TM - August 2007 - (Page 32) recruitment & retention assessment & evaluation compensation & benefits performance management learning & development succession planning [performance management]by Lisa Rummler and Brian Summerfield From Labor to T alent: Performance Management Lessons from Asia and Europe There’s a connection between a nation’s perception of its workforce and the sophistication of its employers’ performance management programs. Where labor is cheap, workers are merely units of labor. As the workforce develops and the pool of candidates shrinks, employers are forced to take a talentmanagement approach to stay competitive. Within Asia, organizations in highly developed countries are implementing performance management programs to maintain and increase efficiency across the enterprise, said David Baxter, Worldwide ERC Workforce mobility expert and executive director of The Urban Futures Institute. “Firms throughout Asia are going to have to start looking at workers as talent rather than as units of labor, and Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have kind of moved into that frame,” he said. “Human resources management in those countries is about getting more output per worker, and so it’s about managing talent and ‘How do you retain your workers? How do you motivate them? How do you get them to do more? How do you bring in technology to replace them?’ For the last 20 years, performance management has been what you had to do in Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong.” August 2007 changing its focus on workers from units of labor to talent, something India has not really started to tackle. “India sits even further back,” he said. “We talk about India as being high-tech, but that’s a very, very small part of the labor force in India.” Another country that has not made the leap from labor to talent is Russia, Baxter said. “The people of Russia are totally disconnected from the economy,” he said. “Russia is increasingly behaving like an OPEC country rather than a manufacturing country. Russia doesn’t invest in human capital.” To combat this phenomenon and move up the valueadd chain, Baxter said, development is critical. “There’s always going to be a country where labor’s cheaper, so at some point, countries are absolutely compelled to say, ‘We have to regard workers as tal- Baxter said China is beginning to grapple with 32 talent management magazine www.TalentMgt.com http://www.TalentMgt.com
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