It seems like a lot of work to get a talent management framework put together. HR and management often focus on managing the day-to-day operations instead of working toward the future. However, putting this together will reduce everyone’s stress and workload eventually while also keeping your employees motivated and engaged.

Here are the steps you need to go through to develop your framework.

1. Get leadership buy-in

While talent management may be in the human resources department’s specific purview, you cannot build this without management buy-in. You need to have alignment across the organization. If HR develops the framework on its own, it will be a wasteful side project. Support from the C-level on down is critical for a successful framework.

2. Analyze your organization’s needs

To build a proper framework, you need to understand the business’ goals. You need to conduct a formal needs analysis and speak to various people to understand the objectives. Siloed organizations can often miss out on how talent in other silos can help them succeed. A good framework can bring that together. In short, you cannot assess talent needs and gaps without understanding business needs and gaps.

3. Review your employee lifecycle

By reviewing each stage of employee lifecycle, you’re able to identify where the potential for improvement is.

How do you approach recruiting? Are your sourcing techniques bringing in the candidates to help the business succeed not only today but in five or ten years?

When does turnover happen? Do you have a handful of long-term employees, and the rest of the employees cycle out after two to three years? Figure out what is going wrong and why they leave.

Are you providing your employees with a clear career path at your organization? Do they have sufficient opportunities for learning & development?

4. Identify the elements of your talent management framework and KPIs to measure success

Not only do you need to identify your elements (see above), you need to figure out how to measure these elements. How will you measure your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)? How do these fit into the overall business goals?

Let’s say Talent Acquisition is one of the elements of your framework. A good metric to track would be time to hire, which helps you evaluate the efficiency of your recruitment process.

5. Be employee-centric

No strategy, no matter how brilliant, will succeed without the right employees. The right employees need the proper support and development to grow. In other words, the best talent management frameworks are employee-centered. You can use words like “talent” and “human capital,” but don’t forget that what you are talking about is living, breathing human beings who have needs outside of work.

If your strategy requires 80 hours a week of work from everyone to achieve business success, it will fail, as it’s not truly employee-centric.

6. Develop tools to make the framework work

Do you have the systems necessary for communication, collaboration, documentation, and integration across departments and divisions? Do you support tuition reimbursement? If not, you won’t get people to take outside courses to increase their skills. How does your total rewards package measure up with your competitors? A framework without proper tools won’t help.

7. Put your framework into action

Getting everything down on paper is one thing; putting it into action is another. This is an organizational transformation, and, like all transformations, you will meet resistance. Plan to deal with this! Prepare support for employees who struggle with the transformation.

Putting a talent management framework in place takes time and effort. However, it helps fully align your talent management strategy with organizational goals. The plan needs to be sustainable, and you need to provide the tools you need to help your employees and your business perform better. Putting this together will help guide you in the future, giving you a high return on investment.