Talent Management - December 2008 - (Page 55)

An organization’s size doesn’t limit its talent management efforts. For instance, diversiﬁed property management organization Harbor Group Management Co. — which manages shopping centers, ofﬁce buildings and multifamily residential properties throughout the United States — has some of the same performance management concerns for its roughly 500 employees as an organization 10 times that size. These concerns include how to keep employees challenged, engaged and simultaneously build enough opportunities for them to grow into. The company also is concerned with maximizing and promoting performance. Ronald Bates, former vice president of human resources at Harbor Group Management Co., said the company chose to make talent management part of its mission not only to attract and retain the best employees but to promote a culture that values integrity and success. Accelerating employee performance is one of the best ways to enable organization success, and that meant the organization had to limit the time spent on its semiannual review process. To develop consistent, enterprise-wide processes emphasizing employee development and rewarding performance, Harbor automated its performance management system, signiﬁcantly reducing the time needed for semiannual reviews. “The company has always taken performance management very, very seriously,” Bates said. “When I ﬁrst came aboard, we had a paper system. As the company grew and became more diverse geographically, it became harder to manage. We made the decision to invest in performance management software that would allow us to improve the workﬂow of employee assessments and the product delivered to the employee through the review.” The change allowed Harbor to design performance reviews for each of its job families using competencies and performance measures inherent to each position. Revised forms kept managers focused on the goals and objectives agreed to by employees and managers, as well as the traits necessary to meet those objectives. As a result, Bates said some of the company’s managers can spend more time with each employee and do a better job coaching and mentoring. As part of the semiannual review process, Bates prepared a report and met with the company’s partners to discuss the company’s talent landscape. Before the performance management system was automated, the process took some 135 hours, which included collecting the necessary forms, coaching managers and ﬁnally preparing the report and getting ready for the partner meeting. “It was horrendous, and I had to face that in six more months,” Bates said. “We talked about almost everyone, the high performers, folks that are meeting expectations and, of course, what are the plans for the folks who are not meeting expectations? When you look at the paper form, the standard deviation between a highly ranked employee and a lowly ranked employee was terrible. The new system narrowed standard deviation down to a perfect bell-shaped curve — plus, it took me 16 hours to do.” One of the most signiﬁcant challenges to effective talent management at Harbor is turnover. Bates said this is partly the nature of the beast in the real estate industry, which had turnover at 49 percent, according to the last market study. That ﬁgure is lower at Harbor, around 30 percent, but it still merits notice. “Part of the problem is Harbor buys and sells real estate all the time. We might ﬁnd a superior performing employee, train them really well and get them ready for that next level of opportunity only to sell the property in 30 to 36 months,” he explained. “They may not be willing to relocate to a property where we can use their skills.” Despite the mobile nature of the workforce, Bates said Harbor emphasizes professional development opportunities in hope that talent may cross the company’s path again in a particular region or geographic area. “Harbor is really trying to be a learning organization, and it stretches from the folks who take care of the grounds,” he said. Automating the company’s performance management process also automated its pay-for-performance system, which enabled talent managers to make easier connections between development, performance and compensation. “When we ﬁrst buy a property we’d sit down with the property manager and tell him what the investment objectives are. He or she is very familiar with where they need to get with occupancy to improve the property, how to improve it and how much money to spend doing that. “The regional manager will then work through goals and objectives getting the property manager set up so they know what to do in the ﬁrst quarter and where they have to wind up in the ﬁrst year. Once employees are on-board, it’s getting set into the performance review process and continually measuring performance. “For an apartment community, the community manager makes a nice base salary. Harbor tries to be very competitive on the base salary side, but the company tries to exceed the market on the incentive side: the pay for performance,” Bates said. December 2008 talent management magazine www.talentmgt.com 55 http://www.talentmgt.com

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

Talent Management - December 2008 Editor's Letter Contents Human Performance Leading Edge Foundations Recruitment & Retention Assessment & Evaluation Compensation & Benefits Performance Management Learning & Development Succession Planning Insight Dashboard Application Advertiser's Index Editorial Resources Full Potential

Talent Management - December 2008

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