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What your Employees Need from You!

The latest edition of IT-Online quotes from the recent research undertaken by CareerJunction on the relationship between bosses and their employees.  And it doesn’t make pretty reading.  It seems that we still have a long way to go to get to better “Servant” leadership.  In the modern world and New Way of Working, it’s not so much what the organisation needs from employees, but rather what employees need from you.

What I found particularly interesting was, when asked to rank the top 5 important practical things that a manager can do to enable a good working relationship with employees, the results were pretty clear.  They are:

  1. Provide clear performance/objective indicators
  2. Provide specific feedback about my work
  3. Create a learning/development programme
  4. Have a clear job description
  5. One-on-one meetings

Three of these 5 are what we, at TalentAlign, are particularly passionate about.

Provide clear performance/objective indicators – the “old” style Performance Appraisal system doesn’t, and has never worked the way that it’s intended.  At TalentAlign, we help create a new style Performance Management that actually links people performance to organisation performance.  And you don’t have to throw out the old either.  You can use the new to better populate the old.  So it’s a win all round.

Create a learning/development programme – having an agile workplace does not mean no career paths.  It just means different career paths.  Employees still need to know what opportunities exist in their current environment, and what competencies need to be developed to be able to perform in the role.  TalentAlign has always taken into consideration the 2 angles of organisation and role design – the first from the traditional “reporting” perspective, and the second from a career development perspective.  Being Agile does not change that.  If employees don’t see development opportunities within their current organisation, they will move.  This can be very costly to organisations.

Have a clear job description – for the longest time I have been complaining about the, generally, poor quality of IT Job Descriptions.  Well, in the new and agile way of working, job descriptions as we have come to know them, become redundant.  Because in teams, people are expected to perform more than one role, and it is almost impossible to define all combinations.  Today we focus on defining Roles in terms of outcomes, value add, and competencies.  This enables people to identify their career moves and create development plans to match their needs.  And it enables flexibility of resource use within teams.  Again – a win all round.

I can’t help but wonder if the absence of these has something to do with the staggering 20%-22% IT staff Turnover reported in the recent PECS IT Salary Survey?

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TalentAlign works with HR and Line Managers to fast-track their knowledge, skills and processes to not only support Agile Transformation, but to facilitate it.  We offer:

  • Agile People Management Mastermind – Learn and implement Agile People Management in a group for quicker and better outcomes
  • Agile People Coach – Agile HR transformation in the same way that IT was so successful.  Copy success—don’t reinvent the wheel!
  • Agile Organisation and Role Design – Define structures and roles for flexibility while maintaining integrity in an Agile environment
  • Agile Career and Competency Management – Retain your top skills.  Career Mosaics based on Competencies so people can decide on their own career—but still within the organisation
  • Agile Performance Management – Performance Management that actually leads to improved organisational performance with long– and short-term goals

Contact us at to find out how we can work with you to implement Agile People Management in your organisation.