Two Success Factors That Will Set Your Professional Services Teams Up for Success
The latest episode of Kantata’s Professional Services Pursuit Podcast features Carrie Young, VP of Strategic Solutions at Cority, who has extensive experience scaling professional services organizations and managing demand against capacity and resource optimization. This episode, hosted by Banoo Behboodi, focuses on a common services challenge associated with today’s economic climate: retaining talent during a time when employee expectations are radically different than they’ve been before. This shift in the talent pool towards remote, contract, and independent work can be navigated by services businesses in a profitable, scalable, and successful way — but only if those businesses can adapt to new ways of managing skills and talent.. Getting resourcing right is absolutely critical for any services organization hoping to compete today.
Below, you’ll find a summary of two of the five success factors to retaining talent discussed by Banoo and Carrie in the episode. To hear about three additional recommendations that can help your organization retain talent and build skills, check out the episode and transcript here.
1. Understanding Skill Sets
The first major hurdle to get over is understanding if your team of resources has the right mix of skills to deliver quality projects and retain customers. In the episode Carrie Young posits that “the difficult question is: do you have the right number of people that you’re looking for? And most of the time the answer is either ‘No, I don’t have enough people,’ or ‘I have too many people in one area and I need to train them in another area.’”
If you don’t take a talent audit of your employees, it’s hard to meet demand and it’s also tough to retain both employees and customers. Carrie advises the first step to auditing your talent to identify gaps is to truly “understand what you have, what skill sets you have, and what your needs are.
2. Set Clear Career Paths & Opportunities for Advancement
Retaining talent today is tougher than ever and requires clear, communicated, and competitive opportunities for advancement. That may be in terms of salary, benefits, flexibility, training, or career development (to name a few) — but employees want to know they are joining a team they can grow and learn with. Carrie emphasizes the impact prioritizing career paths has on retention, “It’s really important to have a clear career path for each individual and have it documented such that they understand all of the hard skills and soft skills that they need to have. Establish a career matrix that clearly spells out ‘If I get to this level of skill in this area, I’ll be promoted.’”
Banoo dives deeper, sharing how setting career paths and developing skills is “all about coordination, it’s not just developing the career path, but it’s also making sure everyone within the organizational leadership understands those paths and is brought into the paths so that the commitment can be actually delivered.”
Effectively setting and executing on career paths requires complex synchronization and an agreed upon vision of future success — across all individuals, teams and leaders of an organization. Carrie shares, “A career matrix should definitely be something that’s coordinated holistically and has a lot of inputs from a lot of different parts of the business. One of the things on my career matrix is about collaboration with other departments.”
Want to Learn More?
To learn about three additional success factors involved in retaining services talent today, you can listen to the entire 30-minute episode or read the full transcript here. Subscribe to the The Professional Services Pursuit Podcast for expert advice, trends, and best practices surrounding professional services.