Talent management

for small & medium-

size businesses:
Steer your business to handle change by creating
the right road map for your talent journey

WHITE PAPER
 SUCCESSFACTORS / WHITE PAPER
Talent management for small & medium-size Businesses

Talent management for small

& medium-size businesses:
Steer your business to handle change by creating the
right road map for your talent journey

Building a talent strategy for a small or medium-size business (SMB) isn’t a one-size-fits-all
proposition. In fact, it might feel like hitting the road without a map, let alone without a GPS.
Depending on your business objectives, the talent solutions you develop must be specific to the
changes your business is anticipating:

• Growth: Suddenly you’re bringing in more clients and driving up revenue. You’re clearly doing
something right, but are you experiencing congestion with all that growth?
• Extension: You’re not just taking the road less traveled; you’re creating all-new ones, whether
you’re launching a new line of business in your current location or expanding globally. Will the
construction cause delays, or take you to new places?
• Efficiency: Pain at the pump means you have to make that mileage work for you. Is your talent
management strategy helping you maintain high performance, or is your company guzzling gas?
• Innovation: Vehicles serve multiple purposes today, beyond transporting us from point A to B. Is
your company going to transform with the market or change the market completely?
Even if the road looks clear, there could be obstacles along the way. With a great talent
management strategy, you’ll be ready for potholes, from erratic markets to global uncertainty.

Mapping out your talent management strategy may seem overwhelming, and fear of the unknown
may have you idling in neutral. It doesn’t have to be that way. You can find roadside assistance with
SuccessFactors. We have extensive experience helping companies of all sizes and in many
industries get real results from their talent strategies. We know what works.

Every business needs great people to help unlock its full potential. As your business changes, so do
your talent needs. Let SuccessFactors show you the routes to optimal talent management.

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Talent management for small & medium-size Businesses

GROWTH: GETTING THERE FASTER

Growing means that you’ll be widening those roads you travel on your daily commute. Through
careful planning, you’ll be adding lanes instead of creating operational congestion. The right talent
moves can speed up progress and then help your business manage that growth.

• Maximize productivity. Regular communication and meaningful feedback can improve

business execution and increase the productivity needed for growth. Performance management
gives you the framework to discuss, measure, and improve employee performance. Find out
what makes “great” employees and use that model throughout the company.
• Keep people aligned. A big part of goal management is getting everyone on the same page.
Explain the mile markers the company wants to meet and cascade those goals down to the
individual level. By tying goals and progress back to the business, you can maintain alignment
even as your company grows.
• Incentivize exceptional performance. Giving employees a stake in your success is one way
to unlock faster growth. You can reward the people who are driving your business’ success by
connecting incentives with the business results you want to see. A compensation management
system makes it easy to monitor progress and reward top performers.
• Replicate great talent through effective recruiting. As your business grows, you must be
able to hire people who are like your proven top performers and who will fit into your unique
culture. Recruiting technology makes it far easier not only to hire top-quality performers but also
to find the people who will be the right fit for your organization.
• Mobilize your teams. When you have to deploy your teams quickly to meet your growth
demands, they need resources at their fingertips. With talent management mobile applications,
employees have real-time status updates when they’re on the road and on the go.
• Create the bench strength you need. What are the roles you will need to maintain your
growth into the future? You don’t just grow revenue, you also grow the people you’ve got.
Succession planning makes it easier to map internal talent against future needs. Understanding
these needs makes it easier to develop current employees to fill those roles in the future — which
puts you in a position to accelerate growth.
• Scale employee data management. As you grow, rely on core HR self-service features to
engage employees and managers to access and update employee data. Employees can update
their profile information, such as skills and competencies, as well as initiate their own transactions,
such as change of address and tax withholdings. Managers can use self-service to update and
view information about employees on their team, including promotions, salary changes, termina-
tions, and more.

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Talent management for small & medium-size Businesses

EXTENSION: BUILDING NEW ROADS

Extending the business means adding roads and navigating through the unknown. Business
expansion can occur in many forms. It may mean launching a new line of business in your current
location or expanding globally. Regardless of how you extend your business, you must have a plan
for how your people will get you there. Through insight and proactive talent management, you will
prepare your team to face the challenges of extension and prepare to pave new roads ahead.

