Acquiring, hiring, and retaining talent have always been the focus of most business executives when it comes to basic talent management. But in order to achieve optimal levels of success, software development outsourcing companies need highly skilled and engaged employees.
One key element to help a workforce reach greatness? Making sure you align your talent management with the company strategy.It’s also important to pinpoint certain competencies that promote continuous growth and define leadership criteria across different functional areas.
Software development outsourcing companies use talent management as a business strategy to retain their most talented and skilled employees. Similar to employee recognition or involvement, this strategy ensures that you can attract top talent, even when you're competing with other companies.
If your goal is to attract the best talent, a prospective employee should know about your talent management strategy and how it offers an opportunity for career growth. Studies show that the chance for professional advancement and personal skills development are major motivators for employees who take and stay at a certain job.
Below are tips to manage talent within your company in a highly competitive environment.
1. Offer a clear career path.
Any employee’s career path should include a continuing education or training program. Although paths for everyone will vary, prospective employees should be able to see professional advancement opportunities in your company.
Make sure to discuss how employees are expected to develop and advance within the organization. Allow them to seek new opportunities–whether that may be as simple as looking for a promotion or making a lateral move to a different position and tackling new challenges.
2. Align individual goals with company strategy.
An excellent talent management plan should be closely aligned with the overall business needs. With goal alignment, you get an effective management tool that defines the employees’ specific job roles and shows the value your employees provide to the company.
By using goal alignment when engaging employees in their work, you show that there is greater employee participation in your company’s success. This makes them more committed to your organization and motivates them to reach higher levels of work performance.
But before you enjoy that benefit, you need to know how to properly achieve goal alignment. First, you need to clearly communicate your business objectives with the rest of the employees. By giving managers knowledge about the goals of other departments, there is a greater chance of reducing redundancy.
Additionally, goal sharing lets departmental heads to come up with new methods to better support each other. It also enables them to look for areas where they may be working at cross purposes without the intention of doing so. When everyone starts working together toward the same set of goals, strategies can be executed faster and with more adaptability and flexibility.
3. Establish internal talent pools with highly-skilled individuals.
In terms of planning and developing a workforce with the right competencies, strategically-minded businesses don’t have a hard time changing and staying ahead of the curve. They instill strategic insight into their employees, and they help them use that insight to respond to urgent marketplace needs by putting the right employees in place.
An important factor a talent management program should have is an internal talent pool generation. By creating talent pools within a software development outsourcing company, you get a consistent and reliable source of talent and take care of crucial step in the succession process.
With a pool of skilled talent, it’s much easier for a company to get desirable skill sets in a group of employees that is much broader. This leads to increased performance across all functions and levels. By having an internally-cultivated talent pool, you are sure that you’ll always have trained and experienced employees ready to assume leadership positions once they become available.
4. Develop a collaborative atmosphere.
For a company to have a collaborative atmosphere, there has to be an alignment with the metrics for success. Solely basing success on individual performance sends mixed messages to employees. Apart from creating a space for collaboration, software development outsourcing companies should offer tools that facilitate easier collaborative tasks.
Driving better collaboration across your business is not as difficult as it seems. You just need to give employment and management access to rich employee data, including special skills (e.g. language abilities), interests, and experience.
If this information is centrally located, it increases the success rates companywide. It’s easier for employees to tap into a knowledge hub and collaborate, while those in the management can utilize the information to make better talent management decisions and increase workplace performance.
Related Content: How to be a Great Leader to Your Software Development Team
5. Put more value in daily sharing and interpersonal relationships.
Multiple studies have shown that the human brain is composed of special neurons known as “mirror neurons.” These neurons allow us to gain new abilities, such as learning based on imitation, empathy, understanding another one’s mind, and so on. Mirror neurons also make it possible for humans to foster strong interpersonal relationships in the workplace.
If your software development outsourcing company’s objective is to encourage problem-solving, teamwork, and development of innovative ideas centered on collaboration, conditions must be created to enable these teams to be established and strengthened.
Promoting interpersonal relationships can be done with daily sharing, collaboration, mutual aid, joint activities that aim to achieve different goals, and so on. These activities let you constitute a team functional mind that is based on an informational field shared by all the team members.
Final Thoughts
In software development outsourcing, businesses that know the value of strategic talent management outperform their competition. They know that establishing the right workforce is crucial if you want a precise business execution. Beyond gut feelings or generalities, executives utilize diagnostic tools and analytics to obtain detailed reports of performance drivers in the workforce.
When you develop a strategic talent management process, you can create opportunities for collaboration real-time, train and retrain team members quickly according to your business needs, and have better analytics to support the workforce. While implementing some or all of the above strategies may need a shift in focus, they are well within reach even for small to medium-sized companies.
