Mobilizing Talent After a Disruption

Steven forth is a co-founder of Ibbaka. See his skill profile.

Covid 19 has been a difficult time for most of us, even if we have not had to experience it directly. That experience is changing us as people. It has had an impact on how we work, what we value, and how we sustain the most important relationships in our lives. It will change how we think about our work and with that will come changes to human resources and talent management.

Share your thoughts on how HR and talent management will change

One theme that has emerged in our conversations with our customers is that talent mobility is going to be more important than ever. Talent mobility is the ability of people inside an organization to move from one job track to another and to take on different roles. Rather than going outside and hiring to build new capabilities, talent mobility encourages organizations to look inside first. There are often people inside your organization who have the skills or potential skills needed to build the new capability. Of course, without a skill and competency management system they will be invisible to you.

Why is talent mobility emerging has a critical part of the conversation? There are three immediate forces diving this: a changing business environment, workstyle changes and evolving aspirations. Longer term, demographic shifts are also making internal mobility critical to success.

Business changes (external drivers)

Covid 19 has taught (or reminded) all of us just how rapidly the business environment can change and that building an organization that can only perform in calm waters is a strategy for failure. As HR and talent leaders we need to build organizations that are resilient, able to adapt and agile. Talent mobility is a foundation for all of this.

Resilient organizations are those that can return to normal after a distortion. The idea comes from the work of the great systems ecologist C.S. Holling.

Adaptive organizations are able to change. Beyond this, they have the systems that enable change built into them and are able to disrupt themselves.

Agile organizations are able to both right themselves quickly and to change quickly.

Why is talent mobility a core capability enabling resilience, adaptation and agility?

Resilience requires that people be able to fulfill more than one role (this is one reason role design is more important than job design). One of the best ways to enable this is to let people play different roles in parallel and to test out different roles without having to commit to a job.

For adaptation, people need to be able to move into new roles, including roles that may not have existed before the change. Trying to do this through new hires, where people have not built trusting relationships, is a high risk approach.

In an agile organization people can move quickly between different roles, pick up new skills and find ways to apply them.

Skill and competency management systems are critical enablers of all three.

Workstyle changes (internal drivers)

During social isolation people have had to not just work at home but socialize online. This morning I watched my wife’s choir rehearse together on Zoom. My eight year old granddaughter has been hosting online meetings for the play she is producing with her cousins. I often have a Google hangout open so that my colleagues and I can chat and trade ideas while we work in our kitchens and home offices (or I suspect in bed for some of those early morning meetings).

Working in physical isolation, many of us are getting better at social collaboration.

These new skills can all add to resilience, adaptation and agility. We should not let them atrophy.

Working in physical isolation is stressful but it can also be liberating. Many of us will not want to lose the flexibility we have working at home when we are back in our offices.

People’s aspirations

Ibbaka’s research on pricing and value has found some important changes in value drivers. During a time of stress, community and emotional value drivers become more important. See Customer value and pricing scenarios (managing in a time of uncertainty). I suspect the same is true for us in our work relationships. In a time of uncertainty we want stronger and more meaningful relationships. Our workplaces need to offer these. This will not change once work returns to whatever the new normal will be.

Workforce demographics

Longer term, workforce demographics will change how we think about capability development in ways that impact HR and talent management. We are working longer and longer. People entering the workforce today will in many cases work into their seventies. They will want to have more than one career. Careers and roles will overlay each other. Our careers will be more like braids than stairs.

For the millennial generation (I have three millennial children in professional or management roles) the Covid 19 experience will likely be a formative experience, one that will color how they think about work for the rest of their lives.It will have a long term impact. It is possible that work experience during Covid 19 will ripple out across the years. The shift to emotional and community values could be enduring.

Designing in talent mobility

We are not the only people focused on internal mobility. Back in late 2018, Karen Chiang (Ibbaka’s COO) and I attended an event on the future of HR at Berkeley University. The high point was a workshop that applied design thinking to internal mobility. You can read about what we learnt here. The critical point is that talent mobility needs to be designed into the organization. It does not happen by accident.

Skill and competency models are one of the design tools you have to do this with.