“As many as 40% of employees are seriously considering leaving the organization they work for” to quote from a recent article in The Weekend Australian. It’s a figure that closely tallies with similar other surveys both in Australia and in the USA so it’s worth taking seriously.

The money alone isn’t enough. Business is increasingly tackling the issue by looking at ways to help staff feel “engaged and motivated”, ie help them feel they are encouraged to express their true talents and passionate interests in the course of their work. It recognizes the fact that people work to develop their potential, not simply to earn money.

Inherent in this approach is the need for employers to identify all of the talents and abilities possessed by staff. Skills audits have been around for years, but business still tends to focus on the skills used in the workplace. They overlook the fact that everybody has skills and talents they don’t use at work or at least are not encouraged to use. Often an employee’s most passionate interests (and talents) are developed at home, at leisure or in their community life.

One person I know is an engineer at work and a playwright in personal life. This is a potentially powerful business skill for e.g. management role-playing training programs (to name just one obvious possibility). 

And most of us can quote examples of when a loyal long-serving employee retires and only then does the employer realize the wider talents the retiree had, which were never formally recognized and which are now lost to the business.

Innovative businesses recognize they have an amazingly huge and diverse armoury of ‘talent weapons’ to use and develop for:

• Motivating staff to be engaged passionately in their work
• maximizing the corporate potential of all the transferable skills, talents and abilities
• engaging the ‘enemy’, i.e., by sharpening the competitive edge of the organisation over its rivals, and
• ensuring they don’t lose that person and their talents to that enemy.

Identify, recognize, use and encourage the development of all the talents of all staff at work, home and play. It’s becoming an increasingly essential task for attracting and keeping the best staff and, in turn, maximizing corporate and financial success.

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