When ‘Work’ is no longer work

Enablers and Inhibitors: Talent Journey

Enabler / Inhibitor — Talent Journey

Definition

The concept of the Talent Journey will evolve with the rise of Talent Marketplaces. While historically, the journey an employee took through their career was created and owned by organizations, in the marketplace environment the journey will be created by the individual, and validated by the network.

In the future talent market the talent journey will be driven by much greater focus on the acquisition and change phases, which will drive greater visibility and accessibility of all opportunities. The control of the enterprise will move to more open systems of learning, and recognition of contributions.

An individual’s journey will become more open, and provide a lower cost of change to new assignments. The enterprise will become a consumer of the open information constructed through the journey and therefore will need to connect to multiple trusted sources.

Through the marketplace platform, this journey will become transparent within enterprises and also visible externally. In a sense the platform become a passport, providing the evidence of belonging.

Dimensions

Traditionally the talent journey might be defined as an acquisition phase, a perform phase, and a change phase. Each phase would have moments or events.

• Acquisition might include finding, applying, being evaluated, and deciding.
• The perform phase might include onboarding, learning, contributing, and growing.
• And the change phase becomes like the acquisition, finding a new role, applying, etc.

Although written here through the lenses of the employee, every step is defined and accountable to the enterprise.

In this traditional setting, stable enterprises could take time, which would enable their employees to:

• Have an employee experience through their time with the enterprise — structured journey
• Build a track record and trust of the employee — assigned assignment
• Enable the employee to trust the enterprise — especially to enable mobility to new risky areas — CV/Resume
• Have confidence to reach beyond the bounds of the enterprise to freelance or subcontractors — exclusive workers

With a talent market place, there is much greater mobility of internal and external workers across and through previous organization boundaries. In and of itself this doesn’t affect the journey, which has always been built on the movement of people. However we also expect this movement to be in a much more rapid cycle. A number of studies suggest that the average duration of employment will move from 15 years to 2 or 3 years. This speed of change undermines the opportunity employees have to take time over the journey, and employers have to get to know their talent.

Therefore the critical dimensions of the talent journey are:

• The joining and re-joining cycle, the performance / talent cycle, and the time cycle that builds relationships and trust and forms an input to reputation and culture.

Talent Journey in an Agile Environment

The ability to navigate agile environments requires a clear sense of joining and progressing, and evidence of performance that has been delivered through the talent journey in the past.

Therefore rather than enterprise talent and HR systems separating freelancers and employees, and ‘archiving’ leavers, we expect to see much greater integration between workers, no matter their contract type. We also expect to see ‘passport’ or ‘thumbprint’ type learning and performance solutions, issues expanded on in other Enablers, become more important.

The benefits/cost for the individual include

Easier entry into the enterprise, pre-onboarding, and speed to engage

• A potential cost for the individual as the enterprise asks for ‘pre-onboarding’ to be done in their own time, not as part of the working day.
• A potential cost for the individual is to invest into his ability to swiftly manage through the three steps of the talent journey
• Necessity to stay active and be informed on multiple relevant talent marketplaces

Recognition of trust carried with you to new enterprises and roles

Talent built in one environment can be carried into new enterprises

Simpler and lower cost of switching who you work for

• Possible lower cost of being removed from a role, so less long term thinking and confidence in the future.

The benefits for the organization include

Easier entry into the enterprise, pre-onboarding, and speed to engage

• Speed to engage workers across and outside the enterprise minimizes idle cost, and maximizes revenue or time to benefit.
• Recognizing talent from other enterprises means less ‘start from scratch’ development programs, lower cost of L&D.
• Faster time to trust workers means better engagement. It also means there is an opportunity to align with the intrinsic motivation of workers, rather than treating workers as resources to assign and motivate extrinsically.

What will it take to transition your organization?

It is important for an organization to understand where it currently falls and desires to be on a spectrum of levers that impact how the transition to an environment that will be shaped. Below are a few areas to consider and our view on their evolution’s direction from a stable into the agile future state. The future state depends mainly on the business model, business strategy and the market environment of the organization.

The four dimensions, how workers engage (exclusively or as a multi-company), the structure or flexibility of the journey, the choice or allocation of workers over their assignment, and the portability of the documentation which carries the trust of the enterprise. We see a slow evolution of these dimensions, and even in an agile future we imagine the number of workers and enterprises who have moved to the agile quadrant to be small.

