Twenty per cent of organisations in India are at the ‘foundational’ maturity level of talent health. What does this mean? It means that these organisations are focused on the building blocks of talent programmes and are managing to fulfil the basic talent needs of their business and employees. For those who are new to the term, ‘foundational’ talent programmes are impromptu in nature and compliance driven. The processes in place may be manual and far from formal. Foundational talent programmes are potentially interested in the role skills can play in talent management across the organisation, but they are yet to prioritise the identification of skills that exist or are required. The human resource (HR) departments in such establishments give more importance and weightage to basic and essential HR programmes such as hiring and compliance.
Only one per cent of organisations in India are at the transformative level of maturity. In other words, these establishments have created talent programmes that promote a highly self-driven learning culture and have adopted skills as a common language across the organisation. They identify, analyse and leverage skills to support workforce planning and make strategic business decisions. Transformative talent programmes implement automated processes that are integrated with people, job roles and skills data to inform workforce decisions. The HR and talent leaders in such organisations are looked up to as strategic partners and their teams facilitate achievement of organisational and business outcomes.
As per the Cornerstone Talent Health Index India Report, 38 per cent of organisations in the country are in the sophisticated level of talent health, while 41 per cent are in the administrative level. That means, 38 per cent of the organisations have really advanced in terms of creating a strategic talent programme and have put in place processes and adopted tools to drive optimisation.
Sophisticated talent programmes promote a strong learning culture and use certain analytics to fulfil the developmental requirements of their employees. These organisations have begun speaking the language of skills across the business to spot the skills gaps, yet, they lack skills data to make strategic workforce decisions. Talent programmes at the sophisticated level of maturity consist of automated processes. The chief learning officers and the chief HR officers of such organisations are looked up to as strategic business partners. Such organisations make valuable investments in talent in a democratic manner.
Organisations at the administrative level of maturity in talent health have already laid down the foundation for their talent programmes and are now looking at strategic initiatives that are becoming successful. Administrative talent programmes are not limited to compliance but go on to offer some skill-building opportunities for employees. However, skills have yet to become a common language across the organisation. While the programmes and processes within administrative talent are often manual, the process of automating them has already begun. The HR departments in such organisations are well on their way to becoming strategic partners for the business, despite the majority of the budget decisions being taken top-down.
Globally, the average talent health index (THI) score is 88.1, while for India the score is 82.9! Spain has amonst the highest scores, of 88.9, followed by the UK at 87.6, Germany at 86.9, and Australia and N Zealand at 86.7. Japan has a THI score of 86, while Singapore and Hong Kong have a score of 85.4 and France of 84.
The seven dimensions of talent health, as per the Cornerstone report are: talent reporting, data and analytics; culture and technology; skills strategy; learning and development; content strategy; performance management; talent mobility
The three weakest dimensions for organisations in India are talent reporting, data and analytics, followed by learning and development, and finally, technology and culture.