IBM Talent Management - Case Study Example

TALENT MANAGEMENT By: + IBM Talent Management Talent management AsLewis & Heckman (2006) posit, international companies are at the verge of risks facing as a result of inadequate talented staff in their field of activities. There has been a consistent lack of talented global staff, and as a result, most companies have shown continuous dedication in talent acquisition, management and retention. Companies have reported consistent shortages of talented staff in their workplaces, leading to decrease in productivity levels. Most significantly, the element of diverse cultures in the operational regions limit the ability of the companies to venture well and hunt for the talents they so need desperately in ad ideal way. The human resource department have had a great challenge in establishing the right talents to pick especially when it comes to recruitment, selection, and on placement. They spend a great amount of their time in searching for the ideal talents to fill the vacant positions. Organizational performance and productivity entirely relies on the employees’ dedication and contribution. The increasing nature of globalization and advanced technology is a contributing factor to the new dimension of global talent management. In talent management, firms anticipate their human resource needs, and set up plans to meeting the needs. The aspect of talent management necessitates a holistic approach to solve the human resource issues once and for all. The firm has to put across mechanisms to addressing the root cause of the problem, which included talent searching, improvement and retaining and on boarding. All the decisions made veers off to shape the future performance of the firm (Stahl et al. 2012). The decisions set to establish the path to be followed. Inclusion of diversity is imperative. The utmost success is also dependent on other factors such as gender mix and collaboration. Gender inclusion aids in achievement of business goals through innovativeness promotion, collaboration acts to enable technology usage. Many firms have diversified their operations in different countries. Therefore, companies have a great need to ensure that they balance the human resource team in their area of jurisdiction, while at the same time ensuring ideal implementation of the long term and short-term necessities pertaining to the objectives set. In essence, the role of the Global management is to create an ideal environment whet the best employees will be attracted, selected, developed and retained (Schuler et al. 2011). In all this, there is consideration of the different operational policies and protocols in the countries within the level of jurisdiction. This essay will analyse the challenges facing the International Business Machines Corporation with relation to Global Talent Management and provide recommendations to such limitations. Case Analysis Thomas Watson founded IBM in 1911. The founder came up with immense policies that would see the success of the company within a short time. Such policies encompass wearing of suits by all salespeople, among other strict principles and values. The company is proud of its success in informational technology progression, especially with the famous IBM personal computing that sold beyond the forecasts that were made. The firm was among the best profit making firms in early 1990’s, winning classic confidence of the Americans as the best and most successful source of computing solutions. However, the trend did change quickly, and it began incurring huge losses and debts. Most critics refer to the company as being behind the times and not keen to focus on the client demands. The progress of the company is a clear indicator that the company needed special attention to revert to its previous success. Even as by 2013, the firm had not regained its lost glory (Chi et al. 2011). There are several characteristics of IBM highlighting their weakness in deployment, tracking, and development of their workforce. The overhauling of the whole workforce system is deemed to improve the performance of the organization. First, there was low utilization rate of talents and mentoring of the same. The shortage of skilled and talented workforce is a global phenomenon that has affected the firm immensely. It has affected the top leadership positions in the firm, leading to decreases performance and proceeds. The resulting evidence is that the firm has many slots that need to be filled at any one moment, which is an indicator of great shortage of skilled personnel. Furthermore, there was more employed people without clearly assigned roles to work on, hence at most times they were not working. Such analysis reveals that there was a lot of unnecessary workforce at the bench. The finance and human resource department did not advise accordingly, in a bid to eliminate the unnecessary labour and fill in the sections demanding specific skills (Garrow & Hirsh 2008). The top managerial group did an intense research and found out that did exist bottlenecks in the process of service delivery. They were problems emanating from the process of demand and supply of the commodities and services. They had to make an urgent march between their available talents and needs for the sake of production sustainability. The idea implementation could see a decline in the structure of all the costs incurred in production and remuneration, as well as an escalation in the competitive advantage (Srinivasan 2011) . Essentially, they decided to lay out a talent supply chain that would undergo constant monitoring and evaluation. The specified bottlenecks were the root cause of dissatisfaction among the clients and poor market penetration. IBM had a historic trend of treating their loyal clients with great sensitivity and concern, epitomizing on the ethics and primary concerns, rather than tools of work. The optimization of their consistent culture was to lean and work consistently on their set of beliefs and philosophies. The firm had one principle of lifetime employment. However, the top leaders did fail to utilize the stance to ensure that all the staff s had received intense training and were well equipped to handle any intrinsic task. Despite their innovative and diligent attitude, the top managerial team missed so many opportunities, or else, they were at lack of vital information to aid them in such completion. They did fail to cut the operational costs through reduction of labour that was unnecessary to them. The managers heading different departments were experts and fully qualified but were uncertain on the process to encounter challenges emanating from the global business. They did fail to integrate the workforce and shortcomings that they faced daily. There was insufficient communication between leaders in different nations. Additionally, what was done in each country was different, and activities were disintegrated. One could not borrow ideas from another firm. Most primarily, there was a disconnection and disjointed talent supply process. They failed to supply the human resource network in the capacities of employees, contractor and applicants. The three pools were managed as one pool, which led to eventual failure. The coordination between the decision makers was weak, leading to poor coordination and hiring of unnecessary work force. Recommendations There are several global talent management drivers that if adopted can change the operational path of BIM. The divers have a close connection to the patterns of development, retention, attraction and mobilization of the skilled personnel in any firm. The key drivers to adoption of the program are evident as a result of shortage