Hands and Map

The 5 Essential Talent KPIs Your Company Must Follow



Human capital professionals in high-performance organizations understand that success relies less on the inner workings of talent management processes and more on managing talent to maximize productivity and performance. HR needs to identify the business model components that drive value and then determine what is needed from the workforce to drive organizational performance.

Treating workers as individuals while making evidence-based workforce planning decisions requires that all managers at all organizational levels receive comprehensive training and support to become proficient and effective at managing productivity and performance.

The People-Profit Chain™ from i4cp identified the top five talent KPIs that correlate to market performance and found that for high performance, your company should:


1) Focus on maximizing employee productivity

A supportive workplace and better performance (both individually and organizationally) are likely outcomes when frontline managers spearhead employee development, according to i4cp.

Read: How High-Performance Organizations Maximize Employee Productivity


2) Focus on process improvement

Employee development plans should be consistent and aligned with organizational goals. At the same time, managers should be provided with opportunities to build critical performance management skills.

Read: How High-Performance Organizations Constantly Seek Process Improvements


3) Focus on product/service improvement

The needs of consumers are always changing, so it's important for products and services--and the processes that bring these to market--to evolve as well. Steps to accomplish this include: educating employees about customer needs, rewarding intelligent risk-taking, embracing technology-enabled collaboration/social media tools, and putting in place a formalized or structured idea/innovation review process.

Read: Improve Your Products and Services through Talent Practices


4) Retain talented employees

It's a retention by numbers game--i4cp research suggests a four-part process underlies high-performance: providing career opportunities, ensuring that managers support learning and skills development, allowing greater individual and team autonomy, and creating an environment that enables employees to maximize their potential.

Read: 4 Ways High-Performance Organizations Retain Their Best Employees


5) Focus on cross organizational/group effectiveness

Most organizations have relatively low effectiveness at managing teams to maintain productivity, agility, and innovation. Although there are more virtual, diverse, and geographically dispersed teams doing more complex and mission critical work than ever before, the proper structures are not being put in place to ensure their success. Strong formal and informal communication channels can improve strategy alignment, keep leaders more in touch with the pulse of their organizations, engage employees, and improve the customer experience.

Read: How to Kill a Team in One Easy Step

Curious about how you compare to high-performance organizations? The People-Profit Chain™ Assessment can help you benchmark and improve your talent practices to drive revenue growth, market share, profitability, and customer satisfaction.