Using Talent Mobility to Align Employee Aspirations with Department Goals

Merge to Get Ahead

Table of Contents The Smarter (and Faster) Way to Build, Develop, and Engage Your Team 1

Increase visibility 3

Build a stronger team in less time 4

Develop your team to meet your needs and theirs 5

Engage your team 6

Managers Make Talent Mobility Happen 7

Harness Employees Passion and Purpose to Drive Your Department–and the Organizations–Forward 9

The Smarter (and Faster) Way to Build, Develop, and Engage Your TeamFor most of this century and the last, talent management has been the primary domain of HR. Or, more often, it was a joint effort between HR and an organization’s top executives, who were responsible for the succession planning of other executives. But no longer. Today, managers are expected to track, manage, and report on every part of the employee lifecycle within their own business units.

And it doesn’t end there. When it comes to retaining your best talent, it also means anticipating their future needs and career aspirations. Employees who don’t have the opportunity to grow, go.

Your talent management responsibilities likely include onboarding new team members, guiding development and training, increasing the frequency of reviews, and even succession planning. While valuable, these activities are no longer solely sufficient ways to develop, grow, and retain your team. To ensure your department steps up from “survive” to “thrive” in today’s economy, you must begin nurturing employees in a new way: by helping them achieve meaning, purpose, and career goals not just in support of, but alongside, the organization’s goals. How? By focusing on talent mobility.

81% of organizations actively practicing talent mobilization demonstrate “on or above target revenue growth.1

Talent mobility once implied simply moving employees in one direction—up. But now, talent mobility centers on transferring people around your organization to ensure you have the right team, doing the right job, at the right time, and in the right location. Top organizations already rely on talent mobility to address skill gaps, increase productivity, reduce turnover, and boost profits: research shows that 81% of organizations actively practicing talent mobilization demonstrate “on or above target revenue growth.”2

While more revenue is great for your organization as a whole, how does incorporating talent mobility into your day-to-day management activities benefit your department? By making it easier and faster to:

• increase visibility into the skills of your team • build a stronger team, faster, and in less time • develop your existing team• engage your team

Recent research supports this claim. Weichert’s 2014 Workforce Mobility Survey showed that high-performing companies (identified as organizations with 5% or more revenue increases from year to year) rely on internal mobility to both fill staffing requirements and meet employee career development goals.3

High-performing companies (identified as organizations with 5% or more revenue increases from year to year) rely on internal mobility to both fill staffing requirements and meet employee career development goals.4

Increase visibility

You’re already monitoring your team, tracking their performance, and observing how they’re taking the initiative to grow and learn—or not. But do you have the data and the insight into your department’s anticipated skill gaps? Can you see at a glance how you could fill those expected gaps while simultaneously addressing your employees’ aspirations and passions?

While there’s a growing awareness of talent mobility’s importance in every in-dustry, research by the Human Capital Institute (HCI) found that a mere 41% of respondents felt “well informed” about lateral mobility opportunities within their organization.5 The likely cause? A lack of visibility into opportunities and needs, as well as little insight into how existing departmental gaps correlate with employee skills and aspirations.

Bridging the gap between company goals and employee career aspirations requires focusing on talent mobility as a core component to your overall talent manage-ment strategy. When talent mobility is driving the talent strategy, managers can instantly see which candidates in their organization are available, interested, and ready to help fulfill the department's goals. Instead of guessing which employees are the right fit for a lateral or rotational move based on performance scores, there’s real-time transparency into the proactive linking of employee career goals with departmental needs.

Research by the Human Capital Institute (HCI) found that a mere 41% of respondents felt “well informed” about lateral mobility opportunities within their organization.6

Build a stronger team in less time

You’ve mapped out your department’s goals. And you know which employees you need to make them happen–and what skill gaps still need to be ad-dressed. How are you going to find that talent? Logically, it would be far more cost effective and time-efficient if you could be proactive about planning your workforce, from knowing what your employees really want to do and seeing if the right candidate for that next project is already working in your company.

A talent mobility program can help accelerate team building for managers at less cost, in less time, with more gains to productivity. Enabling employees to move laterally and vertically (up and down), take on short-term assignments, and even experiment with a temporary role within your department gives you access to talent that is already knowledgeable about your organization’s culture and services or products. Your department builds bench strength, employees build resiliency and flexibility, and the organization benefits from a more adaptable, cross-trained workforce.

