1. Recruitment and staffing
Traditional Approach: Employee referrals.
Network Approach: Leverage Web networking tools. IDEO, a global design company, facilitates internal staffing by developing “rich profiles” of employees’ capabilities and performance. Shared across the firm, these profiles can be searched and tagged electronically, providing an effective mechanism for uncovering talent that might otherwise go unnoticed.
2. On-Boarding and Off-Boarding
Traditional Approach: Tactical, focusing on moving employees through the recruitment process, enrolling in payroll and benefits, and reviewing policies and procedures.
Network Approach: Help employees develop and connect with personal networks and gain insights into organisational culture and job-related knowledge.
3. Employee Engagement
Traditional Approach: Broad-based approach to handling “perceived” issues.
Network Approach: Create structures that enhance employee engagement by understanding social relationships. Help geographically dispersed employees create critical connections, exchange ideas, and discuss organisational insights.
4. Learning and Development
Traditional Approach: Cohort-based learning, mentoring and coaching as part of a broader learning portfolio.
Network Approach: Understand the networks of the most effective people and build mechanisms to replicate similar networks throughout the workforce.
Action Point
Q: How does your company leverage talent management beyond the traditional approaches to recruitment, on-/off-boarding, employee engagement, and learning and development? How does talent in the company interact and connect to unlock creativity, share new ideas and build real value?
(Source: Building a Well-Networked Organisation by M. Schweer, D. Assimakopoulos, R. Cross and J. Thomas, SMR, December, 2011; and Employee Profiling That Works by L. Brokaw, SMR, January, 2012).