Nurturing Talent: Strategies for Developing Your Team

Nurturing talent—tending to the development needs of the people who work for your organization—has become especially important in today’s post-pandemic economy. The employment landscape has shifted in recent years to affect and elevate the importance and difficulty of attracting and retaining quality talent for your organization.

The Great Work Teardown, mass exodus from jobs, worker demand for remote working options, and quiet quitting are trends that have influenced many organizations’ access to quality talent. This makes it even more important for an organization to retain the talent it's already invested in.

Attrition and vacancies reduce organizational productivity and cost an estimated average of $52,000 per full-time role, or $480 million in annual value for a median-sized S&P company. Many HR leaders view business disruptions due to skill shortages as the number one workforce risk to growth in 2024 and 2025. A 2022 Gallup survey found that 51% of workers are watching for or actively seeking a new job, with 53% saying it’s a good time to find a job near where they live.

Companies wishing to remain competitive and attract and retain highly skilled people must place nurturing talent at the foundation of their business strategies. Companies that put talent at the center of their business strategy, for example, enjoy higher total shareholder returns than their competitors.

Nurturing talent at your organization will:

• Reduce turnover costs
• Enhance stability
• Increase talent engagement and productivity
• Build your reputation as an employer of choice

High-performing organizations share the common characteristic of valuing talent. Take these collective actions to be well on your way to establishing yourself as a company where people want to work.

Understand the talent within your team

The first step in nurturing talent is to take an inventory of the talent you already have within your team. What are their strengths and weaknesses? What is their general state of mind?

With 59% of the world’s employees quietly quitting, take stock of where your people fit on this continuum. Only 23% of employees report they are thriving at work. Often, employees are less productive due to lack of skills (22%), lack of engagement (6%), and inefficiency that can add up to $15,000 in annual costs per company for one hour of unproductive labor per week per employee.

Turn things around by assessing the state of mind of your team, including conducting a thorough skills assessment to help you adapt and create a more dynamic network that spreads skills where skills are needed. A skills assessment of your team will help you:

• Assess existing skills and competencies
• Establish measurement benchmarks for future performance
• Identify skills gaps to prioritize

You can take several approaches to assess skills:

• A talent review will provide an overall composite of workforce performance, areas of strength and weakness, and offer a clear inventory of skills
• A skills matrix chart will give a visual map of individual and group skills, experience, and performance
• A skills gap analysis will generate an action plan to identify and fill gaps needed to round out your talent plan

Be sure, as you assess skills, that your team knows you value their contribution and that your goal is to support their growth and satisfaction in their role within the organization.

Create a culture that fosters talent development

A strong and clearly articulated company culture is the foundation for success in achieving organizational goals. Fostering a culture that values continued learning and talent development is essential for nurturing talent. Companies that create a culture that fosters talent development and nurturing talent are:

• More productive
• Create more value
• More likely to attract and retain a higher level of talent

Create a safe yet motivating culture in which gaps in skills and talent can be identified. For example, maybe you have a successful content marketing team that consistently produces high-ranking SEO content, but team members aren’t yet skilled in the implications and uses of artificial intelligence (AI) to assist with content creation. A culture that fosters talent development would openly identify these gaps in talent. Management would then encourage team members to explore, educate themselves, and upskill in this area.

Managers can model a culture of exploration and upskilling by investing in their own self development, including communicating about their own learning paths and sharing ideas and resources with team members.

Invest in continuous learning and development

Invest in the resources needed to create a talent development plan that empowers employees to improve their skills, knowledge, and capabilities. Include learning and development in budget planning. Factor in the cost of the programming itself and the ongoing time and resources it will take individual people to invest in learning and development.

Types of programs to invest in include:

• Workshops
• Conferences
• Online courses
• Formal degree and credential programs
• Job shadowing to learn new skills
• Rotating jobs to try out new roles

Personalize learning paths for team members based on individual skill gaps, interest, and opportunity. When possible, share details about how someone’s training led to new opportunities or advancement within the organization to encourage others to participate.

Provide constructive feedback and recognition

Fostering a feedback-rich and communicative environment is important when nurturing talent. Offer constructive feedback in a way that motivates and supports growth. Create opportunities for constructive feedback in which a person’s strengths, areas for improvement, and actionable goals are identified and addressed. If the feedback is negative, create an environment in which negative feedback will remain constructive.

Check in during weekly meetings as a way to normalize feedback, keep communication open, and provide ongoing real-time input with no surprises. Set goals and be open to input and ideas from team members.

