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English|Are Those Innovative Talent Management Practices Really Working?( 三 )


This is especially important at a time when many industries are facing transformation. Take the automotive industry for example, since the competition slowly shifts from hardware engineering to software development, there is a natural change of the talent structure with different skill sets. The proactive employees would certainly take the chance to quickly adapt and develop other skills to meet the needs. This change is actually happening in every industry. According to a study, there will be a billion jobs, approximately 1/3 of the world’s workforce, which will be transformed by 2030 thanks to the technologies like automation and AI. Offering the learning opportunity is facilitating the employee to build a more sustainable career path.
The intention is beautiful, but the self-learning scheme hardly reaches its full potential on an organizational level. Since the scheme is completely autonomous, there are employees that have never taken any course, and many others have difficulties taking all the courses they want due to the tight schedule and heavy workload.
2. Peer learning
A culture of peer learning is what I have found in almost every tech company that I have come across, the easiest practice is internal sharing, given the diversified expertise and experiences of each employee. The sharing could be on professional topics like venture investment process, market research clustering, basics of python, or rather casual topics like funny mobile game privately developed, the experience of climbing Everest, the culture of Ramadan…this practice helps the employees to easily get to know their colleagues, more engaged with the team, and for an organization to identify talent needed for secondments.
Another type of peer learning has mentoring concept implanted. This mentorship program can be further divided into two different types: one is for skill development, the other is for career development. For the former, the employees can take any colleague within the organization as a temporary mentor for the skills that they intend to develop, like graphic design or online marketing. For the latter,  it is more systematically have one mentor guiding one or more talents on a long-term basis. The mentor will need to build trust with the mentee, understand their motivation and work satisfaction through open communication and provide advice or resources for their further career development. The mentors are normally the senior members of the company, and not necessarily the direct reporting line or manager of the employee.
Although there are indeed limitations from of mentor capability and scientificity for the individual match, I have still got a lot more positive feedback on long-term mentoring practice: ‘super helpful to have someone senior to talk with when I am struggling with my team problem’; ‘I feel my career goals are recognized regardless of my current tasks’; ‘I was provided with many useful resources for the skills that I needed’; ‘It provides me with a different perspective from different working functions’. Nevertheless, implementing this practice has a super high requirement of a trust culture within the organization. You might assume no one would choose their direct manager as their personal mentor to avoid conflict of interest, as they might touch sensitive topics or build a negative impression while being completely honest. But interesting enough, the managers with strong charisma are the most popular mentor choice for their team members.
3. Feedback system
Further from constant personal development, a fair and structured feedback system is the key to completing the cycle and the chain to direct ongoing career paths. It is easy to understand if you ever worked in a scrum team, the feedback follows the same logic of retrospective: celebrate the achievement, learn from the failure, and improve time and times again.
Many companies have initiated semi-annual or annual performance review sessions. What I want to point out is, the review can play a positive role only if it’s well-rounded and unbiased. It should neither solely be based on business performance nor only come from 1 or 2 individuals. A good practice is 360 performance review, which allows a group of coworkers who have worked together with you to provide both quantitative and qualitative reviews on different skills from communication, creativity, teamwork to leadership and company value alignment. Every employee will receive an aggregated score and detailed comments on every category of skills. This review offers rather objective insights into an individual’s strength as well the knowledge gaps, professional weaknesses and personal challenges. Is it painful to receive negative feedback? of course! But the more objective the feedback is, the less painful people will emotionally feel, and on contrary, the more useful it will be for your personal development. At least I have personally improved a lot in this way.

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