The overall employee experience must also be closely monitored in order to minimise the costs associated with recruiting and retaining talent.
Boards can support management in looking beyond traditional metrics and focusing instead on the key value drivers of human capital such as the knowledge, skills, and uniquely human creative abilities that employees bring to the business. At the same time, boards can create accountability for how this talent management strategy is executed by aligning executive compensation with these KPIs.
Realigning board’s own structure
Providing effective oversight in the new world of work will likely require boards to review their own composition. Boards should be diverse and inclusive in perspective, with the right range of competencies, experiences, and skills required to support the organisation and its workforce as they evolve.
Broadening and strengthening board involvement in and oversight of talent management will require a quite fundamental rethink of its traditional role in this area. The correct talent management and human capital strategy will help organisations to adapt, innovate, and transform toward new ways of working – boards simply cannot afford not to have oversight of that.
Boards should, therefore, include individuals with in-depth knowledge of human resources and talent management. Agile teaming, diversity and inclusion, digitalisation and technology, flexibility and employment law should be topics for regular discussion. There may also be a need to review the board’s operating model in terms of reporting, risk oversight, management accountability and incentives, and committee delegation.
Five key questions for boards
In today’s highly disruptive information age, winning in the battle for talent will be a strategic imperative for organisations and boards must support and enable this focus. To help Irish organisations navigate a changed business and work environment, boards need to ask the following questions.