Far from being a static discipline, talent management has shown in recent years that it can be as, if not more, dynamic as any other business discipline. In an article in Harvard Business Review by Peter Cappelli and Anna Tavis titled “HR Goes Agile,” the authors argue that HR deserves some recognition for the way it has evolved to adapt to an ever-changing world. Yesterday’s post reviewed Cappelli and Tavis’ support of this argument through the lenses of performance appraisals and coaching. Today, how their argument holds up with respect to the concepts of teams and compensation.
Teams
The authors note that in the old business world, much work was done at the individual level, and employees would report up to their managers, who were responsible for the output of multiple employees. “Now that so many companies are organizing their work project by project,” they write, “their management and talent systems are becoming more team focused. Groups are creating, executing, and revising their goals and tasks with scrums—at the team level, in the moment, to adapt quickly to new information as it comes in.”
Compensation
Most of us are familiar with end-of-the-year bonuses. The problem is that those bonuses, well, come at the end of the year. It can be difficult for an employee who has a great first quarter to connect that performance with a bonus at the end of the year. To remedy this, some companies—like Macy’s, for instance—are using more immediate bonuses to more closely tie the reward to the behavior. This is just one way talent managers are changing how they handle compensation.
Human resources is an ever-evolving function, impacted by the constantly changing nature of the workforce in terms of demographics, employee expectations, and diverse generational views toward the workplace and the employees’ roles in it. So far, we’ve reviewed how Cappelli and Tavis paint a picture of HR as a dynamic function using examples based on performance appraisals, coaching, teams, and compensation. In the next issue, we’ll review the same subject with a focus on recruiting and learning and development.