While talent mobility enables you to be more proactive around filling skill gaps, it doesn’t replace external recruiting; it actually enhances it. While some positions are best filled by new blood, others are ideally suited for internal candidates. By having both external recruiting and internal talent mobility in your toolbox, you can move faster to meet project deadlines, create new products or services, or ramp up production. And research shows time and time again that organizations—and departments—which practice internal talent mobility in tandem with external recruiting accomplish revenue goals faster and more consistently:

• According to Bersin, “one of the biggest success-drivers in enduring orga-nizations is their ability to rapidly and transparently move people from role to role and function to function as business needs change.”8

According to Bersin, “one of the biggest success-drivers in enduring organizations is their ability to rapidly and transparently move people from role to role and function to function as business needs change."7

Develop your team to meet your needs and theirs

Employee learning has moved from the physical, onsite classroom to the online, in-house university. Training is now embedded, on-demand, relevant to the job, social, and collaborative.9 Yet while 48% of organizations sur-veyed frequently offer formal job training, only 16% offer mobility opportuni-ties—e.g., task or job rotation—as an active part of development plans.10

While 48% of organizations surveyed frequently offer formal job training, only 16% offer mobility opportunities—e.g., task or job rotation—as an active part of development plans.11

The problem? While the above activities fulfill one aspect of Bersin’s four E’s of continuous learning—education—they don’t nurture the remaining three. But talent mobility does. By providing lateral, rotational, or project-based opportunities, managers can nurture all components of continuous learning, including experience, exposure, and environment.

The past decade has shown that encouraging employees to advocate for their own development experiences not only increases the meaning of those experiences, but also nurtures engagement. Talent mobility supports a self-driven learning culture by enabling employees to identify new roles and projects that align with their goals. With talent mobility, while employees need access to information about opportunities, they must also act on those opportunities. Tangentially, as high-performing, high-potential employees will be more likely to take initiative in finding those lateral opportunities, talent mobility also provides a shortcut to identifying candidates suitable for more traditional vertical succession.

Engage your team

Engagement is still the biggest driver of productivity, performance, and retention.But when it comes to engagement, the game is always changing. And as the competition for talent increases, the stakes become higher. Translation? Keeping your great, or even merely good, employees engaged is going to require more than training, rewards, and reviews.

Along with meaning and career goal fulfillment, employees today want leader-ship opportunities. Yet even with Baby Boomers retiring, there aren’t enough of those opportunities for everyone. It’s a Catch 22: organizations have growing leadership gaps, yet those willing to lead may not yet be ready to do so. The impact can be devastating to both engagement and growth.

Enter talent mobility. According to the Towers Watson 2014 Global Workforce Study, surveyed employees listed “career advancement opportunities” as the second-highest reason to stay at their organization.13 (Incidentally, improved career opportunities are also a significant reason employees seek work outside their current company.)14 And Randstad Sourceright calls mobility a “carrot,” emphasizing that offering employees relocation or new projects can go a long way toward nurturing employee engagement.15

When it comes to engagement, it no longer works to impose department goals on employees without considering their aspirations.

The new conversation is vastly different: What are you going to do for me if I do well? Why should I stay? Do I have a future here? What is your plan for me?

The takeaway? Via talent mobility, you can keep your team more engaged—and actively loyal—by showing you’re less a superior and more a partner, committed to helping them fulfill their career interests and passions.

Randstad Sourceright calls mobility a “carrot,” emphasizing that offering employees relocation or new projects can go a long way toward nurturing employee engagement.12

Managers Make Talent Mobility HappenDeploying a talent mobility strategy takes time. And it isn’t easy. Talent mobility research by the Human Capital Institute found that “82% of organizations do not provide incentives to support, promote, or encourage Talent Mobility practices among management.”16

So how can you practice talent mobility within your own team? Take inspiration from talent management guru Josh Bersin, who says that while CEOs, investors, and marketers have a key role to play in the organization’s success, “when it comes to building products and offerings, serving clients, and developing inter-nal processes, middle managers make things happen.”18

Start making talent mobility happen with these five steps:

1. Understand what talent you have and what talent you’re going to need. This is a case of know thyself—your department—first. Take a good look at employee training, performance, and goals, and work to correlate those with anticipated departmental skill gaps. Take into consideration the finan-cial and performance record of the department as a whole. The advantage to starting early? By leading the charge, you reap the benefits of talent mobility first.

