The age of lifelong employment is over and there is a new phenomenon of Career Laissez faire that is shaping the new talent economy. This change can be best understood through a good appreciation of the new generation and the forces of demand and supply.  Gen Y want to be less governed and want to exercise their own career choice. Businesses on the other hand are becoming more unpredictable and so are people movements within and outside the organization.  Short supply of talent in emerging economies accentuates the challenge further.

Organizations face a continuous challenge of running an ongoing engine to hire, train, develop and transition employees through their talent life cycle. This is true in Support organizations which sets the stage for many professionals to acquire customer facing experiences and then people go on to develop their career in other related work streams.

Talent Staging Explained

In this transitional nature of the young work force, successful businesses build better predictability systems. One such approach is Talent Staging to forecast people movements within and outside the organization and build succession plans and knowledge retention mechanisms.

Talent Staging can be viewed as a three level building block - The first is Attrition Forecasting, followed by Succession Planning and lastly Knowledge Retention.

Stage 1 - Attrition Forecasting is a predictability framework to build intelligence around career aspirations of people and their readiness for a role an employee wants to move into.

Stage 2 - Succession planning around those key resources that have been identified in Stage 1 and build a succession plan for them.

Stage 3 Having predicted and built a succession plan this stage builds around Knowledge Management to plug vital knowledge from moving out.

Talent Staging helps to mitigate business risk around critical and key resources making movements in the organization. It also builds employee trust as good people want to leave a good legacy behind by way of succession planning and knowledge transfer efforts.

Generational Characteristics of the New Workforce

According to workplace experts, younger workers want a more collaborative work environment, less monotonous work, and more work-life balance. An online survey of 320 graduates by Experience, Inc., found an average tenure of 1.6 years at a first full-time job. More than 36 percent stayed less than a year.

Gen Yers are team spirited and like to bond together. Growing up in schools and environments that fostered teamwork, consensus, and collaboration, they crave belonging and fitting in. They also want to have fun and live for the moment, combining working, learning, and playing and that includes socializing and forming friendships with coworkers. Finally, armed with the latest electronic devices, laptops, and cell phones, Gen Yers demand immediate gratification and tend to be impatient when they do not get what they want when they want it. They expect things to happen quickly.

The most overprotected generation in history is the Gen Yers. First wave Gen Yers are currently entering the workforce and will be moving into positions vacated by Xers. Yers are not as concerned about job security as much as finding their dream job. Highly optimistic and confident, they want to succeed immediately in their jobs, and if they don't, they will jump ship and find another job rather than climb the corporate ladder.

Talent Demand and Supply Cycles The huge shortages of good geologists in the 1980's in the oil industry in US and the recent trends in India are not too dissimilar. The high demand for skilled talent apart from boosting wages triggers a key behavioral change .When candidates know they are valued and in short supply, they react by changing their behavior. The new workforce is becoming more empowered, more confident. Employees are changing the way they approach every facet of their working lives, from finding new opportunities, to negotiating for those opportunities, to thinking about their relationship to their job and organizations.

The internet and personal connectivity is enabling access to vast amount of information. There are loads of company data available and is enabling employees use this information to find jobs, apply for them, and learn facts about specific companies. Employees are a lot more empowered and net savvy to shift company loyalties by the click of a button.

Talent Stage 1 - Making Turnover Predictable

In this emerging scenario the need for a Talent Management framework to de-risk attrition challenges is increasing being felt by corporate houses worldwide. More so in Services & Support organizations where more than 45% staff are in the age group of 21 - 30 years as per a SSPA Talent Study Report 2004.

Wall Street investment firms were once plagued by erratic, unplanned turnover among junior analysts. The companies addressed the problem through a planned transitioning of these analysts after a period of three years. Serious modeling of the movement of employees within organizations was based on the work of mathematician Andrei Andreyevich Markov, who developed procedures for understanding the movement of items from one state to another, in this case the movement of individuals from one job to another in a promotion hierarchy. The models calculated the rates of movement according to variables such as company growth rates and the attributes of the individuals in each position, such as average tenure.

PRIYA (Proactive Retention Interventions among Young Associates) is a conceptual model that has evolved from HR practices based on intuitive common sense. The model is based on a simple principle that Managers through the power of observation, intuition and open and transparent conversations can build better insights on people movements in an organization. The tool hunches on two key coordinates - The value to Company and Probability of Leaving Matrix.  

The enablers for building an attrition forecasting model are:

• Open communications about career direction and planning happen between employees and managers.
• Managers playing the role of career coaches. Knowledge of positions their direct reports are aspiring for. Employees openly assess and discuss the skills needed to succeed in aspired roles. Managers have a clear idea of how close the employees are to meeting the skills needs of the aspired job.
• Career development plans exist for each employee. These outline the actions that the employee is going to take to develop skills and gain experiences needed to meet needs of the next job.
• Internal Job Site being updated and kept current.

