Mr. Cobb

Human Resources, Recruitment & Training

Using Talent Management to Drive Competitive Advantage

By Adam Cobb, Regional Manager, Halogen Software

Hotel executives are looking for new ways to create a competitive advantage in a tight economy and talent management offers a relatively untapped opportunity to maximize operations and focus on delivering outstanding customer service. While other areas of hotel businesses have already been optimized, human resources continues to be challenge.

Human resource management is the most troubling issue of concern to managers and executives in the lodging industry worldwide. A 2008 survey of hotel managers conducted by the Cornell Centre for Hospitality Research identified a common set of shared problems that impede the ability of industry leaders to manage effectively, with human resources issues being at the forefront. Over 60 percent of respondents from six different regions of the world in both general manager and executive positions reported that the human resource issues of attraction, retention, training, and morale were key areas of concern.

Why Goal Management?

As a practice, talent management enables organizations to develop, manage and retain workers and includes functions such as recruiting, learning/training, compensation, employee performance management and succession planning. Talent management is based on the premise that employees are any organization’s most valuable asset. In the hotel industry where customer service is the foundation of success, effective talent management is of particular importance.

A talent management program that includes effective goal management enables organizations to create a true competitive advantage. It aligns the workforce so that employees understand how their goals connect to and support overall organizational goals, enabling the entire team to pull in the same direction. However, goal management is more than simply assigning goals to employees and reviewing performance on an annual or semi-annual basis. It’s about getting every employee to use and develop their talent, skills and experience in a way that drives business results for the organization.

To ensure your hotel creates and implements a goal management strategy with impact, here are four best practices to follow:

Best Practice #1: Goal Alignment

Goal alignment plays a key role in effective goal management. Every employee's role and every employee goal should be tied to the organization's overall strategy, not just to their manager's success. That way you can rationalize conflicting priorities, based on a higher level common goal. Without alignment, everyone is managing their own personal goals in a discrete way. While an individual may be successful in meeting all their personal goals, their work may not in fact contribute to the success of the organization overall; it might even work against it. Goal alignment helps to ensure that everyone's individual contributions move the organization forward in the right direction.

Best Practice #2: Make Goal Management Systematic

For goal management to be successful, it needs to be ingrained in your corporate culture so it keeps everyone's focus on the success of the overall organization, and helps everyone to see themselves as part of a larger team. With systemic goal management, the whole team succeeds or fails; no individual division or department can succeed at the expense of another.

The case for automation of goal management and overall talent management is a compelling one for any hotel. The Cedar Crestone 2010/2011 HR Systems Survey found that more talent management automation is positively correlated on net income growth, sales growth, and sales per employee.

Using an online employee performance management software tool can help by making the larger organizational goals visible to everyone. It also makes it easier to link the personal goals of employees from across the organization to these higher-level objectives in a way that provides meaningful context to the day-to-day work of your employees. From the front desk to housekeeping, everyone can see how they're contributing and the impact of their efforts.

Best Practice #3: Goal Management Should be Ongoing

It is common for employee goals, set as a part of an annual performance review, to be forgotten during the year. Goals get written down on a paper form that is filed away, and only consulted when it's time for the next performance appraisal. An employee's daily work and priorities are then easily affected by the crisis of the day, new requests or changes in direction.

The result: individual, departmental and organizational goals are often not achieved.

Effective goal management is ongoing. It requires regular, continuous dialogue between managers and employees that includes: feedback and coaching, prioritizing, and employee development and career planning. This ongoing dialogue – be it conducted via weekly, monthly or quarterly meetings - helps to ensure that individual and organizational performance stay on track. It also allows everyone to adjust their goals as needed to keep pace with evolving business and market requirements.

In the fast-paced hotel industry, it may seem like there isn’t enough time to conduct performance feedback discussions more than once or twice a year. Again an automated tool that allows managers and employees to keep notes on performance, provide updates on goal status, plan and track important development activities, and get automatic email reminders of performance management tasks, helps to make goal management a part of everyday work life. It also makes it faster and easier for managers and employees to document goals and communicate progress, so they're more likely to keep the dialogue going.

By making goal management an ongoing process, it is possible for you to measure the impact this strategy has on improving customer service scores, income growth, sales growth and more.

Best Practice #4: Encourage SMART Employee Goals

In order to engage employees and foster accountability, hotel organizations need to have their employees set SMART goals - specific, measurable, achievable, results-oriented and time-bound.

While SMART goals are generally recognized as a performance management best practice, writing them is not easy. It takes some practice, but especially vigilance, to ensure that an employee's goals are effective. When managers and employees know how to write SMART goals, it helps take the subjectivity out of goal setting, and ensures they have a shared set of expectations. The real aim is to specify the who, what, where, when and why for the goal and ensure shared understanding and expectations. All of these elements are critical for helping align goals throughout your organization. Remember, the ultimate purpose is always to help the employee, and by extension, the organization, succeed.

Well-executed goal management as part of an overall talent management program offers hotel executives an opportunity to not only attract and retain high-performing employees, but to focus on outcomes that have the greatest impact on their business, and ultimately enable the organization to become more competitive.

As regional manager at Halogen Software, and a certified Human Capital Strategist, Adam Cobb has worked directly with hundreds of human resources professionals to plan and implement integrated talent management systems in support of their organizations’ strategic plans. With more than a decade of software solutions experience, Mr. Cobb applies his expertise in performance management, succession planning, pay for performance and performance based learning solutions to help Halogen’s clients build solid business cases for investing in automated talent management systems. Mr. Cobb can be contacted at 613-270-1011 x 4110 or acobb@halogensoftware.com Extended Bio...

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