…while CEOs, investors, and marketers have a key role to play in the organization’s success, “when it comes to building products and offerings, serving clients, and developing internal processes, middle managers make things happen."17

2. Appreciate—and apply—the power of analytics. Making talent mobility work for the long term takes consistent measuring, reporting, analyzing, and adjusting. To do that, you must have powerful analytics tools, the kind that not only aggregate the data but help you—and your C-suite—see at a glance what’s working, what’s not, and how to fix it. Even better, your analytics solution should include predictive capabilities designed to map not just possible - but probable - outcomes and the factors, in detail, that may increase or decrease success.

3. Increase your fluency when talking about talent mobility, and encourage your employees to do the same. Up to 26% of leaders still can’t “recognize or articulate” exactly what talent mobility means.19 Don’t be that leader. Instead, eliminate misunderstandings about talent mobility early on by informing yourself and your employees about what it is, what your responsibilities will be, and what you expect of them. Explore better ways, including technology tools, to increase transparency around opportunities.

4. Lead the charge on letting employees inside and outside your department know what’s available now and later. Be proactive in communicating with employees throughout the organization. This requires networking tools, ideally unified with your talent management system, which can provide employees with information about your upcoming needs, the skills you’re looking for, and what you expect from those looking to transfer into your department.

5. Connect with other managers around skill gaps and future needs. Just as transparency is key to knowing what talent is available in the organization, communication is crucial to making mobility work between departments. A successful mobility strategy has no room for talent “territorialism.”20 It’s a give-and-take activity that requires fluidity and flexibility. Work with other managers to create a vision of the organization as a lattice (not a ladder, per Bersin) and discover how increased mobility of employees, even on a temporary basis, can help everyone achieve goals faster, with fewer resources.

Harness Employee Passion and Purpose to Drive Your Department—and the Organization—Forward

Today, managing your team takes more than a few pats on the back and a learning opportunity or two. Employees want more from you and the organization, including the opportunity to pursue their own passions and purpose alongside your department’s goals. And if they don’t find their career path in your company, they’ll find it elsewhere.

The solution? Adding talent mobility to your existing talent management strategy. With talent mobility, you can more efficiently build, develop, and engage your team, while at the same time increasing the agility, productivity, and innovation of your entire department. When employees find their right career path or job fit, you in turn harness their enthusiasm, curiosity, and passion to drive your department—and the entire organization—forward.

© 2016 Cornerstone OnDemand | moreinfo@csod.com | 888-365-CSOD Stay connected:

Cornerstone OnDemand is a global talent management software provider that is pioneering solutions to help organizations realize the potential of a modern workforce. csod.com

1. Russell, Matt. “Talent Mobility – Essential to Organizational Success.” HRZONE. March 6, 2014. Accessed on March 30, 2016, at http://www.hrzone.com/perform/business/talent-mobility-essential-to-organisational-success.

2. Russell, Matt. “Talent Mobility – Essential to Organizational Success.” HRZONE. March 6, 2014. Accessed on March 30, 2016, at http://www.hrzone.com/perform/business/talent-mobility-essential-to-organisational-success.

3. Ellie Sullivan. “Optimizing Workforce Mobility: Aligning Talent Mobility to Drive Business Results.” Excellence Essentials Presented by HR. com. Accessed on April 14, 2016, at http://www.hr.com/en/topleaders/all_articles/optimizing-workforce-mobility-aligning-talent-mobi_i4x53v12.html

4. Ellie Sullivan. “Optimizing Workforce Mobility: Aligning Talent Mobility to Drive Business Results.” Excellence Essentials Presented by HR. com. Accessed on April 14, 2016, at http://www.hr.com/en/topleaders/all_articles/optimizing-workforce-mobility-aligning-talent-mobi_i4x53v12.html

