As a child, Lois Melbourne watched her mother run her business with a focus on people.
That lesson stays with her as an adult at her own business, Aquire Inc., a work force planning and management solutions company. As co-founder and CEO of the 64-person company, she uses those people skills to help business owners develop succession plans and work through mergers and reorganizations.
Smart Business spoke with Melbourne about how to effectively manage your talent.
How do you create metrics for talent management?
Every organization has different drivers, but looking at the measurement, some of them are subjective, yet they still need to be ranked — like readiness for another position. It has to still be a human intervention to say, ‘Is an individual ready for a particular role?’ But that decision is also hopefully based on measurements that have been going on throughout the year or throughout someone’s career as you look at what experience have they been through, what value have they brought to the organization, do they have the necessary training or hands-on experience with components in the company? Then, sometimes it’s very easy to check off the list and say maybe they’ve been to a university or they haven’t, they’ve gotten a certain certification or they haven’t. Those kinds of things are often part of the measurements, as well.
How do you prevent bias from creeping in with subjective measurements?
An important part of avoiding bias is there isn’t one individual making a decision about another person’s career. … Organizations will put in 360-degree reviews. That kind of quantification is there, and it gets a lot easier in a business to avoid bias if the organization is driven by results, and the goals are set for any given individual or position or department, so you can measure if someone has actually met the goal.
Let’s say a goal is 80 percent of the employees will have been through a global training experience in two years, because we want them to either do a global job or to have been through certain types of classes about global awareness. If that’s a departmental or corporate goal, then you start driving the goals down to the individual, so then it’s less subjective — that HR person who was in charge of getting people properly trained, did they do a good job? Well, did they reach the goal? Was the goal properly established? Those types of things help take out the bias.
How do you set goals that are challenging but achievable?
Part of it is looking at historical data. What has been done in the past? We’ll use the previous example — let’s say the goal is, ‘We want 80 percent of the people to go through training in two years,’ but we never could reach more than 50 percent. So why would we, this year, crank it up 15 percent? Look at some of the historical factors and see what’s been achievable in the past. Come up with a logical number for the future, as well.
How do you know when you need to lower a goal versus it’s a performance issue?
It requires a discussion with sometimes a lot of people — the stakeholders, the individuals involved — to figure out why have we not been reaching this goal? Is it because of the performance of individuals, or is it because of budget constraints? Why did we set the goal at 80 percent to begin with? Was that wishful thinking? Did we have to have that many for some reason, like compliance issues?
It’s finding out why the goal was set and finding out is there a consensus on why the goal hasn’t been reached. Are there conflicts as to why the goal hasn’t been reached? Is there finger-pointing? … It might have been something out of their control, and that might need to be notated.
If we have a goal of watching what kind of turnover we have in our employee base and we lose a whole lot of people, why does that happen? Did we lose people because we stopped a benefits program, and people had to leave because they needed to find health insurance? That insurance impact then affects other goals. Get down to why did we miss the target.
How to reach: Aquire Inc., (888) 674-2427 or www.aquire.com