Talent Stage 2 Succession Planning

Planning for future talent gaps at all levels in the organization is a critical success factor and the importance of that can never undermined. Some organizations, such as the military, have considerable experience and expertise with succession planning. In the event of a personnel change or a loss, the leadership knows exactly who will take over and what his or her role will be from the newest recruit all the way up to the commander-in-chief. What's more, these organizations typically understand the strengths and weaknesses that particular individuals within the organization possess and what is required to fill gaps in skills and competencies. Then they train workers appropriately. In this war of talent, succession planning plays the vital role of providing immediate plug-ins of talent where the need arises.

The success of this planning phase is dependent on the right mapping of those key resources that are on the attrition forecast radar to a potential successor. This pairing up is quite similar to a buddy program for a new employee as it is to potential successors. Outgoing employees typically like to leave a good legacy behind and being identified as a mentor to potential successors cements the bond of trust in the organization.

Good succession plans have a readiness measure of successors and development plans against which time checks are built. Learning cycles and milestones are made available to all resources to plan their development efforts.

Talent Stage 3 Harvesting Knowledge

Attrition is a pain area in any organization that intends to have a knowledge management system in place. Attrition has been discussed as one of the pain areas in the field of KM, because vacancy of a position might be easier to fill in through the proper people-sourcing approaches, but filling in the knowledge gap is not. This is particularly in context of a tough economy where the concept of all-size-fits-all is no longer working, and vacancy of a position by attrition is basically vacancy of a knowledge-base, and this vacancy in knowledge base cannot be filled in by any person.

Retaining knowledge in the organization in the event of attrition of a key resource involves the identification of a burning platform or issue related to knowledge loss and looking for windows of opportunity through champions who are willing to try out knowledge retention approaches.

AQPC (American Productivity and Quality Centre) has categorized three knowledge types that are under attack through attrition. This includes

Cultural knowledge This includes management practices, values, respect for hierarchy, and decision flows.

Historical knowledge this includes the organization journey from the day it was founded till the present

Functional knowledge this includes technical, operational, process and client information.Thus from the attackers point of view, depending on which type of knowledge it needs from the competitor, the recruitment strategies are also sorted out accordingly. It is evident therefore, that attrition rate among junior employees (2-4 yrs) would be higher for the functional knowledge part associated with technical and operational processes. At higher levels, the attrition warfare would be more for gaining historical knowledge (business portfolio changes down the years, etc) and cultural knowledge from the competitors.

From the organizations point of view, the counter strategy is to predict attrition zones which depend on the criticality or type of knowledge that is at important to the organization, and thereby evolve plans to counter loss of human assets from those positions. Once we realize this, the next step is to come out with concrete plans to prevent attrition, which can only be forecast using data and trends available. Some of the worlds best practice organizations have tried capturing data to predict attrition on the long run, and done that in different ways.

This is precisely what is referred to as tacit knowledge, which most organizations today are grappling to capture and retain. This closely pertains to what AQPC referred to as the Cultural and Historical knowledge, in addition to the Individual or Proprietary knowledge that goes off without being codified and migratory, and therefore is never assimilated in the organization as invisible Knowledge.

The problem can be aptly stated through examples from the corporate world itself.One such company which had been experiencing knowledge loss through the large scale retirements through 1990's estimated that it lost around 2000 years of cumulative years of experience as a result of a retirement package offered in 1998 and this exemplifies loss of knowledge due to planned retirements alone here we are talking of corporate SitzKrieg, where an employee may walk into the office any morning to place his resignation letter and walk off with the competitor not just creating a vacancy, but taking some of the most vital knowledge quantum from the company to it's competitor.

The problem is more acute depending on the industry and the demographics of the employees too,as in call centres. Here the knowledge drain is at a different level, and it corresponds more to AQPC's definition of Functional knowledge. Though it is a known fact that high turnover rates drain the cost effectiveness of call centres, unfortunately little is being done about it.

At Pfizer, key stakeholders engage in a carefully orchestrated process that harvests know-how critical to the role going forward, transfers it to the successor, and identifies and addresses any remaining knowledge gaps. The approach also provides the successor a transition road map for accelerating learning and capitalizing on strengths while tending to business.

KCS Knowledge Centred Support is one such framework that is gaining a lot of currency. KCS helps the organization to archive knowledge in real time. KCS practices involve collaborating, sharing, using and improving knowledge in a manner similar to a double loop process. Companies have mastered the solve loop of the process and are now wrestling with the evolve loop. It has become apparent that the evolve processes are not natural acts in our current business structures. Building this double loop is one such method to soak knowledge within the organization even when attrition moves out of the revolving door. Ongoing training efforts and special projects help in transitioning knowledge to others in the organization.

Social networking is emerging as a great platform to share knowledge on an ongoing basis. Blogs and wikis are the knowledge pools that employees are pouring their learning into and also drawing knowledge from.

Summary

In summary, the forces of change are transforming talent behavior and organizations need to adapt to this paradigm shift happening.  Predictive systems to capture talent aspirations and expectations is helping organizations to understand the talent landscape better and plan their succession slates and knowledge retention within .  Developing our talent is the only constant in the world of Talent Management and employee attrition are the variables that we deal with. Managing these variables through organizational methods of forecasting, succession planning and knowledge management will give us the positive returns to build a better organization.