Organizational Culture and Talent Management

Organizations recognize the power of an engaged workforce in delivering superior business performance and talent outcomes. As a result, most organizations undertake some sort of periodic workforce engagement survey. Leading organizations recognize that the survey should enable the organization to implement strategy and achieve real and lasting changes.

Numerous studies consistently show that employees who are engaged are more likely to perform well on the job, stay with the organization, help their coworkers, and advocate for the organization. Work engagement and organizational commitment have been shown to have the strongest impact on key talent outcomes such as employee performance, retention, and organizational performance. Work engagement is a psychological state at work in which people are focused and dedicated, and experience energy and enthusiasm from the work they do.

Organizational commitment is an attachment to and involvement in one’s organization. Thus, measuring both addresses two key aspects of talent management: ensuring that employees are doing good work, and plan to stay. Organizations may want to measure other employee attitudes, such as commitment to one’s team, job satisfaction, or trust in management, but they should be scored separately from work engagement and organizational commitment. Employee engagement needs to be measured with precision, and focused on engagement with the work itself as well as commitment to the organization.

In addition to understanding the workforce conditions that can be leveraged to improve engagement, organizations can now focus on the parts of the organization where there is the largest gap between current and potential engagement. Targeted, timely, data-based interventions that take into account the characteristics of your workforce are critical.