Across over 800 engagements, supporting 800+ small and growing businesses (SGBs) across Africa, it became apparent to Open Capital, that while SGBs are the largest contributors to employment in Africa, a majority of them struggle to acquire, develop, and retain highly skilled labor to facilitate their growth. SGBs are highly aware of these talent challenges, however, they struggle to access and develop sustainable talent solutions due to limited time and resources to address this internally, and limited affordable talent support options in the local African market.
It is for this reason that in 2017, we partnered with Argidius Foundation to develop a robust talent assessment tool kit, called the Talent Diagnostic, designed to help businesses assess the efficiency of their talent systems across 6 key areas;
- Engagement: How engaged are your employees with their work, teams and alignment with your company vision and mission?
- Learning & development: Does your organization foster development aligned to its growth strategy?
- Organization & structure: Are roles structured to motivate employees and promote accountability?
- Performance management: Does your organization define, measure, and reward high performance?
- Compensation philosophy: What is your compensation philosophy and do employees understand it?
- Culture & well-being: Does the team understand your values? Does your leadership live them?
So how does our Talent Diagnostic address the 3 key challenges SMEs face with talent development?
- It is free for all SGBs and easy to use
With the talent diagnostic, companies do not have to worry about spending large sums of money to evaluate their talent management systems. They can now do this for free by signing up to the Talent Diagnostic website, which gives them access to comprehensive surveys, carefully designed to assess the business performance across the 6 major talent areas described above.
2. Detailed reports with accurate results benchmarked against peer organizations
Once the survey completion thresholds have been met, companies can generate insightful reports with detailed results by level (managers vs. employee) for each question, and overall results for each talent area, anonymously benchmarked against peer organizations that previously completed the survey, to give them context on how similar companies are performing in each talent area.
3. Robust talent modules with best talent practices
After companies have understood the efficiency of their talent management systems, based on the survey results and insights from the reports, they can leverage our free talent curriculum designed to give holistic insights that can act as a starting point for companies to develop their talent management systems.
To date, numerous companies have taken the Talent Diagnostic and successfully utilized the results of the assessments and our talent modules to improve their operations. In 2021, pulling from the additional insights we have gathered from the activities of our Talent Practice and the wider Open Capital team, we have improved the Talent Diagnostics tool, making it more user friendly, and refining the assessments to provide even more value. We are excited to relaunch the Talent Diagnostic tool and support more SGBs on their journey of growth. To learn more about our Talent practice or to take the diagnostic today — visit our website!
