Each winner of the HR Excellence Awards has proven their impact on business by backing up their award-winning strategies with facts and figures.
Here's how the Dentsu team completed its post-pandemic talent overhaul.
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Best Talent Management Strategy 2023: Dentsu
Detailing the strengths and weaknesses of 34,000 people around the world, identifying future leaders and targeting development does not just make for a comprehensive talent management strategy. It makes for an utterly exhaustive one.
Dentsu’s decision to map the talents of its entire global organisation, therefore, was a huge ask.
The transformation begun in 2018, when the PR giant realised it wanted to shift emphasis from employees’ output to employees’ ambitions, as part of a wider culture shift at the firm.
By 2021, a new talent strategy had crystallised, and was ready for deployment.
The strategy was based around four key assessment points – performance, potential for development, risk of leaving and the impact of their loss on the business – and lined up for full roll-out by the end of 2021.
Aligning the project behind a mantra of ‘Your career, your development, your performance, your reward’, Dentsu’s talent team collaborated with hundreds of employees across the firm to develop a career framework.
The framework has given employees a consistent understanding – no matter where in the business, or world, they are – of how they fit into the organisation, how they can progress, what their strengths are and what they need to grow and develop.
Simultaneously, the team built a correlated the Leadership@Dentsu model. Mapping the behaviours, mindsets, and level-specific requirements for leaders, it has not only informed the experience of people looking for progression, but created the backbone of the firm’s 360-degree feedback system.
Feedback is gathered three times a year – and with 99% of participants reporting that the experience has been valuable, the framework is clearly successful.
Dentsu’s talent mapping generated a huge amount of data. By the end of the first year of implementation, four in five (80%) had all four key data points; 92% had an overall performance descriptor.
For the first time, Dentsu was able to accurately identify its talent streams. Immediately, it could target a transformative development programme at its rising stars.
Creating three major development streams – one each for senior leaders, mid-level female leaders, and junior leaders – the company brought in its first cohort of 589 trainees.
The results were astounding, with a 60% career progression rate in 12 months, compared with a 35% company-wide population, and attrition of just 10% compared to the year’s average of 20%.
The next year’s intake, of 832 participants, added an additional stream for client-facing staff.
One participant from the year one female leadership course said: “The course got me started on exploring what I enjoy doing and where I want to take my career. Thank you – it has been life changing.”
Most encouraging for Dentsu’s talent team is that the programme has achieved 98% engagement with talent mapping: employees actively want to map their talent profile, as they now understand how useful it can be to their own progression.
“It’s a significant, pan-business project,” said one judge.
“The clear objectives and alignment of strategy with business goals are excellent – and I like how it has evolved over time to keep meeting business goals.”
Another added: “It’s a really creative and impressive submission. Outstanding.”
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