5. “Set Talent in Motion: Achieving Organizational Success with Talent Mobility.” Human Capital Institute in Partnership with Lee Hecht Harrison. 2013. Page 12. Accessed on April 15, 2016, at http://www.hci.org/hr-research/set-talent-motion-achieving-success-talent-mobility

5. “Set Talent in Motion: Achieving Organizational Success with Talent Mobility.” Human Capital Institute in Partnership with Lee Hecht Harrison. 2013. Page 12. Accessed on April 15, 2016, at http://www.hci.org/hr-research/set-talent-motion-achieving-success-talent-mobility

7. “Talent Mobility: The New Era of Talent Management.” Bersin by Deloitte. November 18, 2009. Accessed on April 15, 2016, at http://www.bersin.com/blog/post/Talent-Mobility-The-New-Era-of-Talent-Management.aspx

8. “Talent Mobility: The New Era of Talent Management.” Bersin by Deloitte. November 18, 2009. Accessed on April 15, 2016, at http://www.bersin.com/blog/post/Talent-Mobility-The-New-Era-of-Talent-Management.aspx

9. Josh Bersin. “The Talent Agenda for 2015: What Comes After ‘Integrated Talent Management?’” Bersin by Deloitte. October 2014. Slide 45. Accessed on April 15, 2016, http://www.slideshare.net/jbersin/talent-management-revisited/45-45_ELearning_Blended_Talent_Management

10. “Set Talent in Motion: Achieving Organizational Success with Talent Mobility.” Human Capital Institute in Partnership with Lee Hecht Harrison. 2013. Page 16. Accessed on April 15, 2016, at http://www.hci.org/hr-research/set-talent-motion-achieving-success-talent-mobility

11. “Set Talent in Motion: Achieving Organizational Success with Talent Mobility.” Human Capital Institute in Partnership with Lee Hecht Harrison. 2013. Page 16. Accessed on April 15, 2016, at http://www.hci.org/hr-research/set-talent-motion-achieving-success-talent-mobility

12. “The Randstad Sourceright 2015 Talent Trends Report.” Accessed on April 15, 2016, at https://www.randstad.cn/FileLoad/Attachment/20150814164313626.pdf

13. “2014 Global Workforce Study: At a Glance.” Tower Watson. Page 2. https://www.towerswatson.com/en-US/Insights/IC-Types/Survey-Research-Results/2014/08/the-2014-global-workforce-study

14. “Employee Job Satisfaction and Engagement: Optimizing Organizational Culture for Success.” Society for Human Resource Management. Page 19. Accessed on April 15, 2016, at https://www.shrm.org/Research/SurveyFindings/Documents/2015-Job-Satisfaction-and-Engagement-Report.pdf

15. “The Randstad Sourceright 2015 Talent Trends Report.” Accessed on April 15, 2016, at https://www.randstad.cn/FileLoad/Attachment/20150814164313626.pdf

16. “Set Talent in Motion: Achieving Organizational Success with Talent Mobility.” Human Capital Institute in Partnership with Lee Hecht Harrison. 2013. Page 14. Accessed on April 15, 2016, at http://www.lhh.be/fr-BE/actualites/Documents/LHH-set-talent-in-motion.pdf

17. Josh Bersin. “Becoming irresistible: A new model for employee engagement.” Deloitte University Press. January 26, 2015. Accessed on April 15, 2016, at http://dupress.com/articles/employee-engagement-strategies/.

18. Josh Bersin. “Becoming irresistible: A new model for employee engagement.” Deloitte University Press. January 26, 2015. Accessed on April 15, 2016, at http://dupress.com/articles/employee-engagement-strategies/.

19. “Set Talent in Motion: Achieving Organizational Success with Talent Mobility.” Human Capital Institute in Partnership with Lee Hecht Harrison. 2013. Page 18. Accessed on April 15, 2016, at http://www.lhh.be/fr-BE/actualites/Documents/LHH-set-talent-in-motion.pdf

20. “Set Talent in Motion: Achieving Organizational Success with Talent Mobility.” Human Capital Institute in Partnership with Lee Hecht Harrison. 2013. Accessed on April 15, 2016, at http://www.lhh.be/fr-BE/actualites/Documents/LHH-set-talent-in-motion.pdf