Most Companies Unprepared to Manage Talent Risk
Talent risk is business risk, but only 45% of companies have a process in place to mitigate it
In this unpredictable business environment, the ability to hire and retain skilled employees and manage the risks associated with developing critical and top talent plays a key role in sustainable business success, yet less than half of companies surveyed by the Institute for Corporate Productivity report that their companies have a process in place to address organizational-level talent risk.
As highlighted in a new complimentary i4cp report titled Talent Risk Management, only 45% of companies with 1,000 or more employees report having processes in place to manage talent risk—and of those, nearly half don’t know how to measure the costs and benefits.
Even more alarming is data from companies that struggle to find and keep skilled technical talent:
- Fully 88% of respondents from high-performance organizations say they are concerned about talent risk among technical experts
- Yet 67% of them haven’t taken any major actions to address this risk.
Talent risk management is the process of assessing the organization’s current technical/professional capacity compared to the expected one-to-three-year demand, aligning with which risks are a priority, and then taking mitigating action to level workloads as well as transfer and/or build knowledge and skills to reduce the highest risk. It uses detailed, targeted data to measure and monitor the organization’s talent risk profile, manage the talent pipeline in terms of quantity, skills or capability, and fine-tune the makeup and readiness of the workforce. It means the financial impact of your organization’s risk at any time is known.
In the design of the study, i4cp incorporated insights from Steve Trautman, renowned thought leader and author of an upcoming book on managing talent risk. The report features cases studies on Toyota Financial Services, Western Union, Fluor, Western & Southern Financial Group, and Institute of Nuclear Power.
The report, available to download now, presents four steps—along with actionable recommendations, calculators and templates—for managing risk.
- Assess talent risk
- Prioritize talent risk
- Mitigate talent risk
- Measure and monitor talent risk