Why Invest in People? Leveraging Talent to Reach Strategic Objectives

This paper explores what MFIs can do to maximize the value of their people. It suggests that MFIs can maximize staff strengths by hiring right, providing appropriate learning and development opportunities, and adopting strategically focused human capital management practices.

MFIs often struggle to retain their best people, because they hesitate to entrust decision-making too far down the organizational hierarchy and hesitate to share much information with their staff. This practice is at odds with the need to develop employees who can take on ever increasing responsibilities. Lack of information and transparency reduces the employee‘s ability to commit to the organization. The paper recommends that MFIs should:

• Hire right people;
• Plan for future workforce needs;
• Adopt progressive human capital management practices to experience higher levels of employee commitment;
• Plan for performance by developing a robust performance planning process;
• Leverage employees’ strengths;
• Create opportunities for learning.

The paper suggests that MFIs begin with a careful, detailed assessment of current human capital management policies and practices in order to understand what is working and what is not, so that they can focus on the right levers of change.