Published : 4 years ago, on 23/12/2020

By Sarah Danzl, Head of global communications at Degreed, discusses the business case for career mobility.

A recurring theme throughout the coronavirus crisis was the need for greater agility and responsiveness. Simply put, business leaders couldn’t predict what was on the horizon so they needed their people to adapt quickly to all sudden changes. As a result, internal mobility came to the forefront as a way of redeploying workers to where they were needed most. Cabin crew were upskilled for healthcare roles, staff were shared across grocery retailers and restaurants, and researchers sprung into action to find treatments and support testing.

The demand for mobility will only increase as we move into 2021. Recovery hinges on high productivity, responsiveness, and navigating a difficult economic climate. Workforces will have to achieve more, with less headcount, and leaders will have to make the most of every worker. Internal mobility is a key component of this.

Internal mobility in-action

Many organizations looked for innovative ways to plug their immediate skills gaps in the wake of the pandemic. Others had to grapple with a surplus of workers. A lot of cross-company, cross-sector collaboration, therefore, occurred – such as British Airways supporting the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) with first-aid trained cabin crew. UK supermarket Tesco, meanwhile, took on (and reskilled) more than 45,000 restaurant workers to meet sudden demands for its in-store groceries and online shopping.

Some of this mobility was spearheaded by workers themselves. Researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts who found their projects stalled due to COVID, instead offered their help in detecting positive COVID cases.

How internal mobility works

Internal mobility works to direct talent to high-demand projects when demand falls in their current business area. It is a valuable tool for ensuring workers remain challenged, fully utilized, and retained when demand changes. However, for internal mobility to be successful, it has to be worker-centric. Careers are very personal things. So, any opportunities offered must match-up with an individual’s career goals and interests.

The benefits of improving mobility

84% of business leaders view workforce agility as extremely important to the future success of their organisation. However, currently, only 39% of them feel their workforce is agile. By improving internal mobility, leaders can boost their workforce agility and better prepare for sudden events.

Having an effective internal mobility strategy will also improve skills utilisation. This is vital at a time when many organisations have implemented hiring freezes and, therefore, need to make the most of their existing workforce. Plus, 40% of workers feel that their skills are underutilised, and this can have a detrimental impact on their job satisfaction and retention.

Providing work opportunities that engage every worker’s full skills will boost their productivity and it will also consistently challenge and grow their abilities. This will prove particularly beneficial for firms with a young workforce. 87% of Millennials rank learning and career growth opportunities as important when deciding on an employer.

Sarah Danzl

There are financial benefits too. Organisations with effective internal mobility processes are six times more likely to report higher shareholder returns compared to those without. Being able to quickly redeploy workers to where they’re needed most, helps a company outperform its competitors.

How to get started

With all of this in mind, how can business leaders get started with improving their internal mobility?

There are three areas to begin with:

1. Improving skills visibility (through analysing the right data).
2. Changing the culture around how work gets done.
3. Gaining individual buy-in through a person-centred approach.

Skills visibility: 53% of business leaders feel that the inability to identify the skills their organisation needs is the number one impediment to workforce transformation. 31% report that they have no way to identify market-leading skills. Without the right skills data, business leaders will be running blind with no effective way of redeploying talent.

To improve skills visibility, having an up-to-date record of all worker skills is essential. This goes beyond a CV, to having a comprehensive overview of what skills a worker has now, what they are currently building, and what they plan to develop. This can be achieved through consolidating all different sources of skill data, from recruitment to HR and learning system data.

Cultural change: For internal mobility to be effective, everyone needs to be on-board including hiring and people managers. There can be a risk of ‘talent hoarding’ – where managers are tempted to keep hold of their best team members. However, this can have the opposite effect where workers leave because of a lack of career opportunities.

Additionally, managers must be encouraged to move beyond traditional recruitment when work needs to be done. Instead, hiring managers must understand that there are many ways to get a task or project completed – mobilising an existing worker, through stretch assignments and secondments, volunteering, mentoring and even automation.

Individual buy-in: Any internal mobility strategy must place individuals at the core of its plans. Without a person-centric approach, widespread buy-in and engagement will be impossible to achieve. When considering (and communicating) the benefits of your internal mobility strategy, factor in how it will help individuals to achieve their full potential, have fulfilling work, and ensure their future employability.

Long-lasting benefits

Taking the time to improve your internal mobility this year will pay-off in the long run. The workforce is ready to be redefined and challenged. So many workforce changes happened over 2020, opening the doors to greater innovation in how demand is catered for and work is completed.