Talent management is the process of identifying, selecting, developing and retaining high-potential talented employees within your organisation. When done in a practical and discussion oriented way, it can provide significant, tangible business and performance benefits. Get this right and you can take your restaurant from good to great. It’s that important. Talent management can be used by your organisation to better understand the skills and potential of employees, allowing them to make decisions on where to focus their training, development and retention efforts. The key to this process is simplicity. Therefore, a simple talent management matrix should be used to position employees based on their level of overall performance and perceived future potential.
Talent management initiatives need to be driven and owned by your leadership team in a consistent and accountable way. It will really benefit employees if adopted as a regular quarterly management discussion tool, with development actions taken because of these discussions. There are many benefits to focusing on talent management, including having a strong handle on current employees from a performance and potential perspective. There is also an improved ability to make more strategic workforce decisions to support business growth plans and activities and being able to focus training efforts on where the biggest impact will be made both for the identified ‘talent’ and the business overall.
Focusing on your high-potential (HIPO) employees is important because they have the greatest impact on your restaurant’s tangible outcomes and patron experience. There are many benefits to doing this, including having a strong handle on current employees from a performance and potential perspective. There is also an improved ability to make more strategic workforce decisions to support business growth plans and activities and being able to focus training efforts on where the biggest impact will be made both for the identified ‘talent’ and the business overall. Your training and development activities should be very focused on your HIPO employees contributing to the high-impact activities for and within your restaurant that are critical for your organisation to be successful in the future.
Essentially, your company’s talent depth can be determined by the degree to which each employee has the potential to undertake a greater depth and breadth of responsibilities, workload and leadership accountabilities in the future. When you think about your current workforce composition and assess everyone based on the HIPO criteria provided in this article, what does your talent depth look like? Do you have the required blend of skills, experiences, attitude, leadership and teamwork which will enable your company to achieve sustainable success.
If you are scratching your head and are a tad concerned about the talent depth in your current workforce, be assured that this is part of a broader Australian challenge. This is even harder if you are on the hunt for decent, reliable and trustworthy Apprentices in the Australian trade sector. According to the Australian Financial Review, this issue is a broader systemic challenge that goes to the heart of talent attraction at the very early stages of career attraction. “Australia’s reputation for provision of apprenticeships has slumped heavily, according to a global business school. The IMD World Talent Ranking shows Australia has slipped to No.51 on its global scale for implementation of apprenticeships, down from 22 in 2016”.
The same can be said for the cafes and restaurants. According to Nation’s Restaurant News, in the hospitality sector “we’re over-managed and under-led. We’re better at training than we are at recruiting, so we hurry-hire the wrong people and hope training will fix them – but there’s no right way to develop the wrong person. We’re better at hiring than we are at retention, so we churn employees that should be kept and keep employees that should be churned.” They go on to provide some helpful advice when it comes to talent management: “Employee retention is a maze in which most businesses take the wrong turn before even learning to walk. Rethink the process your company uses to recruit, hire and retain team members. Now is the time to apply the same importance and resources to employee acquisition and retention as we do for food safety. Don’t settle for good. What makes teams good won’t always make them great.”
