It’s repeated so often as to be trite: people are a company’s most important asset.
Actually, according to accounting standards and theory, this is not true. Harvard Business School professor Ethan Rouen points out that companies do not control their people. By that definition, people are not assets at all.
But what if talent leaders and the C-Suite could, to an important extent, influence their employees? Not control in the negative sense. Rather, positively shaping the talent pool toward high performance, development and growth. If a company could do this consistently, then by Rouen’s definition, its people would indeed represent its key asset.
Here is the struggle though. The output of employees, and the way they work, is not easy to shape or influence. It requires deliberate effort, clear data and the right talent strategy.
Even leaders who genuinely value their people should pause before claiming their workforce as an organisational asset. The chances are they do not have the full picture. Without that knowledge and clarity, there is no genuine ability to influence outcomes.
Influence and shape your talent pool towards high performance!
There is a phrase for this: the composite insights, data and metrics that provide an end-to-end view of the organisation’s people. It is called talent visibility.
Knowledge is powerful
Talent visibility is a holistic view of everything related to an organisation’s talent. It covers the capabilities, experiences, skills and ambitions of the people responsible for delivering productivity and profitability. In short, it gives leaders the full picture of their human capital.
This picture encompasses employment costs, the attributes of the workforce and the value the talent pool generates. It applies to the organisation as a whole, to specific teams and right down to individual contributors. Together, these elements make up the talent value chain. Just as organisations invest in supply chain transparency, there are significant advantages to applying the same discipline to talent.
Yet HR leaders and the C-Suite often lack the information they need about this value chain. They will typically know the salary bill, the cost of training sessions and the license fees for talent technology platforms. However, there are often significant gaps. Full organisation-wide employment costs are frequently unknown. These include recruitment costs, the opportunity cost of poor onboarding programmes, underperforming learning and development initiatives and weak talent retention rates.
Other questions attract even less clarity. What are the most pressing skills gaps in the organisation? Does the company have a strong employer brand? These questions are often treated as abstract rather than answerable with data.
Even more rarely does an organisation have a clear view of the relationship between talent investment and value creation. Specifically: can HR draw an ROI line from people investment all the way through to the company's financial results? For most, the honest answer is no.
In other words, human capital should no longer be measured only by what it costs. Instead, organisations should evaluate talent by the value it generates. These insights then feed back into improving people’s productivity and performance, creating a compounding return on talent investment.
For instance, understanding the composite elements of a strong employer brand is commercially valuable. A positive employer brand attracts high-potential talent. Research consistently confirms this connection between brand strength and talent quality.
Consider the names that attract the best talent naturally. Software architects want to work at Google. Aeronautics engineers pursue Lockheed Martin. Aspiring marketers want to be headhunted by Unilever. These organisations attract top candidates before they even advertise. That is the commercial power of a strong employer brand.
However, employer brand value goes further than attraction. Measuring its full ROI requires tracking employee engagement, culture shifts and customer satisfaction over time. This is complex but entirely possible with the right data.
As one concrete example, a 2021 LinkedIn study estimated that a strong employer brand, combined with technology to automate recruitment, can reduce hiring costs by up to 43%. That is a direct, measurable financial return from investing in talent visibility.
It is possible to get even more specific about how talent insights affect the bottom line and generate real financial gains.
How many new recruits does your company hire each year? Assume 25, at an average salary of R50,000. Regardless of how skilled these recruits are, every one of them needs time to orient and reach full productivity.
Onboarding time-to-productivity varies by industry and role. Studies indicate it takes between two and eight months. A Gallup report suggests it could take as long as a full yearport by global HR research firm.
Assume a productivity wastage factor of 50% of each new employee’s cost for their first three months. For a 25-person intake, that amounts to nearly R2 million in lost productivity per year on the income statement. That is a real, calculable cost.
With comprehensive talent visibility across the onboarding process, organisations can reduce this significantly. This means using technology accelerators, KPIs that track output and clear milestones toward full employee autonomy. Applied well, these tools strip out the redundancy and shorten the time it takes new people to contribute fully.
From human capital to business value
The pressure to perform and improve makes full talent visibility more important than ever. Leaders need to see the entire value chain that their people represent, not just the cost side of the ledger.
Deep talent insights allow organisations to build on existing strengths, identify skills gaps early, flag talent risks before they become problems and act on opportunities quickly. In short, these insights show leaders how the company can perform better. They also reveal where new skills and capabilities can be built.
Where clarity is missing about any aspect of the talent function, that gap is simply not good enough. In today’s performance environment, the absence of talent data is itself a competitive risk.
Talent visibility and employee engagement: what the data shows
Employee engagement covers buy-in to the organisation’s purpose, alignment to strategy and motivation to work productively. It is crucial. When engagement is high, organisations perform better at every level.
Low engagement is a widely acknowledged problem across industries and geographies. It is linked to high employee churn, quiet quitting and declining productivity. Organisations in South Africa are not immune to these pressures.
The C-Suite question is straightforward: how do we ensure strong engagement? The answer matters commercially. Organisations with highly engaged employees, outperform their peers by 14% in productivity and by 23% in profitability, according to Gallup research.
A smart talent leader knows how to answer this question and channel it into action. Not just in the boardroom, but as a deliberate, ongoing talent approach that aligns with business strategy and adds measurable financial value.
Talent visibility (360-degree, real-time knowledge of human capital capabilities, employee workflow challenges, managerial churn metrics and employer brand health) is what makes this possible. It connects the daily activity of people, processes, systems and technologies to the company’s financial results.
Only full talent visibility will bring your people to the point where they genuinely represent the organisation’s single most valuable asset.
By Michael Franks, Sales Multiplier Executive, Talent Technology division at LRMG
The LRMG Group of companies specialises in igniting the growth and performance of people. Get better visibility into your company’s talent value chain. Contact Michael Franks at michaelf@lrmg.co.za or contact LRMG: +27 87 941 5764 www.lrmg.co.za
