Talent Management: Strategies And Challenges For HSBC Australia

Recently, the top management team in HSBC Australia has been worried about the impact that all the changes in the modern business world have brought, and wants to tackle many of the issues and challenges as a result of these changes by drafting a talent management plan for the next 10 years. This plan will help HSBC Australia manage its human resources and stay competitive in the banking industry. Imagine that you work for a consulting company which is specialised in human resource management. HSBC Australia hired your company to draft the talent management plan for them. You are assigned to work with HSBC on this task.

Factors Influencing Talent Management

This essay is based on Talent management. Talent management is an organization’s assurance to employ, maintain and build up the most excellent and capable employees available in the job market. It is an important term used to describe the organization’s dedication and promise to hire and hold the brilliant employees. It involves the work processes and systems that are associated with maintaining and developing a better work force. It is a business management strategy that is believed to retain the talented employees in order to build up a superior workforce. It is similar to employee involvement or recognition and helps to ensure that the talented and better employees get hired by the organization. When the employees will get to know about the talent management strategy of the organization, they will put their utmost effort in order to get selected as the most talented employee(Al Ariss, Cascio and Paauwe 2014).

There are several internal and external factors which influence the approach of an organization to recruit talented employees. The size of a business is dependent on the talent management plan. For a bigger business, it would be easy to source talent management as they are recognized by the public and they have a strong financial support to advertise for the post and get lots of employees at hand(Arora 2015).

The value of the employees has been increased by the contemporary knowledge economy. It became the prime factor for differentiating in the market where goods or services can be easily duplicated(Beaverstock and Hall 2016).

The increase in globalization has led to talent crisis in the developed countries which made the low-cost labor unavailable with the increase in number of consumers and progress in technology(Cappelli and Keller 2014).

When talent management strategy will be created and implemented, there must be a natural flow and succession from the overarching theories and concepts which can easily guide the transitions to methods of the entire talent management. A talent management strategy will be successful only if it is understandable and can match up to thegoals and long- term objectives of the company(Cerdin and Brewster 2014).

Demographic factors are the primary causes for the organizations to adopt the practices for working in increasing diversity in the labor market. Diversity has the capability to change a group of potential employees, their needs, and also influencing a wider business objective. The constant change in the demography of the wider population reflects that the organization has the need to develop strategies for fulfilling the consumers’ desires(Dries 2013).

Demographic changes are ongoing at a constant rate in the global sector of organization. In that case, growth rate of population and ageing population are balanced to suppressed local economies. The ability of the organizations to become successful in identifying global talent from abundance to scarcity is a strategic challenge.

The longevity and increased health in the organization reflects the fact that there are more seniors working which helps the organization to retain experienced members till their retirement. But the drawback is posed by the complicated workforce planning which raises challenge associated with longer succession planning (Serrat 2017).

Challenges and Opportunities of Talent Management

Globalization has led to increased diversity in the team and workplace. For getting the benefits of a diverse workplace, it can support the risk of cohesion, initial productivity and cultural bias. With a varied diversity comes new opportunities for instance, recruiting the employees who are discriminated for belonging to a different country and culture for gaining competitive advantage.

In the future, the global workforce is in demand for technical skills at different levels and categories of job. Technology has changed the process of how people used to work in the traditional way. The companies are adapting new technologies to come up with new strategies to remain in the competition. Using the appropriate technological factors, the company will be able to keep running in the competition of rapid dynamics and competitive global market (Sparrow, Farndale and Scullion 2013).

It has been known from a long time that knowledge is growing at a tremendously fast rate. The fact is that the rate of knowledge gained properly is dubious because of this rapid rate. It is said that the knowledge gets doubled after every two year.

Internet is said to have the greatest impact on any organization and their talent management strategy. It has allowed growing connection, communication and creating communities among people. It has also modified the corporate business plans and the competitive landscape. Digitization is responsible for creating new business models based partially on content and commerce. This process has resulted to the wholesale immoderationof the overall industries for instance, banking in HSBC(Valmohammadi and Beladpas 2014).

Telecommunication technology is facing a similar growth as compared to hardware, processing and storage technologies. With a rapid growth in virtual teams and increase in knowledge, technology must be carefully examined. The three aspects of telecommunication- speed increases, bandwidth increases and online video games have remarkable impact on talent management and HR practices.   

The technical, demographic and economic factors that were discussed will affect the strategic importance, practice and scope of talent management for more years in the future. It seems that the impact will reflect on the meaning of talent management and expand the theory far ahead of the existing domain of employee and employer relationship(Serrat 2017). The mentioned factors do not signify the total influence of talent management. These factors cannot exist separately from each other or from other socio- economic influences. Personal empowerment, contingency and regulatory policy and macro- political shifts are the important intersection points which are noteworthy. The after effect of advancement in technological innovations has resulted in an increase of personal empowerment. The intermediaries have been eliminated from the personal lives to sidelines which have enabled the individuals to imply direct control on their actions either through online banking, travel planning, investing or purchasing. The intermediaries eliminated from the interaction are every time done by the in- person expert. The shift in demography from in- person sharing of expertise is considered as the biggest achievement of the internet(Meyers and van Woerkom 2014).

Personal empowerment is also influenced by the availability of an unparalleled amount of communicative and collaborative technologies. The social channels are used to share authentic and instant news from any part of the earth on variety of topics. Through the use of blog and wiki technologies, a person can share his opinion and expertise with the whole world. There was not another time when technology had integrated with the human life to such an extent.

Impact of Technology on Talent Management

Even though the trends are well documented but still there is no equality. The knowledge workers in an MNC of India can access more information than those of the USA because of the uneven distribution of the internet telecommunication providers. In the same way, half the population of Dutch inhabitants have internet speed of more than 10 Mbs but Eastern European countries if connect the internet get a speed of less than 1 Mbs. Wealth and age are also factors when it comes to digitization(Glaister et al. 2017). The applicability of either of these trends is influenced by the characteristics of the job. An MNC can be global on the basis of reach and scale but their bank tellers will be recruited, hired and promoted in the local areas only. Thus, many of the people will travel to the global market which will be accompanied by risks and opportunities but there will be some who will remain in the domestic area. The issue which comes up at this point of discussion is digital work and knowledge work. For instance, the HSBC bank tellers are digital workers but not compulsorily knowledge workers. They are able to handle routine and regular tasks which follow the usual rules and processes and can be automated through online banking(Collings 2014).

It can be concluded that the social and economic drivers will provide many new opportunities in the future but it is important to note that they will not be applicable to all the sectors, employees or economies. Talented employees in the future will have to develop a skill of being up- to- date with the upcoming trends, not only in terms of its impact on the organization but also where they will not be applicable. It is transparent that the impact of the demographical, technological and economic factors on talent management will be insightful. The mentioned factors can be can be resistant mutually and lead to bigger impacts. If HSBC considers talent as the main distinguishing factor then they will have to find the importance of the given trends on the strategic process of talent.

Reference:

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Cappelli, P. and Keller, J.R., 2014. Talent management: Conceptual approaches and practical challenges. Annu. Rev. Organ. Psychol. Organ. Behav., 1(1), pp.305-331.

Cerdin, J.L. and Brewster, C., 2014. Talent management and expatriation: Bridging two streams of research and practice. Journal of World Business, 49(2), pp.245-252.

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