A recent study by IBM and the Human Capital Institute (HCI) shows that while 84 per cent of organisations know workforce effectiveness is important to achieving business results, only 42 per cent of those surveyed say managers devote sufficient time to people management. The study, ‘Integrated Talent Management’, was based on research with 1,900 individuals from more than 1,000 public and private-sector organisations around the world. Some of the findings were:

• Organisations that apply talent management practices demonstrate higher financial performance compared with their industry peers.
• Organisations find it difficult to apply workforce analytics (only 40 per cent forecast skill needs), promote collaboration (49 per cent say they do this), deploy people effectively (64 per cent) and develop those employees in a timely and effective manner (only 38 per cent).

• Organisations with between 1,000 and 10,000 employees are less likely to apply leading talent management practices compared with other organisations. These organisations are too large to manage informally and too small to have the necessary managerial focus or human capital infrastructure.

Comment: Sometimes it’s really nice to know that your intuition was right all along.