• Centralizing your workforce data. Expanding into a new market means moving your
workforce into new regions. Instead of segmenting your workforce systems, ensure that all
employee data is centralized in a single core HR system. You’ll gain greater visibility into your
workforce, and easy access to comprehensive employee data and reports will help you make
better decisions about other expansion opportunities.
• Staffing for new lines of business or new locations. As you build new roads, will you
need more of the same people you currently have, or will you need different types of employees?
Recruiting will be crucial to filling those talent gaps, especially if you’re searching for very specific
skills sets or if you need to hire several people in a short time. Determine the talent you will need,
and set up an action plan for recruiting.
• Aligning people with goals and avoiding confusion. As you open new locations or create
a new strategy, you need to get people on board with your new vision. Existing employees need
to understand what you’re trying to do. New employees need to understand where they fit in.
Senior management needs a way to clearly cascade the new direction throughout the organiza-
tion. Goal management tools can bring clarity and transparency, and can keep everyone aligned
with the changes that expansion brings.
• Keeping people focused on the right things. Extending the business means change, and
change means uncertainty for employees. Performance management, with clear coaching and
meaningful feedback, keeps everyone engaged. Employees shouldn’t worry about how the
change impacts them, and managers don’t need to wait until review time to provide meaningful
coaching. Feedback can be shared as often as needed, and team performance can be easily
calibrated so everyone can focus on what’s most important.
• Retaining your best people. Uncertainty also creates opportunities for the competition to
poach your best talent. Career development plans that demonstrate a career path at your
company can show your people what’s in it for them. Publicly appreciate your team members
and assure them that the challenge of paving new roads leads to great things. Take time to put a
proactive retaining and developing strategy in place. If your top performers see a future with you,
they are more likely to stay with you.

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• Adjusting compensation based on market conditions. Compensation management

makes it easy to create incentives-based compensation that rewards people for real results and
drives retention. Consistently research what the market is paying for specific positions. Remember,
compensation localization is important to consider when going into a new geography. You can get
out in front of pay discussions before dissatisfaction sets in and turnover occurs. Employees are
also more likely to stay with your company if they believe they are being compensated fairly.
• Developing people from within. New strategies may mean that your people need new skills.
Learning management can get employees up to speed. Formal training may help cover the big gaps,
but you also need to foster a collaborative culture. Informal sharing of information creates a culture
of day-to-day learning in the workplace that improves employee performance. Through mobile
applications, you can also ensure that people get the information and training they need on the go.
Utilize analytics to measure the effectiveness of your learning initiatives, and adapt as necessary.
• Keeping people engaged. People are naturally social creatures. They also want to have some
kind of influence on what happens in their work. Collaboration tools, such as SAP Jam, open up
opportunities for employees to engage with one another, sharing expertise from the road.
Whether employees need to find a subject matter expert on the other side of the building or in an
office in the next state, social tools make collaboration easy.

EFFICIENCY: GETTING THE MOST FROM YOUR MILEAGE

In most companies, budgets have been tight for years. Doing more with less has become business
as usual, and in some cases, you may have had to operate on nothing more than gas fumes. The
automation of manual processes can reduce costs and cycle times for many talent initiatives but
can also deliver value in ways that go far beyond efficiency and cost control.

• Knowing the channels that lead to quality hires. Quality hires become more important as
your business tries to do more with less. Using recruiting tools and market research, determine
which channels provide the highest-quality applicants. You don’t want to waste money on
channels that deliver mediocre applicants, especially when dollars are tight. Understand that
you have to invest in managing your strategy up front; hiring low-quality candidates results in
increased costs due to inefficiencies, disruption, and future recruiting.
• Providing feedback so people grow and don’t repeat mistakes. As a small business,
you don’t have time to make the same mistakes over and over. Through effective goal manage-
ment, you can track when goals and tasks get off track. Documenting the issues allows you to
create a history with specific employees, projects, and markets. The individual employee will grow
from the experience. Employees who are also sharing best practices can improve the overall
performance of the team.
• Reducing errors. Data-entry errors in a budget spreadsheet can cause headaches for the
business or, in the worst cases, compliance problems. Compensation management technology
makes it impossible for a small change in a formula to create a financial and employee relations
catastrophe. Driving accuracy increases efficiency, and your business can make decisions
knowing that you’ve reduced the risk.

