Five strategies to harness the power of your company's talent pool. Show
December 3, 2019 In a fast-paced digital world, it is tempting to suppose that deploying the latest technology is the lynchpin to competitive advantage. Extremely powerful digital technologies are now accessible to most companies—meaning you must find new ways to distinguish yourself in a crowded field. One very effective method for unearthing strategies that differentiate your organization from everyone else is to leverage your people as a competitive advantage. “Using people,” in this context, means placing an emphasis on any full-time employee, contractor, partner, supplier, gig worker, etc., who is part of your extended ecosystem of strategy and delivery. These are the groups and individuals who provide the fuel to make your technology engine work. You will find them interspersed inside and outside your organization, and it is your task to harness their collective power to build a coalition of support for your business. If you do this well, you can use ecosystem engagement as a way to build stickiness between your organization and employees. As we progress through this latest digital era, we are starting to see more strength in numbers—particularly from unexpected partnerships that provide different perspectives and allow ideas and innovation to originate from a variety of sources. By embracing cognitive diversity, these partnerships thrive because they’ve learned how to tap into a variety of players in order to design and deliver a compelling solution. Each time you tap into it, your people ecosystem presents a blank canvas of potential innovation, and capitalizing on their insight and adaptability creates new opportunities for unique advantage.
Learn faster. Dig deeper. See farther.Organizations that struggle to keep or fully engage their people ecosystem may find themselves facing the quandary of having people who once worked with them or for them easily becoming foes. History shows us that not recognizing the latent talent in your untapped, disengaged employees creates a hazard for your organization: a cohort of employees who understand your strategic priorities and what you value and use that knowledge to compete, providing new services aimed at dissatisfied customers looking for new options. Armed with the quick and easy tools that make spinning up a startup or a competitive initiative effortless, former employees can quickly wreak havoc on your best-laid plans—something that it used to take a much larger organization to accomplish. What can you do? Go on the offense, pursuing a strong people-based competitive advantage to build a vibrant ecosystem of employees and partners who feel valued and aligned with your organizational goals. A significant challenge you might face when you are looking to strengthen your people ecosystem is the temptation to continue operating within your traditional mode of working, and within your traditional types of relationships. Your old ways of working required one level of engagement, but to exploit the power of the digital economy, you have to bring new players into the ecosystem and be far more intentional about the way you interact with them to use their capabilities. As you do this, you will quickly find that what it takes to make one group or person happy is not what it takes to make another group or person happy, and you will constantly negotiate outcomes to ensure everyone feels like they are in a win-win scenario. The digital economy moves at a frenetic pace and causes massive changes in personal and societal expectations. Solutions that worked just a few years ago will no longer keep customers and partners happy. That’s why it’s vital that you maintain an environment where people feel they are in a win-win relationship and they see your success as something that’s good for them. Leaders who assume they have good relationships with freelancers, contractors, or suppliers can quickly find themselves struggling with the same concerns vocalized by disengaged employees, and this type of disconnect can dramatically impact your level of output. You lose a great deal of innovation capacity when you can no longer count on people to give the extra effort that comes because they are autonomously motivated to succeed. To keep everyone happy and excited at the same time, you will need an agile engagement approach. That means the painstaking work you do today to build a high degree of engagement with your people may have to be revisited often to keep them invested in your organization. If you want to develop a strong, competitive advantage built on the expertise of people in your ecosystem, you should focus on five key strategies:
As you focus on these areas, you will naturally see new and different capabilities emerge. Recognize these capabilities in your people not just for what they can do for you now, but for what they can do for you in the future, and then strategically position them so they can help you transform the business. Placing people in flexible roles helps them come up with autonomous innovation because the deeper they get into technology, the content, or their knowledge of the business, the more they uncover opportunities for you to get better, to modernize, to offer new solutions, or to have the next big thing that might transform the industry. Instead of looking at your people solely as tools to fulfill your current work, look at them as opportunities to uncover new jobs, expand your offerings, design new partnerships, discover a new mission, and recognize new customers. By doing that, you will have a talent advantage that cannot be duplicated. Get the O’Reilly Next Economy newsletter
Thank you for subscribing.How do employees contribute to the competitive advantage?Employees become your competitive advantage when they freely give you discretionary effort – when they give you creative solutions to problems, innovative ideas for new products or services, exceptional customer service, and an extra mile to meet deadlines.
How HPW contributes to employee engagement and competitive advantage within a specific Organisational situation?A relationship model demonstrates that HPWS will result in improved organization identification and job engagement, which will be demonstrated by the results of improved creativity, communication, and proactive behaviors of employees.
How would you build competitive advantages in your organization?6 Ways to Gain Competitive Advantage. Create a Corporate Culture that Attracts the Best Talent. ... . Define Niches that are Under-serviced. ... . Understand the DNA Footprint of Your Ideal Customer. ... . Clarify Your Strengths. ... . Establish Your Unique Value Proposition. ... . Reward Behaviors that Support Corporate Mission and Value.. |