of talented staff members, a change in the target market demographics diverse attitude to work and work structure, and differences in cultural patterns. IBH has a global problem, and shortage of skilled labour is evident. The human resource department have had difficulties matching the vacancy with the appropriate skills. Therefore, to remain vigorous and relevant in the economic field, BMI should adopt strict and vigorous recruitment measures a systematic approach to management of global talents. They include a workforce planning team should be available to predict and determine the trends in future workforce planning. Simplification of the migration and immigration processes also enriches any talent. It eliminate the trends of brain drain, as it does encourage all the staffs to work at home Moreover, it escalates the levels of skills to the future and current employees. Further, it acts as a chance for talents development, which fosters creativity and innovation in the organization leading to a mix of professionals with diverse skills. The change in demographic factors was an ideology that led to the shrinking of the skills in the company. Essentially, the employees in developed countries are old and set to retire going along with their rich skills. Such changes ultimately lead to creation of a generation of employees. They include generation X, millennial, baby boomers and generation Y.it was hence a great challenge to ensure consistent coordination of management of both young and old generation of employees. The mature workers are set to work and retire, leaving along with them rich knowledge in company production systems. Consequently, the firm ought to outline measures that will ensure all the soon to retire workers transfers vital knowledge and skills to the baby boomers (Swailes 2013). Furthermore, there should exist distinct policies that dictates and protects the stereotypical attitude towards the old and retiring workers. There should be no bias or mistreatment, and teamwork should be the order of the day. To ensure that the company maximize the productivity of the millennial workers, IBM should create a good environment for their working progress. Such an environment may encompass encouragement to progress in their careers and studies, electronic communication rather than face to face, balancing their working sessions with other lifestyle related activities such as entertainment, insist on involvement in corporate social responsibility and involvement in oversea work exchange programs. Concisely, the fir should concentrate more on this group of workers, as they possess less skills and motivation to work. Their location is mostly in developing countries. Country culture remains the epitome of any business success, especially where the Department of Labour has a set or outlined guidelines regarding the policies and practises and how they do influence the employee performance and behaviour at various levels. IBM experience diverging cultural policies in their countries of operations. Human resources management is different. The policies are also diverse. Managing talent may be a new concept in certain countries. Therefore, IBM has to dig deep and ensure that the human resource manager demonstrates awareness of the program and has implemented the same in his area of jurisdiction. One essential aspect is that similar organizations demonstrate competition for a similar trained pool of trainees. Imitation is possible from the new companies, as data regarding their human resource management practises if available. Any organization tends to undergo various stages of growth and development. Precisely, most organizational management teams tends to take more time in prediction of the rate of growth, hence a confusion in talent search and management to ease the transition process into the levels of growth. The various stages do demand specific staffing and capital demands. Leaders must remain proactive enough to foresee the human capital problems that my face the organizations. Action plan For successful talent management in IBM, there needs to be a talent management protocol deemed to be followed by the human resource department. Such a protocol is systematic and incorporates and integrates all the activities included in staff development processes. Eventually, there is maximization of the staff skills and capacity. Therefore, the action will encompass a four stage plan with inclusion of recruitment, selection, talents placement and eventual succession. Step 1 The stage entails recruitment activities. The organization recruits new employee’s from those aspiring to join the organization. The advertisement of the positions should highlight the current and future job descriptions and demands. Training is mandatory to gain re-orientation to their new vacancies. Step 2 The second step assumes that the fresh employees are ready to take up their tasks, and demonstrate awareness of their specific duties. Additionally, they can work on their own and escalate the productivity of the firm. The departmental head should asses the employees skills, then dipped into the talent tool. Step 3 Formation of the talent pool is the excellent idea the firm can make. It is the first step to demonstrate the commitment of the organization towards solving the human resource activities problems. Step 4 The manger should filter the talents, and provide in-service training. Sometimes, in the recruitment processes, ordeal situations may arise, such as employee retention temporal and permanent employment. Successional plans should be in place to avoid any form of a vacuum that may emanate from retirements. The company should resort to firing as the last option to elimination of unnecessary staff members in the organization. Actually, it acts as a clear demonstration of errors in recruitment process, together with wasted resources used during recruitment process, development, indoctrination and compensations. Retirements should be controlled, policies should be available to dictate the process of job exit, as well as promotion considerations. Conclusion Talent management leads to an escalation in career progression and development. The human resource growth in any organization takes a low and steady process. It is a challenging task, with controllable and anticipatory issues. Concisely, the growing employee number poses a challenge in the process management. The human resource department should appreciate these challenges, and come up with the plans to counteract them. Leadership and management is the epitome of talent management, with close provision of easy diagnosis and incorporation into the strategic plan of the firm. Consequently, all that is necessary for ideal growth of IBM. All strategies should be adopted ideally. Reference list Chi, C. et al., 2011. Smarter Social Collaboration at IBM Research. In Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work - CSCW ’11. pp. 159–166. Garrow, V. & Hirsh, W., 2008. Talent Management: Issues of Focus and Fit. Public Personnel Management, 37, pp.389–402. Lewis, R.E. & Heckman, R.J., 2006. Talent management: A critical review. Human Resource Management Review, 16, pp.139–154. Schuler, R.S., Jackson, S.E. & Tarique, I., 2011. Global talent management and global talent challenges: Strategic opportunities for IHRM. Journal of World Business, 46, pp.506–516. Srinivasan, M.S., 2011. An integral approach to talent management. XIMB Journal of Management, 8, pp.81–90. Stahl, G.K. et al., 2012. Six Principles of Effective Global Talent Management. MIT Sloan Management Review, 53, pp.25–32. Swailes, S., 2013. The ethics of talent management. Business Ethics, 22, pp.32–46. Read More