Recruitment often revolves around the job content and tasks related to the position. This is crucial for both the company and the candidate. As a company, you often have a need to have work done and tasks accomplished. As a candidate, you seek a job with exciting tasks and job areas where you can use and develop your skills.
When a candidate becomes an employee and has his first day at work, the new employee wants to contribute with his skills and become an important member of the team. This is, of course, in the company’s interest as well, since you recruited with the need to have certain tasks completed. Therefore, competence development and performance are central and important in your onboarding process. The methods to get employees to perform can vary and depend on factors such as the job, the job content, the company’s organization, and the employee profile. Talent environments is a method to provide new hires with a good foundation for success in the job.
WHAT IS A TALENT ENVIRONMENT
In a talent environment, the focus is on creating organizational frameworks for talent development, where skilled leaders and employees develop in strong and capable communities. Talent unfolds in a context and is created by the environment in which one finds oneself.
Talent depends on the contet
Your managers may have experienced hiring a talented employee who has performed impressively in other companies and has an impressive resume. In other words, this is a candidate where the manager is convinced that the employee will perform from day 1. When the employee starts in the job, and the first week, month, and half-year pass without the expectations being fully met, the managers may be scratching their heads, wondering what went wrong.
This is exactly why talent environments are so incredibly important and significant for the success of your onboarding. Talent is constantly evolving, and an individual’s talent depends on the context. The context in your organization is undoubtedly different from other places. Your culture is different, you collaborate and communicate in different ways, your strategy, goals, and the path to achieving them are different, your procedures and approach to tasks are different and so on. The context in which the new employee is expected to perform and navigate is new for the employee. This is normal, and this is where a talent environment truly helps your new hires on the path to quick success. In a talent environment, the new employee will meet colleagues within the same work community working towards similar or related goals in the company. Through relationships and common goals, the new employee will learn more about your culture, collaboration, and be better able to connect their tasks to others in the organization and your strategic work.
EXAMPLE
In competitive sports and especially football, we often see new hires failing to perform from day 1. Here, we see major football teams paying several million dollars for a new player (employee) with the expectation that the player will step directly into the team and perform at their highest level in the next game. A game that may be a week later. The expensively acquired player disappoints and performs far from the level that the coach, players, fans, and the medias have seen on the player’s previous team (workplace). Six months later, the newly acquired player’s level is still the same – disappointing. The reason for the disappointing performance is that the player now must perform in a new context. The player’s new team (and employer) plays differently, has a different strategy, may communicate in a different language, has a different culture and norms, and you must build new relationships. There are many factors that impact and are crucial to the player’s success and performance. Therefore, it makes sense to give the new player time to get to know their new workplace, and this is something you, as a company, should assist with. The more you help, the better are the conditions for the employee to succeed.
3 tracks of talent environments
To unfold the fully talent of your new hires – and other employees – you need to ensure an environment where the new employee can use their skills in relation to their task portfolio and current tasks in the company. Here, you can work with talent environments in several tracks, where the new employee, in line with their onboarding, gets tasks within, for example, these tracks:
1. Individual track: Tasks that the person can independently perform.
2. Team track: Tasks in a team where the new employee may have the role of project manager.
3. Organization track: Tasks that involve multiple parts of the organization, and where the person has the role of project manager.
Invite the employee frem the beginning
Even if the employee does not have any tasks related to the talent environment from the beginning, it can be valuable to invite the employee to talent environments early in their employment. This can help them establish early relationships and gain insight into the culture and your business.
Take your onboarding to the next level
If you need advice and assistance in developing your pre- and onboarding, we use data in the development of your pre- and onboarding. This way, you get a tailored solution that matches your specific needs and desires. If you want to learn more, contact us at talenton@talenton.dk or +45 4061 8029.
Sources:
Stephanie Semay Bäckström, Nicole Baandrup Nielsen og Andrea Søndergaard Poulsen, Sæt talentmiljøet frem for talentet i spotlight, 2020.
Dansk Erhverv, Talentmiljø bygges på mening og relationer, 2022.