Looking for Future Leaders? Try Optimizing Your Workforce Today

How engaged are your employees? Are they excited about their jobs and demonstrate this enthusiasm when interacting with customers? Are they constantly looking for new challenges and putting all of their effort into achieving new goals? If these questions seem foreign to you, it may be time to dig into workforce optimization solutions that focus on employee engagement.

Conversations about engagement tend to focus on the customer, as their satisfaction greatly impacts the bottom line. Only looking to this audience, however, ignores the potential you have within the employee base. Happy employees help to generate happy customers, and those employees with a long-term focus in mind are more likely to be engaged.

A recent post on Forbes examined the findings of the “High-Impact Succession Management: Key Findings and Maturity Model” study from Bersin by Deloitte (News - Alert). A key finding from this study shows that organizations employing sophisticated processes for identifying successor candidates to fill key roles in leadership realize significant employee retention and engagement gains over those that fail to make investments in this area.

In fact, high-performing organizations are pushing formal talent and planning for succession further into the business so as to touch all roles. Such a focus within workforce optimization is playing a critical role in the day-to-day operations. These organizations are closing the leadership gap and realizing even greater gains from engaged employees. Performance feedback is regularly provided to employees who also receive alerts on potential future opportunities within the organization.  

It’s not uncommon for employees – especially those of the younger generation – to leave a company if they feel there is no opportunity for advancement or growth. When employees are made to feel as though they are highly valued members of the organization, recognized for their contributions and invested in by their employers, they have more than one good reason to stick with the company for at least the mid-term.

Key findings from this research indicate that broad communication regarding available programs is a top performance driver within succession management. Among organizations that are falling short in these areas, they aren’t identifying critical roles, leaders are not being held accountable for developing successors and key talent is not being identified to fill key roles. Human resources plays an important part in this approach overall, helping companies identify opportunities within the employee base through proven strategies.

Companies like NICE help in the process by providing workforce optimization solutions that better equip companies to identify their top performers through organized processes. Those who take to the corporate culture, receive the feedback they need and become more engaged in their role are more likely to stand out as future leaders.