How to manage talent during the pandemic with S.H.A.P.E., a five-step tool that helps organizations identify, assess, align, and retain talent

The COVID-19 pandemic has created an employment crisis unlike anything we’ve seen since The Great Depression.  The unemployment rate stands at 13.3%, and 42 million Americans have filed jobless claims.  On the organizational side, companies are scrambling to adjust to this harsh new reality, in which they’ve laid off or furloughed workers or cut individual salaries.

With reduced headcount, roles are shifting rapidly, creating a chain reaction through every organization.  Executive leaders are reassessing business needs and responsibilities, and they’re redistributing the remaining talent to fill employment gaps.  These sudden changes have been disruptive in the short term, but companies will be affected far beyond this initial pinch.  Executives will need new succession plans and talent management strategies, and they’ll need better infrastructure to fill the aforementioned gaps and accommodate new business requirements.

Plus, when they’re ready to hire, they’ll be facing an almost unrecognizable recruiting environment, including a bigger candidate pool, candidates with bigger gaps in their employment histories, all-virtual interview processes, and remote onboarding. 

Facing all of these challenges without a plan could be disastrous.  But leaders can survive if they start thinking differently.  Some questions every executive needs to ask:

• Do existing internal employees have the leadership skills to step into higher-level roles and lead the organization beyond a crisis?
• What happens if we need to replace more than one executive?
• How do we stay on course if we need an external candidate?
• What are reasonable timetables for internal and external candidates to become fully competent in new roles?
• What support do leaders and their teams need during and after COVID-19?
• Have the decisionmakers (e.g. HR, C-suite execs, etc.) identified the organization’s top talent?
• How do we identify, assess, and align talent as we look beyond COVID-19?
• How are we going to ensure that we have the right people (employees), in the right seat (department), on the right bus (organization)?

More succinctly, do leaders understand what shape their organization will take once we emerge from the pandemic?  These are all tough questions to answer, but S.H.A.P.E. can simplify the process.

Introducing S.H.A.P.E.

S.H.A.P.E. is a groundbreaking, five-step talent management tool designed not only to help companies survive the current hiring crunch, but also think more strategically about hiring and talent management best practices, create healthy bench, foster a more equitable workplace, and safeguard the organization for the future.  

The S.H.A.P.E. talent management method consists of five steps:

• S – SEE who’s currently on your team and use data analytics to reorganize team members and retain the best-performing talent.  By factoring data into your decision-making, you can predict attrition rates, rank employee performance, assess leadership potential, and refine your hiring profiles for future recruiting efforts.  This enables you to operate the organization more efficiently, minimize costs, and make more informed decisions about your response to COVID-19 (e.g., how many employees, and which ones, to lay off).  To do this well, you need to ensure you have the technological capability to capture this data and that your team is bought in to tracking and using it.
• H – HAVE a detailed plan that uses core objectives, dependencies, and milestones to prep the organization for the future.  Create a high-performance culture – identify your talent, outline their goals and what they’ll work on to achieve them, measure their progress, and set clear expectations for success.  Additionally, prioritize the behaviors you expect, create development opportunities for your team (e.g., training), give talent reviews, and build out realistic succession plans.
• A – ALIGN your talent through cross-training, so they can acquire new skills that enable the organization to respond quickly to evolving customer demands and reset priorities as needed.  Cross-training helps you avoid silos within your company, creates opportunities for advancement, and helps you build stronger customer relationships.
• P – PURSUE employee engagement and use stories to boost your workforce to action to meet the changing needs in the business.  Engaging employees is more important than ever – they’re fearful of the pandemic’s effect on the business, and to drive their performance, they need to be reassured.  Employee engagement isn’t just good for the organization’s bottom line – it helps you build a better company.  Encourage a dialogue through surveys, build trust through transparency, and share stories about struggles and big decisions to humanize leadership and create connection.
• E – EMPOWER and nurture your workforce to thrive, measure outcomes, and reward creativity to fuel continuous performance management.  Celebrate victories and recognize achievements when your team hits the goals they’ve set forth.  Build a culture that produces new leaders and retains talent.  Aside from recognition, empowerment also comes from encouraging top talent to take on more responsibilities and work toward bigger roles.

S.H.A.P.E. = SEE, HAVE, ALIGN, PURSUE, AND EMPOWER.  We are living and working in unprecedented times, and business success requires an unprecedented solution.