As HR professionals, we all know (and I hope you truly believe this!) that the right talent is an organization's greatest asset. As such, our task does not end after we recruited them to join our organizations. In fact, getting them on board is just really the start of a hopefully long and rewarding relationship between employees and companies.

Fortunately, there are many employee management tools in our HR arsenal that we can use and one of them is what we refer as employee performance management (EMP). In essence, it is a system designed to help your company and its employees set and align the right expectations, evaluate the achievement of those expectations over a given period, and identify ways to further improve employee performance and engagement.

However, there are a lot of EMP practices that other organizations use but the real question is which is the right one for your organization. Well, as a first step, I would recommend participating in Aberdeen's EMP survey (refer to the side bar to access the survey site).

The survey aims to identify:

* What are the best EMP practices that can truly transform an organization?
* What companies are doing to better align employees to the core mission of the organization?
* What processes allow superior performance and work flow?
* How EMP is becoming a strategic differentiator in the marketplace?

Hopefully, with the knowledge that you gain from the results of this survey, you will be in a better position to formulate plans and strategies and install or enhance an EMP system in your organization.

Remember: finding, keeping, and engaging your employees is now HR's key value added to the organization and hence, having an EMP system is no longer an option, it is a MUST if you want to win the war for talent.