What’s Your Employee Life Cycle Strategy?

Chances are your organization has a detailed, strong system for hiring and employee on-boarding. Chances are your organization has a focused, clear way to train employees and manage them. Chances are your organization has a distinct understanding of promotion and, ultimately, retirement. It’s the employee life cycle and every organization has one; but do you have an employee life cycle strategy?

If you’ve got each component of talent recruitment and management, how does a defined employee lifecycle strategy fit in, and what benefits can an organization see? Industry publication The HR Examiner points to the necessity of definitions regarding talent management and how that plays into the full employee life cycle strategy.

“Much of the real value extracted from Human Capital comes from the internal machinations involved in assignment, reassignment, utilization, assessment and development.” – (hrexaminer.com)

The author of this post, John Sumser (one of the top 25 influential bloggers on the subject of recruiting), makes a great point that goes to the heart of the issue of developing a defined talent management approach that accentuates an employee life cycle strategy, stating:

“Rather than simply being a gateway between the outside world and the company, recruiting skills can be usefully applied to the internal processes that actually make a company great. Shouldn’t every recruiter be held accountable for the transition of a new hire to successful integration?”

The idea of a continuation of responsibilities and approach from recruiting through on-boarding, from integration to performance management, and from development to feedback and promotion is a process that can be boosted by a standard way of looking at the way employees get hired, approach their work, and focus on maximizing their output.

If you look at critical factors for success when hiring that go beyond experience and resumes to point to motivational attributes—mostly through behavioral interviewing and selection assessments that gauge the way potential employees look at work and what drives them—shouldn’t those same factors play into the way employees actually work on the job? Motivational and work style elements can be a key part of employee development, team formation, and performance management. In the case of assessments, and using Emergenetics for example, the employee life cycle starts to take shape:

• Potential employees are evaluated based on what motivational factors are needed for success in a particular job. These factors are built into an assessment and certain factors carry through into a hire’s work and communication style.
• Employees gain self-awareness and a description of strengths via a workplace assessment. This can help pinpoint what kind of work they’ll enjoy and how they can best accomplish that work.
• Employees can move up the organization by taking on projects and teams where their unique styles and thinking and behavioral approaches can be accentuated.
• Performance management takes on a cyclical approach through a more informed (via a manager’s knowledge of particular employee motivations and work styles) performance evaluation and path for improvement and career building.

It truly becomes an employee life cycle strategy built on fundamental elements of the ways employees are hired, work and move through a career.