All businesses want to avoid employee turnover. When an employee leaves a business, it takes significant time and money to train new employees to take their place. It can also mean that you don’t have enough staff to handle demand, or lose key positions that are necessary to the overall function and flow of your organization. And constantly overturning workforces can lead to mistakes, confusion, and overall uncertainty in the company.
Talent mobility is a way that you can keep your employees happy and ensure that their professional goals are being met without leaving your business. In this article, we’ll take a look at what talent mobility means for your business, what types of software can help you create a talent mobility strategy, and the benefits you'll receive, including better employee retention and a loyal, engaged workforce.
What is Talent Mobility?
Talent mobility is the ability an employee in your organization has to move between different departments, positions, or branches of your business. When an employee has talent mobility, they are able to determine which of their skill sets is best utilized and pick the role that works best for their professional growth or personal needs.
Management that encourages talent mobility provides assurance and security to employees who want to explore different career opportunities but don’t necessarily want to leave the business. When managers can understand the skills, goals, and personal needs of employees, they can help to facilitate an experience that moves employees to positions and roles that they feel comfortable and work well in.
With an increasing rise in employee turnover, having a workforce that wants to stay is an important part of successful management. According to Glassdoor, the average company spends around $4,000 and 24 days hiring new talent, and if you are constantly experiencing employee churn and turnover, those numbers start adding up to huge employee costs. By developing a talent mobility strategy, you are able to help your employees find new professional opportunities without incurring those expensive costs that come with searching for, hiring, and training new talent.
How Can Enterprise Software Help My Talent Mobility Strategy?
While you might know that talent mobility is a good idea for your business, it can be difficult to get a talent mobility strategy started. It all starts by gaining an understanding of who your employees are and understanding their needs, priorities, wants, and requirements.
Company-wide transparency and a strong internal network can be a great way to begin your talent mobility efforts. A great way to picture this in action is to put yourself in the shoes of an employee. Let's call this employee Anisha. She is a highly productive young professional and excels at creating professional networks in the office. However, this has been increasingly difficult since her organization moved to a hybrid work system. In order for Anisha to find (and be found) for the key opportunities she needs to move her career forward, there needs exist a systematic and equitable way to connect people to collaborators, experts and opportunities across the organization.
A robust people directory can connect people through skills, roles, clients, capacity, and much more. It also brings the entire organization together, making communication more effective and providing mutual benefits like transparency and trust in both management and employees. By making it clear to employees that you want them to find the positions that best fit their skill sets and meet their needs, you can help encourage them to explore new opportunities for growth.
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Enterprise software can also help you create a people-centered (and employee driven) talent mobility strategy. Take for instance an internal opportunity marketplace. Paired with automated people profiles, an intelligent opportunity marketplace can automatically match people with the open roles, stretch assignments, mentorship opportunities, gigs and long term projects the need to drive their careers (and the organization) forward. Moreover, talent leaders can search across the organization for ready-now talent to fill open roles (internal fulfillment) or empower employees to create a unique talent mobility strategy of their own.
Benefits of a Talent Mobility Strategy
Talent mobility isn't intuitive for every company. Some leaders, who came of age in strict workplace hierarchies, believe that the best approach is to 'stay in your lane' and may even see talent mobility and fluidity as a potential problem. However, there are numerous reasons to embrace talent mobility including: better employee retention, a more loyal workforce, higher levels of employee engagement, and the development of more empathetic leaders.
1. Better Employee Retention
The Great Resignation is major concern for business leadership. Employees that feel undervalued or unappreciated at their jobs will leave to find opportunities that better fit their personal and professional goals. That leads to high costs to replace and train new employees and in the loss of knowledge, connections, and productivity. And it can lead to a decrease of morale in the brand from both leadership and employees.
Talent mobility drastically reduces that turnover that many businesses are facing today. Employees that can move throughout their company to find better positions for their goals are less likely to leave. And that means the costs that the company faces are much lower.
2. More Loyal Workforce
Workplace loyalty on the whole is much less than it was in years past. Rather than staying at a job that they feel isn’t providing for their personal or professional goals out of loyalty, employees will leave to join a new company that offers better pay, benefits, or management styles. That means that today’s managers should be focused on creating strategies that increase the amount of loyalty that employees have with a brand.
When employees have trust in their company to look after their best interests, they are more likely to remain loyal to the brand. If a company demonstrates, through a talent mobility strategy, that they want to help employees learn and grow, that creates more trust all around.
3. Higher Levels of Employee Engagement
When employees feel respected and trusted by their company, they want to put in more effort in their everyday jobs. When an employee sees that they are allowed to move through the company to a position that fits their skills and goals, they are much more willing to put in extra effort and reach their full potential in order to realize those opportunities.
With a strong talent marketplace through the help of a tool like Structural, employees are able to give employees ideas and suggestions for what skills they can develop, what types of opportunities are opening up, and what patterns for rising through the company are available. That leads to more engaged, productive, and invested employees.
4. Better Management Styles
More than anything, a talent mobility strategy is a reflection of management. Is the management in your organization interested in helping employees reach their personal and professional goals, or do they keep open positions a secret and refuse to look inward when there are opportunities for growth?
A healthy management style is one that is empathetic to needs and wants of the whole team. Managers who help their employees grow and find the positions and teams that work best for them are more satisfied in their own career paths.
Building a Talent Mobility Strategy that Empowers People to Learn, Grow, and Stay
You know how, in big organizations, there are so many people and projects? People are siloed, they’re distributed, they’re remote — it’s hard to know who knows what, who does what. Structural solves that. It discovers what people need to know: the roles and opportunities that they didn’t know existed, so they can be in the driver's seat of their own careers.
In short, it discovers the things that help people love (and thrive) where they work. Click here to learn more.