Improve the quality of quarterly or annual performance reviews. Include positive feedback about areas where the person is excelling, along with constructive information about areas where the team member could improve. Include information about how the company can help the person improve or upskill in areas where there are gaps.

Be sure to celebrate and offer recognition for achievements, milestones, and career advancements. Acknowledge and celebrate:

• Work anniversaries
• Outstanding work contributions
• Meeting project targets
• Completion of training and development programs
• Job promotions

Offer opportunities for career advancement

Offering opportunities for career growth and advancement is an essential component for organizations that prioritize nurturing talent. Career growth pathways are vital if an organization wants to attract and retain top talent. Nurturing talent by offering internal career advancement has several advantages, including:

• Increasing engagement
• Strengthening retention
• Improving your organizational brand

Improve innovation, productivity, and collaboration among workers by offering clear pathways for personalized learning and career progression. These may include:

• Advancements within a person’s current position
• Prioritized hiring from within for roles as they become available

Align employee goals with organizational needs and opportunities by meeting early and often to establish the pathway there. Ask: Where would the person like to be in one year? In three years? In five?

Strategies to support career development and align individual goal setting with organizational goals include:

• Personalized career development plans built into the direct report and HR review processes
• Internal mentoring programs designed to support individual careers

Leverage technology to support talent development

The process of nurturing talent doesn’t have to be a heavy lift. Organizations that effectively focus on nurturing talent use technology to support their talent development programs. In fact AI-enabled skills management offers deep advantages, including:

• Increasing the collection and usage of data related to talent
• Improving operational processes related to allocation and coordination between work and the workforce

HR programs may strengthen their analytics capabilities for swift access to insights that relate to the entire organization, to specific business units, and to individual managers. Technology can help identify and reduce inefficiencies including:

• Automating routine tasks
• Identifying areas of inefficiency, for example, too many team meetings
• Tracking individual and team performance, productivity, and effectiveness

HR may also support continued learning with automated training and development pathways. Offer opportunities for team members to upskill at their own pace. For example, offer learning pathways in AI, learning pathways to support new marketing approaches or social media strategies, and self-guided tutorials to support the use of collaboration tools.

Build a community of learning and mentorship

A particularly effective means for nurturing talent is the development of mentoring programs and peer learning groups. This approach is effective and widely used; 98% of Fortune 500 companies offer mentor programs.

Community learning and mentorship come in many forms. Six examples of what a mentorship program could look like include:

1. One-to-one mentoring in which an experienced employee is paired with a high-potential employee to offer personalized guidance and share knowledge to support career advancement
2. Group mentoring circles in which similarly grouped employees share a mentor to learn from the group leader, but also from each other
3. Informal and casual mentoring between people that can happen through an opt-in mentorship database, for example, to facilitate informal connections and interactions
4. Flash mentoring programs in which experienced mentors provide short-term, ad hoc guidance, as needed, focused on specific skills, issues, or situations
5. Skill-based mentoring programs in which mentors offer focused expertise, advice, and guidance to mentees related to critical business, technical, leadership, or other skills needed to advance and succeed
6. Reverse mentoring programs in which senior leaders and executives are paired with younger employees to share fresh perspectives, new technology skills, and cultural awareness

In every case, an organization may closely align its culture and people development strategy to offer valuable investment in the growth of all employees.

Measure the impact of your strategies

You’ve diligently worked to improve your strategies for nurturing talent. Measuring the impact of your strategies is the final step in building an effective program.

As you begin your program, identify key metrics and indicators that you’ll use to assess, at predetermined times, whether your talent development strategies are working, or whether they need to be adjusted. Common measurement approaches focus on:

• Completion of training programs, certifications, or courses
• Improvements in overall job performance
• Promotions or advancements
• Retention rates
• Data crunching to help assess and compare accomplishments

Measure both overall team accomplishments and impact, as well as individual accomplishments and impact. Share feedback with the team, and also with individuals, to discuss areas of success as well as areas where improvements can be made.

Be sure to collect feedback from employees. Employee feedback is a valuable tool for improving your program. Proactively responding to employee feedback helps ensure an atmosphere of trust and participation.

Find talent on Upwork

Now that you’ve built a world-class talent program within your organization, consider partnering with Upwork to continue to identify, cultivate, and retain the best talent for your organization. Today’s modern talent programs—called hybrid or blended teams—mix nurtured inside teams with long-term independent contractors and short-term freelancers. This model enhances your talent management program by:

• Supporting the needs of the inside team you’ve invested in
• Reducing business costs
• Improving retention rates

Explore Upwork's platform for new hires, resources, and professional guidance on talent development. Upwork is here to partner with you to support your strategies for developing your team.