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Insight

Published May 2008

Graybar: Supporting a Long-Term View of Talent Management

Kellye Whitney

 

Today, very few companies market themselves with long-term employee candidates in mind. Graybar, a leading North American equipment distributor specializing in supply chain management, is one of the exceptions.

Graybar has made a habit of promoting from within and has built a comprehensive talent management strategy to support it. Kathy Mazzarella, senior vice president of human resources and strategic planning, took a moment to explain how things work for the organization's 8,500 employees.

TM: Describe Graybar's approach to talent management.

Mazzarella: We're very much into a long-term view as an organization. We like to keep and develop employees, so we need to recruit employees who can develop and thrive, and want to build long-term careers. We need to engage them and develop programs that will continue to evolve as business challenges evolve. Our approach to talent management is very broad. Every year we have a strategic plan as an organization, and we build a workforce plan around our strategic plan. We call it the State of the Workforce report. We do an environmental analysis, which includes the economic environment, industry trends, external factors such as regulatory issues, technology security, overall workforce trends, what we're seeing out there in the world — demographics, forecasts, any talent management best practices where companies are trending. We develop an internal analysis, our demographics, our talent management practices, productivity data and such, and then we try to marry the two. We try to build it so everything we do supports alignment with the business objectives.

TM: What processes or programs have you established to improve workforce performance?

Mazzarella: We do basic performance reviews every year and a midyear review. We've averaged 95 to 98 percent completion of our performance evaluations year over year. Now we're focusing on quality. We use a lot of the report to make sure we have goal alignment, and we are starting to measure employee productivity more in-depth to make sure that any areas employees need to improve, they don't wait too long to work on them.

TM: What special challenges impact talent management at Graybar?

Mazzarella: One of the biggest external factors we have is that wholesale distribution doesn't have industry visibility. There aren't many schools that teach students about distribution, which is interesting because one out of 20 jobs in the United States is in wholesale distribution. It's a $4 trillion industry in the U.S. Of course, you've got the demographic shifts, which everybody's dealing with, and the changing expectations of the new workforce. A lot of universities tell folks coming out of school, 'You're going to change jobs X amount,' and that's very different from our culture. We like to get them, develop people, continue to help them learn and improve themselves until they retire and into retirement. Then, internally at Graybar, many times talent management is viewed as an HR thing, and it's really not. It's a business issue; we just help facilitate it. I've only been in HR four years. I had 24 years on the business side.