Shared Services Talent Management: Lessons from the Masters

Accenture builds on recent research to uncover the secrets of those organizations that excel at talent management—the Masters—to offer a way to take shared services to the next level.

Accenture’s research report, Achieving High Performance through Shared Services: Lessons from the Masters, highlights a number of ways in which high performers in shared services differentiate themselves.

One of the key success factors identified by the research is talent management: the management of individuals and workforces toward improved performance. In fact, respondents ranked attracting and retaining the best employees as the top factors contributing to the success of their shared services organizations.

This report explores the talent management practices adopted by shared services Masters.

Shared services Masters have begun to develop a talent management mindset. Its key elements are:

• Focus on talent management from the start of the implementation of shared services.
  
  
• Continuously challenge leaders to engage and motivate the workforce at all levels.
  
  
• Measure culture regularly.
  
  
• Invest in developing the people management skills of managers.
  
  
• Target recruitment processes to attract and retain the right people.
  
  
• Offer meaningful and differentiated career paths.
  
  
• Offer training and development to build identified skills.
  
  
• Leverage a market-related rewards system.
  
  
• Implement performance management at all levels.
  
  
• Offer user-friendly tools to enable talent management processes.

The Accenture Shared Services Talent Management Model addresses the key elements needed to build an effective shared services organization. Such organizations focus on:

• Building a culture to glue talent management processes together.
  
  
• Using the transition to the shared services model to build a talent management culture from the outset.
  
  
• Developing a leadership team that embodies the strategy, vision and confidence needed to create and maintain an autonomous shared services organization.
  
  
• Developing people managers rather than task managers.
  
  
• Bridging the gap between service level agreements and their implications for individual employees.
  
  
• Recruiting to meet specific challenges relating to shared services organizations.
  
  
• Offering real, challenging careers.
  
  
• Using training and development to integrate new joiners and maintain the desired environment.
  
  
• Providing market-related rewards.
  
  
• Managing performance in the widest sense.
  
  
• Leveraging new technologies to improve talent management.