­ers acknowl­edge that their most valu­able asset is their peo­ple. Peo­ple are also the largest expense for most busi­ness­es. Well, regard­less of your busi­ness strat­e­gy and the results you are seek­ing to achieve, if peo­ple are your most valu­able asset and your largest expense, then they are your most cru­cial invest­ment in your busi­ness.

The grass is green­er where you water it. Many com­pa­nies have been able to get away with mask­ing high turnover for a while dur­ing the cur­rent econ­o­my where high­er rev­enues have hid­den many defi­cien­cies. But as the econ­o­my lev­els off and prof­its grow lean­er, if you can’t find any good can­di­dates and your best peo­ple keep leav­ing, your busi­ness is in seri­ous trou­ble.

There are rock-stars sit­ting on your bench right now, but chances are if they are not per­form­ing as such, their poten­tial will nev­er be devel­oped and they will leave soon. And in this econ­o­my, they have options. They are not lucky to be work­ing there, you are lucky to have them there right now.

Ok, so now what?

Tal­ent opti­mi­sa­tion pro­tects against dis­en­gage­ment. Employ­ee dis­en­gage­ment is a wide­spread issue that caus­es organ­i­sa­tions to lose bil­lions of dol­lars to poor pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, absen­teeism, safe­ty issues, poor client ser­vice, and tox­ic work­place cul­tures. By some mea­sures, more than 70 per­cent of US employ­ees are dis­en­gaged.

Dis­en­gage­ment caus­es employ­ees to with­hold dis­cre­tionary effort and to deliv­er the min­i­mum amount of work to stay employed.  Inevitably, when employ­ees don’t give it their all, busi­ness results suf­fer.

There are many facets to tal­ent opti­mi­sa­tion, but a good start­ing point for a com­pa­ny that is bleed­ing tal­ent is to look at the four fac­tors of dis­en­gage­ment:

1. Mis­align­ment with the job. Poor­ly defined posi­tions, slop­py hir­ing process­es, or evolv­ing busi­ness needs cre­ate a mis­match between employ­ees and their roles. Lack of job fit direct­ly impacts moti­va­tion and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. We can com­bat this by using peo­ple data to under­stand the dri­ves nec­es­sary for suc­cess in roles and match employ­ees to those dri­ves.
2. Mis­align­ment with the man­ag­er. The rela­tion­ship between employ­ees and their man­agers is the most crit­i­cal con­trib­u­tor to engage­ment, yet many man­agers are poor­ly equipped or not trained to effec­tive­ly under­stand their employ­ees’ indi­vid­ual needs. They strug­gle to com­mu­ni­cate with and moti­vate their employ­ees. Com­pa­nies have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to train man­agers to under­stand and lever­age peo­ple data.
3. Mis­align­ment with the team. Team-based work is more crit­i­cal than ever; yet poor com­mu­ni­ca­tion, insuf­fi­cient col­lab­o­ra­tion, and inabil­i­ty to man­age the ten­sions inher­ent to team­work con­tin­ue to extract a mas­sive tax on pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and inno­va­tion. We can address this by using peo­ple data to under­stand whether behav­iour­al dri­ves are aligned to achieve the team’s goals and com­pa­ny ini­tia­tives.
4. Mis­align­ment with cul­ture. To be pro­duc­tive and engaged, employ­ees need to feel that they belong. When they feel out of tune with their organ­i­sa­tion’s val­ues, or when they lose trust in their lead­er­ship, their own per­for­mance suf­fers, and they can cre­ate a tox­ic work envi­ron­ment that under­mines pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. We can fix this by using data to con­sis­tent­ly eval­u­ate cul­ture and pre­scribe solu­tions.

Opti­mis­ing tal­ent means always con­sid­er­ing these four fac­tors:  job, man­ag­er, team, and cul­ture. An opti­mised organ­i­sa­tion keeps these fac­tors top of mind with every peo­ple deci­sion and action: espe­cial­ly when look­ing to expand its work­force.

If you can fix your tal­ent reten­tion prob­lem first and inspire your exist­ing employ­ees to achieve rock-star results by address­ing the four fac­tors of dis­en­gage­ment, your recruit­ing prob­lem not only becomes eas­i­er to solve, it also becomes less con­se­quen­tial.