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• Staying connected with the organization. Business is running anytime, anywhere. Big
efficiency drivers include on-demand access using multiple devices, such as mobile phones, that
cloud-based talent solutions offer. Logging in from anywhere means you can respond faster to
the business. Access the company’s organizational chart to find and locate people quickly.
Connect with a job candidate on LinkedIn or approve someone’s raise quickly and easily. You can
also stay connected with your people and projects through mobile social learning. Break learning
out of the classroom through wikis, portals, and mobile training modules.
• Developing tomorrow’s rock stars and leaders. Identify your top performers early and
often. Instead of facing the costs of replacing great talent, have frank conversations with them
about how they can fit into the company’s future success. If budget means you can’t reward
financially, reward through development perks and flexible programs. Using integrated develop-
ment tools can allow these key performers to maximize their impact. For example, leaders can
benefit from coaching that comes through online best practices, not just in-person sessions. Also,
know a leaky engine when you have one. Poor performers can cost more time and money than
you would like.
• Integrating core HR data with talent management initiatives. Leaders in small to
medium-size businesses need to increase efficiencies wherever they can. When you integrate
your core HR data with solutions for other talent management initiatives — such as performance
and goals, compensation, learning, and social collaboration — you create a full 360-degree view
of the workforce and can make faster, more-informed decisions.
• Helping people find information on demand. Information sharing is critical to an organiza-
tion’s success, especially in a fast-paced environment. Just-in-time learning means that people
have to have collaboration tools at their fingertips to get the information they need at the moment
they need it. Through sharing, expertise isn’t locked in a corner office but instead is available
through your network. Build an internal crowdsourcing culture by granting access to your teams.

INNOVATION: CHANGING THE WAY YOU TRAVEL

Building your company through innovation changes the nature of your business. If you’re building
the future of your business by developing a big idea or a breakthrough product, your success
hinges on your people. Innovation doesn’t happen because you say, “Today, I’m going to innovate.”
It happens because someone sees a problem or an opportunity for improvement that hasn’t been
tapped into. A light bulb goes on. Your people will be the ones who identify these solutions and put
innovation into practice. Will your company be using new types of fuel for power, or will you be
replacing roads entirely? Beyond roads, we navigate the sea, air, and space. There are so many
ways to change your business; you’ll draft maps with new destinations in the market.

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Even if you can’t schedule when that next great idea comes along, you can proactively foster
innovative thinking in the culture and structure of your business.

• Unleashing innovation by creating a single source of truth. An ideal culture of innova-

tion can best occur once your company data and processes are streamlined and efficient. When
you integrate employee data across your entire ecosystem, you provide a foundation for innova-
tion and create a “single source of truth” for quality data. Further integrate your core HR and
talent management data with third-party solutions for payroll, benefits, ERP, and time manage-
ment solutions to create easy, fast, and cost-effective access to data and reports, all on a single
global platform.
• Hiring the right people for innovation. In order to innovate, you have to find those people
who will challenge and change your business. You will know whether you need to tap academic
institutions for scientific talent or the social web to hire creative talent. Recruiting processes tied
to future needs will help you identify candidates with the cultural qualities you want to cultivate in
an innovative environment.
• Developing skills internally. Building innovative thinking in your organization requires exercise.
Development programs can foster continuous learning and provide challenging problems that
shift the way your employees think. Just shifting the context surrounding a problem can bring to
light new answers and solutions. Changing the dynamic on a regular basis will encourage people
to think beyond the issues presented and toward the possibilities. Developing people is ensuring
that your business won’t run out of gas when implementing innovative practices.
• Compensating people to reward innovation. Meaningful compensation plans articulate
how you reward not just the work someone does today but the work you want them to develop
in the future. In order for someone to step away from their day-to-day tasks, they have to know
that innovative thinking is encouraged and that adopted recommendations are rewarded.
Outlining how you incentivize innovation will drive engagement, incite performance, and foster
retention of your top talent.
• Understanding risks from skills gaps. To stay competitive, you have to not only deliver
what is required today but also maneuver to position yourself as an innovative leader in your
market. Succession management will be critical to identifying the gaps in talent that will hinder
you from innovating and from differentiating yourself in the future. Without filling those skills gaps,
either through development or recruiting, you run the risk of not being able to respond when
things change. Some products become obsolete with innovation, so you have to be ready to
make shifts. Think of the people needed to innovate from tape decks to CD players, then to
MP3 devices.
• Getting people to work together. Use social collaboration tools to break down silos by
encouraging sharing and collaboration. You’re essentially taking your company culture online.
Social tools also increase the effectiveness of talent processes, such as learning and onboarding.
The informal nature of social collaboration software encourages creativity and teamwork —
qualities that many employees love about small businesses.

