When employees can't find opportunities inside their organization that take advantage of their skills, interests and aspirations, they start looking elsewhere. (Photo: Shutterstock)
COVID-19 served as a wake-up call for businesses. As the worst of the pandemic subsided, and there was hope of life returning to some normalcy, a new crisis emerged: attrition and labor shortages – what is being called the Turnover Tsunami. Followed by the Great Resignation.
The causes for these phenomena go beyond the remote versus in-office workforce discussion. Employees want more flexibility, money and happiness. And more control over their careers. Perhaps a better way to understand what's happening was captured by Heather Long of The Washington Post when she coined the phrase the "Great Reassessment" last spring. Workers are reassessing and evaluating what they want in a job and career, who they want to work for, where they want to work, the opportunity to grow, and the purpose and the values of the organizations they are working for.
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We can't just administer our way out of these challenges. The pandemic underscored the urgent need to adopt new mindsets and strategies to navigate 21st-century work and careers.
21st-century workplace challenges
The linear progression of climbing up the career ladder – one predictable step at a time – is outmoded. Instead, you need to unleash the potential of your workforce, for the benefit of your employees and the organization. Our employees are much more than what we recruited them to do and much more than what they have been doing at our company. The challenge is to recognize the combination of skills, capabilities, interests, and aspirations of our employees.
What is needed are "careers and skills in motion" – a dynamic approach to helping every employee realize their potential and interests, and acquire the skills and experiences to meet the rapidly evolving needs of our businesses. Leaders and managers need to be able to operate at speed and scale when dealing with unexpected challenges or full-blown crises – such as COVID-19 – as well as with opportunities for growth and innovation.
Emerging trends in the workforce, and the changing nature of work — faster, more connected, more driven by technology – require a new approach to career development.
Your employees want control of their careers. This requires a leadership shift, from a rigid, hierarchical approach to managing talent to one that is built on choice, agency, flexibility, and equity and that leverages your employees' aspirations and interests. Career management is no longer a game of chess where business and talent leaders move chess pieces (employees) on the corporate board. The workforce – these chess pieces – are human. They have aspirations, dreams, interests, potential, and personal lives. The challenge today is to offer employees, business leaders, and talent and HR managers a platform and strategy based on choice, markets, and information, not just administration and transactional efficiency.
When employees can't find opportunities inside their organization that take advantage of their skills, interests and aspirations, they start looking elsewhere — and we are left with the great resume tsunami. An engaged employee – with clear opportunities and agency to grow within your company – is less likely to jump ship for an external opportunity.
Careers are not linear and involve multiple chapters. Employees want more choice in their careers and they want to be able to shift into different roles. Careers are also much longer and often involve reinvention along with lifelong learning. Going forward, career opportunities, both inside and outside the organization, will be less about moving up the ladder and more about moving across departments or functions and acquiring additional skill sets and expertise. In short, career progression is no longer only about moving up, it's also about moving in different directions and jumping lanes in the organization to try something new. So an employee that came onboard as a financial analyst may realize her true calling is in marketing or R&D and want to explore opportunities in those areas.
Business requirements are changing quickly. It's critical to be able to allocate resources to make decisions better and faster than the traditional administrative planning processes. Business and HR managers need to be able to identify future and emerging requirements for talent, and to be able to access that talent anywhere in the organization. Also, because work needs are changing so quickly, sometimes new job descriptions and project teams emerge so fast that the demand can't wait for the area to be formalized.
This is precisely what happened with the development of the COVID-19 vaccine, which was deemed safe and available in record time.
In February and March 2020, when the CEOs of life sciences companies tasked their R&D leads with vaccine development, the lead researcher couldn't pick up the phone and call HR and say, "Send me a hundred resumes of coronavirus respiratory mRNA specialists and technicians." Those folks just didn't exist. What life sciences companies did instead was effectively replicate a marketplace. They identified staff from oncology, from the diabetes department, from cardiology, etc., who had relevant interests and capabilities that could be applied to the current need, and they brought them into the vaccine development program, with stellar results.
While not many organizations face responsibilities of life and death as the life sciences sector did in 2020, most companies are going to face external realities that could change quickly and will require new skills, staff and access to new capabilities. And they are certainly going to have to meet the demands of the emerging workforce.
The most significant shift in how companies are addressing these challenges is through the rapid adoption and growth of internal talent marketplaces in the past few years. Recent surveys highlight that employees report it is easier to find a new job outside their organization, through platforms like LinkedIn, then inside. Talent marketplaces, also called opportunity marketplaces, give companies and organizations the ability to offer employees opportunity, and real agency (not only do they have choice, they can exercise choice as well).
The largest source of talent for most companies may be their internal workforce. A talent marketplace helps companies do more than talk about employees owning their careers. It provides a mechanism and processes for employees to explore and choose options inside your company for jobs, projects, learning, mentoring, and networking. For business managers, it provides visibility and access to employees in your organization with combinations of skills and interests to meet the current and future needs of your teams.
To achieve the results at scale and speed, talent marketplaces today are powered by both the dynamics of marketplaces and the power of AI. The market dynamics are the
- The supply of talent, i.e. your employees and their skills, capabilities, and interests and aspirations;
- The demand for talent, i.e. the needs of your business teams to access people with the desired skills and experiences who can be successful in your company (who better than your own employees in new roles and gigs in your organization); and
- The information and insights generated by your talent market providing growing and real-time visibility into what your employees want and what your business needs.
AI powers talent marketplaces to manage the scale and complexity in a market that might have hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of employees, jobs, gigs, learning opportunities, and workforce requirements. Matching algorithms are a part of it.
A growing part of AI in talent marketplaces is connecting and predicting how employees with different combinations of skills, training, experience, and interest can grow and fill gaps to be better prepared for current and future requirements. AI and talent marketplaces help organizations create the talent they need, not just allocate the talent they think they have.
The challenges being addressed by talent marketplaces and AI are not the same as the problems for which we designed HR and HCM ERP. These systems, obviously very valuable, were designed for a different set of HR problems that were largely focused on transactional efficiency, ease of use, completeness of core data without errors, and monitoring compliance with internal requirements and external regulations. Talent markets are designed for the flow of work, jobs, and their integration with the lives of our employees and business requirements. They are not about transactions, but about relationships, flows, and results.
The great resignation, or the great reassessment, are harbingers of what's coming in the 2020s. Talent marketplaces need to be on the front burner in 2022 as a priority to position companies to dynamically manage evolving workforce expectations, changing work requirements, and the growing needs of our businesses to access, redeploy, and develop the talent we need to grow.
Jeff Schwartz is vice president of insights and impact at Gloat and a pioneering force in the field of workplace transformation. Prior to joining Gloat, Schwartz was a principal with Deloitte Consulting LLP for 20 years, most recently as a founding partner of Deloitte's Future of Work practice.
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