The modern day working environment is a highly complex and intricate field, in which employees and employers have to continually meet new demands, standards and challenges. Employees, for instance, have to perform new tasks at superior standards, or they have to continually develop their skills. At the level of the employers, they have to respond to challenges such as increasing roles of employees, increasing competition for talented staffs or changing structures of the workplace, especially due to diversity (Bond, 2007).
Bank America Case Study From Goldsmith & Carter textbook, select Bank America (Chapter 2) case study assignment - uploaded Write a (5-7) page paper: 1.Outline talent management program led success company.
Bank of America case study
The modern day working environment is a highly complex and intricate field, in which employees and employers have to continually meet new demands, standards and challenges. Employees, for instance, have to perform new tasks at superior standards, or they have to continually develop their skills.
At the level of the employers, they have to respond to challenges such as increasing roles of employees, increasing competition for talented staffs or changing structures of the workplace, especially due to diversity (Bond, 2007). Despite these challenges, the role of the employer remains that of directing and using the resources of the staffs to attain the business objectives of the firm.
In order to attain this objective, economic agents develop and implement talent management programs, through which they strive to motivate the employees and gain their support to attaining company objectives. In line with this, the current project looks at the talent management program implemented by the Bank of America.
2. Talent management program at the Bank of America
The management of talent is traditionally understood as the totality of efforts completed by a firm in an effort to "attract, develop, deploy and retain talent to achieve strategic objectives and meet future business needs" (Silzer and Dowell, 2009). In a traditional sense, these efforts are understood as being directed at the totality of the staff members within a firm, but the particularity of the program developed and implemented by the Bank of America is represented by the creation of a program targeting a specific category of employees, namely the executives.
The leaders of the Bank of America understood that the executives play a key role in motivating all staffs to strive towards the attainment of the organizational objectives, but also that they are the ones who set the vision and future direction for the banking institution. In such a setting, they have developed and implemented a specific talent management program aimed at coordinating and motivating the executives.
The talent management program thus implemented by the retail institution integrates five steps, which are all completed in a cyclic manner. In other words, the steps are all linked and the process is never-ending, ensuring long-term sustainability and continuous improvement. The diagram below represents the program, as it has been created and implemented by the Bank of America leaders.
Source: Fishel and Conger, 2009
The first step in the talent management program at the Bank of America is as such represented by the identification of the people who have the right skills to perform a specific role, and the assignation of people who are able to perform the respective tasks within the corresponding positions. At the secondary level, the firm focuses on managing the performances of the leaders, with the emphasis falling on their continuous development (steps three and four). Last, the company strives to reward and repay the executives for their achievements, based on their performances and efforts.
3. Program strengths
As the talent management program has been presented throughout the previous section, it reveals a series of strengths and advantages. The more notable of these include the following:
The program is centric on a specific category of employees, who are in fact essential for the ultimate success of the company
The program is a cyclic one, as part of an overall business model, and it does not see interruptions or isolated implementations
The results retrieved by the program are company wide, since the results impact all company elements, such as operational staffs, resource allocation, budget construction and so on The program also has appositive impact upon the culture of the organization, by stimulating empowerment, "trust, teamwork, and accountability at all levels in the organization, especially at the executive level" (Fishel and Conger, 2009).
4. Opportunities for improvement
As it has already been mentioned, the talent management program at the Bank of America is a powerful and well developed effort to managing the staffs at the company. Still, some shortages are revealed at the level of planning, which can be translated into opportunities for further development.
A first example in this sense is represented by the very nature of the program, in the meaning that it addresses executives within the firm. The roles and tasks of these particular staff members differ from one position to the other, meaning as such that it is difficult for the firm to plan ahead a process by which to assess the performances of a particular executive, or to create objective expectations regarding their future performances and results. In other words, difficulties are observed at the level of metric performance (Chingos, 2002).
In order to address this shortage, it is useful to create analyses and benchmarks of similar positions within the industry and assess executive performances against these pre-existent patterns, but also against the performances attained by the firm under the leadership of the respective individual.
Another example of planning shortages is revealed at the level of the limited emphasis placed on the operational staff members. These are virtually excluded from the talent management program at the company, and this could easily result in low levels of employee motivation, and therefore, lower performances. In order to address this limitation, it is useful to plan for the expansion of the current talent management program so that it includes all staffs at the banking institution.
5. Alternatives to future talent management challenges
The modern day business climate and working environment continually change, to raise a multitude of challenges and difficulties for the economic agents. The Bank of America has devised a complex talent management program in order to address these challenges; yet as the difficulties continue to emerge and increase in complexity, there is a need to devise new methods by which to address future challenges to talent management.
One alternative method in this sense is represented by the creation of a talent management plan that is inclusive at the corporate level, in the meaning that it also considers the HRM issues for the operational staffs, as well as the executives. This could be attained through an extrapolation of the already existent program and its adaptation to fit the needs of operational positions. The advantages of such a measure would include the generation of more staff advantages throughout the entire company. Additionally, given the higher levels of standardization among operational positions, the implementation of a company wide program could be completed in cost and time efficient conditions.
The second alternative solution is represented by the completion of thorough research within the industry and the market place. The scope of this effort is that of assessing the means in which other companies deal with their talent management issues and developing competitive advantages in this direction.
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