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CONCLUSION: WHY SUCCESSFACTORS?

Regardless of the needs driving your business, effective talent management can set you apart from
your competitors. In the same way that the GPS system in your car directs you to your destination,
the SuccessFactors Business Execution (BizX) Suite can get you where you want to go.

You will have tools and best practices available so you don’t get lost on your talent journey. Our
solutions for SMBs include:

• Employee Profile: Creating a complete talent inventory enables you to make decisions about
your teams quickly. SuccessFactors Employee Profile allows you to capture input from employees
to help you put the right people in place throughout your organization. You’ll have the right talent
ready no matter what your next business move is.
• Performance & Goals: Performance and goal management is important to maintaining
alignment between individual employee goals and company objectives. SuccessFactors trans-
forms the performance appraisal process from a time-consuming paper-based approach to an
effective performance review cycle. SuccessFactors also allows for easy maintenance and
tracking of goals, driving employee productivity and encouraging accountability.
• Compensation: Even when things are tight, it’s still crucial that you reward the work that
delivers business results. Through SuccessFactors, you can put a pay-for-performance strategy
in place. Motivating your team by having a meaningful rewards system drives engagement and
demonstrates how alignment with the business leads to success. Plus, you can make the best
use of limited budgets.
• Recruiting: Now is the time to hire the right people with the qualities needed to drive your
business. With SuccessFactors, you can inexpensively manage the pursuit and acquisition of top
candidates faster than ever. The system also allows for total talent management integration,
linking your recruiting process to your overall strategy.
• Learning: Learning in business today combines formal, social, and extended learning. In
addition to ensuring compliance and regulatory requirements, SuccessFactors Learning provides
unprecedented content management, reporting, and analytics. SuccessFactors Learning also
supports mobile devices — ensuring a convenient and easy way to deliver and administer
learning on the go.
• Succession & Development: The future of your business depends on having the right people
in the right place. These people can maximize their impact on the business, and as a leader, you
need to build bench strength for success. Proactive succession planning allows you to identify
not just high performers but the quality people who will lead the business in the future.

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• SAP Jam: SAP Jam’s power to drive collaboration and sharing can transform your organization.
You can improve business execution through SAP Jam’s ability to revolutionize social learning,
onboarding, and other talent processes. Employees have the power to find relevant content and
expertise within the organization with this sharing platform. You also change the dynamic of
teamwork, encouraging discussion and learning among employees.
• Employee Central: SuccessFactors Employee Central provides a single employee global
system of record that’s deployed in the cloud and brings greater workforce visibility to small and
medium-size businesses. HR can quickly integrate workforce data from the SuccessFactors BizX
Suite as well as from third-party systems, such as payroll, benefits, and time and attendance.
With data supported by employee and manager self-service, HR can pull real-time reports with
accurate workforce data to make informed talent decisions.

Optimize performance for growth, expansion, efficiency, and innovation using the tools right at your
fingertips. Business execution requires you to be in the driver’s seat, planning and reacting to the
changes you see in your business. Through total talent management, managers will encourage high
performance, idea generation, knowledge sharing, and even some experimentation. It’s time to
check the tire pressure, gas up the tank, and buckle your seat belts. And don’t forget,
SuccessFactors roadside assistance is always available. Navigate your business on the path to
success and enjoy the ride.

About SuccessFactors
SuccessFactors, an SAP company, is the leading provider of cloud-based Business Execution
Software, which drives business alignment, optimizes workforce performance, and accelerates
business results. SuccessFactors customers include organizations of all sizes across more than 60
industries. With approximately 15 million subscription seats globally, we strive to delight our
customers by delivering innovative solutions, content and analytics, process expertise, and best
practices insights. Today, we have more than 3,500 customers in more than 168 countries using our
application suite in 35 languages.

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SuccessFactors
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PHONE    650 645 2000
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