Talent Management - November 2008 - (Page 45)

Succession Planning continued from page 39 Pitfall No. 5: F ailing to Implement Gap-Closing Interventions The most important element of workforce planning is implementation of a plan to resolve the gap between current workforce (supply) and future needs (demand). Too often, the workforce plan becomes an academic exercise, another HR activity or a document that grows dusty on a shelf. Organizations that start too big exhaust themselves (See Pitfall No. 3.) and often do not even develop strategies. Other organizations develop strategies but do not move to the next step to create and implement an action plan. In other instances, HR develops strategies without input from the business (See Pitfall No. 1.), and the necessary managerial buy-in does not exist. To avoid this pitfall, each business unit should have an owner accountable for seeing the plan implemented and outline of speciﬁc tactics, time frames, budget, check-in dates and, most importantly, a set of metrics for monitoring progress. The original workforce planning team should be briefed periodically to evaluate the success of the strategies and to make adjustments where necessary. Pitfall No. 6: Planning Without the Right Skills Workforce planning is a business process that requires a unique blend of skills and capabilities. At the core of workforce planning is the business strategy, so the core capability of a successful workforce planner must be business acumen. Peter Howes, CEO of Infohrm, has been conducting workforce planning for more than 30 years and has identiﬁed speciﬁc competencies as the most important for workforce planners (See Figure 4, p. 38.). Finding someone with these attributes can be difﬁcult — and ﬁnding someone who has these skills and previous workforce planning experience can be even harder. This is the primary reason companies get started with outside consultants, who train HR and the business in workforce planning, provide technology and support the ﬁrst few iterations. Once the process is in motion, the expertise will develop internally, and companies usually ﬁnd they can successfully manage the process independently. Workforce planning will continue to grow as a critical element of business success. It will be important for workforce planners to understand how the process works, how to demonstrate the impact and how to avoid the common missteps. Doing so will enable organizations to focus on what really matters: having the right people, in the right place, at the right time, at the right price to execute business strategy. Paige Menge is manager of consulting services, Nick Garbis is a senior consultant and Mick Collins is a director at Infohrm, a workforce solutions provider. They can be reached at editor@talentmgt.com. Insight continued from page 41 Right now, the most important piece we have in place — and we’re continuing to expand — is our pre-employment assessments. We’re looking for characteristics that successful people at Dollar Tree demonstrate, but we’re also looking for cultural ﬁt in our pre-employment assessments. Also, we’ve identiﬁed competencies that our best store managers embody, for example, and we’ve designed our compensation program around those competencies. For example, on a monthly basis, we have bonus potential that’s tied to achieving key metrics. We know our best and brightest store managers have a tremendous desire to succeed and to attain goals. So we screen for that, we designed a compensation program around it, and we reward for that. Kaufman: We’re just ﬁnishing our ﬁrst full year of automating our performance management system. Now, instead of looking at 35,000 individual manual performance appraisals, we have a system where we can look at groups and divisions and audiences, but we know what our key metrics are in terms of organizational performance. We’re a retail organization, so sales, inventory turns [and] proﬁtability are important metrics. Our performance-appraisal process is designed to reward individual associates who drive corporate success. For example, people are rewarded for hitting sales goals, margin goals [and] inventory turn goals. So we can measure corporate performance, divisional performance and our individual performance. How has your performance management and talent management activity contributed to Dollar Tree’s bottom line? Again, because we’re just coming off of our ﬁrst year of automation, I would say that in past years we’ve been able to demonstrate increased performance at the sales margin and turn level. At the store level, we’ve been able to decrease turnover, which is another important component at the retail and the hourly associate level, particularly since the majority of our folks will be part time. In a retail organization, turnover in excess of 100 percent would not be unusual, but we look at turnover, especially at our store manager and associate managers. We wouldn’t accept anything close to that. One of the key components that’s been really important for us having been successful and anticipating success going forward is identifying with key strategic vendors relative to automation. We work very closely both with Kenexa and Softscape and attribute a lot of our success and progress over the last three years to selecting the right strategic vendors to help automate our talent management approach. TM: Kaufman: How do you measure workforce performance at Dollar Tree? TM: Kaufman: November 2008 talent management magazine www.talentmgt.com 45 http://www.talentmgt.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Talent Management - November 2008

Talent Management - November 2008 Editor’s Letter Contents Human Performance Leading Edge Learning Connections Recruitment & Retention Assessment & Evaluation Compensation & Benefits Performance Management Learning & Development Succession Planning Insight Dashboard Application Advertisers’ Index Editorial Resources Full Potential

Talent Management - November 2008

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