The Intertwined Nature of Enablers and Inhibitors

The employee lifecycle by itself does not make an agile environment. Interdependencies with other enables and inhibitors are a given. How you approach the employee lifecycle, influences and is influenced by these — with differing levels of impact. Below is a guide to the relative importance and interaction of both internal and external enablers/inhibitors. Depending on an enterprise journey and current environment this may impact where it wishes to focus to become more agile in its approach to the employee lifecycle.

An agile environment based on a new approach to the employee lifecycle will:

• Consider strongly the reputation and brand, record in and demonstrate an understanding to ensure trust is captured from both the worker and enterprise.
• Recognize that the attributes of the worker come from the lifecycle.
• Both provide and consume the data required for reward and recognition.
• Be enabled by a new management function which will provide trusted information.

Potential Hazards to Guard Against

It is equally important to assess hazards and hinge factors that could disrupt a re-imagined approach to the employee lifecycle in a marketplace environment. Here are some key areas for consideration:

The enterprise will have to balance the benefits of a market enabled and all pervasive lifecycle which simplifies the movement of talent with the advantages of a captive supply of labor which is tightly bound to the enterprise. In the USA, while employee protection is short, there are many talent officers who see much greater issue in the speed of exit when an employee decides to leave.

Talent in an enterprise, and what it means to perform, differs greatly from manufacturing, service, and other business models. The transition to an open lifecycle which is trusted is a significant challenge when enterprises consider what it means to be a trusted worker in such different ways.

The requirement to retain talented and performing individuals may change, from bonus and stock, to assignment choices and retainers.

This model of the ‘walled garden’ of talent, to an open field will undermine many workers who have built themselves a strong network inside the enterprise, only to find the walls opening, and the network outside becoming more important.

Transformational Trajectory

How could the journey from a stable world into an agile one unfold?

The key states and the related activities are:

Environment

• Individuals seeking greater recognition outside the enterprise.
• Increased velocity of leavers and joiners.
• Talent is visible outside the enterprise and performance needs to be managed / remain visible.
• Networked organization depending on trust rather than hierarchy

Diagnosis

• What is the measure of talent, how can that be reflected outside the enterprise?
• Who are the workers that are most volatile, is this choice, lack of opportunity, life circumstance?
• Which workers return from alumni?
• How would the skills and experience of those returning be recognized?
• Which skills are duplicated across the enterprise? Are the multiple groups of workers with the same skills who could benefit from greater mobility?
• How does the enterprise trust, what are the markers, what is the test? Do you use calibration, 9 box grid, performance metrics?

Incubation

• What developments could be made to the talent system to include freelancers and subcontractors? How might this be different by country and local legal situations?
• How might the alumni system provide data and reflect skills and experience?
• In highly networked enterprises experiment with the separation of manager and coach/sponsor role, so the management of trust is done by someone outside the team. This could make it easier to find common metrics and be less parochial.

Transformation

• A talent system that is used inside and outside the enterprise, with industry / widely recognized skill development and experiences.
• New contracting models offer alternatives to high frequency moves, recognizing and managing the potential for the transfer of risk to workers and mitigating it sufficiently to ensure there is no reputation cost.
• New management models supporting assignment working, offering new ways to quickly gain trust in both the worker and enterprise without having to rest on one relationships.

2020+

• Perhaps workers own their data, and its validation by the network, with trust ensured by the duplication of the data — much as blockchain offers?
• Perhaps teams are joined through new transactions which are recorded during projects and remain to enable teams to rebuild quickly?
• Perhaps there are new open learning standards, much like a University Degree is validated by other Universities, which begin to reflect a common understanding of skills achieved and experience earned in multiple situations?

Questions to Get Started

In an environment where many factors are changing at once, here are a few simple questions to help assess whether moving to an employee lifecycle based market is a primary area for an organization to focus on or if other enablers and inhibitors must be addressed first…

Customer / Business Strategy

• What level of agility and flexibility does your business model / your business strategy require from your workforce? Are you facing an increased number of short-term high-priority customer requests? What level of cross-functional / cross-geo collaboration and innovation does your business model / your business strategy require?

Organization

• Do you know what your employees are good at? Are you able to identify the ten strongest employees in a certain area within a day? Are you facing an increasing number of reorganizations? How long does it take to create a cross-functional team to address a specific customer demand? What are the efficiency metrics of your internal hiring process? Are you hiring externals whilst laying off internals with similar qualifications at the same point in time?

Employee Experience

• Do you have full transparency on all open jobs/assignments across the organization? Is it easier to find a new role within the organization vs. externally? How often did you get a call from an internal leader looking for talent vs. a headhunter?

There are 7 other fundamental factors that will enable or inhibit the transformation… View the entire article here