This is how a talent reshuffle can help your company survive COVID-19 — and even thrive

At SumUp, we have been moving talent to unlikely new jobs and projects for a few years now, all for the sake of fast adaptation to changing priorities. In this story, we’ll share what we’ve learned along the way.

Naiana Buck — Head of People LatAm

Talent Reshuffle is the name we gave the process of moving SumUppers around so that they focus — fast — on the organization’s current top priorities. In the unpredictable times we’re all now facing, more and more companies are understanding the importance of reviewing their talent placement. If the survival or future success of your company is riding on a big new project, you certainly don’t want this to fail because the best people for the job were working on something else.

As we’ve been reshuffling talent for quite a while now, we’ve seen some unlikely moves over the years: a Logistics Manager who was moved to Online Marketing; a Sales Intern who ended up in Risk and Fraud Prevention; a Recruiter who was assigned to a Product Development team.

The logic behind it is quite simple. At SumUp, people are not their roles nor their functions, they are their capabilities. So if someone is great at, let’s say, negotiation, they are suitable for roles in virtually any area, as long as the key requirement for the new role is great negotiation skills.

From the employees’ perspective, most SumUppers enjoy the idea of exploring new career possibilities — who has never wondered what could have been had they chosen a different career path? Well, you might actually find out if you get reshuffled.

Here are the benefits of reshuffling talent:

1. People with relevant skills are allocated to the most critical projects and initiatives — true all the time but especially during COVID-19 times; you definitely don’t want to see that critical project fail because the right people were not working on it.
2. Reshuffling talent can happen as quickly as the organization needs it. At SumUp, it usually takes us less than a week to map the critical initiatives and their respective relevant capabilities, identify people in the organization who have these capabilities, and invite them to help us in a new challenge. People then officially move to their new role a couple of days later, after a quick and non-exhaustive handover.
3. It makes employees feel recognized for their capabilities, and relevant to the organization for being allocated to initiatives where they will generate the most impact possible.
4. It promotes valuable learning opportunities for employees. It also generally helps employees develop a systemic perspective on the organization and improve their business sense.
5. It reduces politics in talent management processes. When you move people around because of capabilities they have demonstrated on the job, a proven track record becomes more important than our personal preferences for one person or the other.
6. In situations such as the current crisis, where some areas see their workload drop dramatically, it improves the overall productivity and efficiency of the organization. Reshuffling also positively impacts employee engagement and motivation even when certain employees can’t exercise their core skills.
7. It promotes cross-functional collaboration as teams learn to work with their new colleagues and to appreciate the value they generate even when their technical background is different.
8. It promotes innovation by breaking functional silos. A fresh external perspective, even when not specialized technically, is, more frequently than not, highly insightful.

Weekly meeting at SumUp's Brazil office before the days of social distancing.

If the idea has caught your attention and you’d like to try it, here are 5 lessons we’ve learned while reshuffling talent at SumUp:

1. Ensure you know your talent for real, otherwise your reshuffle program will leave out some very important people. Some companies have complex talent mapping processes, others have virtually none. It’s OK to adopt a simple approach to getting to know your talent. At SumUp, our horizontal structure helps the leadership get a better understanding of who is good at what. We also take advantage of periodic talent development conversations, when everyone in the organization is talking about their skills and plans for the future, as a starting point for reshuffle conversations.
2. When reshuffling talent, adopt an experimentation mindset. Start with a small reshuffle, evaluate results, incorporate feedback into the process, try again. There is no point in trying to make this big and detailed if the goal of the program is to help the organization adapt fast to changes in internal and/or external environments.
3. Know you will get it wrong sometimes — and this is OK as long as you understand the lesson behind the experience and you create an environment where reshuffled people have other meaningful options in case it doesn’t work either for them or for the organization.
4. No psychological safety for employees, no reshuffle. People have to see reshuffles as a fun learning opportunity, not a test that can define their ultimate value as a professional. Employees have to be at peace with the idea of getting severely out of their comfort zone. And, last but not least, they must feel that they can say “no” to a reshuffle invitation if they believe this is not the experience they are looking for.
5. Transparency and support are key. It will be fun but it will be hard, so both reshuffled employees and the company should know this and be up for it. It must also be made very clear what they are accountable for and what are the criteria for success in their mission. This helps manage anxiety and expectations of learning something new and delivering results quickly at the same time.

The more we reshuffle talent, the more we learn about the process and the experience of our people. It is particularly amazing to see talented people learning more about themselves and the impact they can have on critical projects.

In the upcoming weeks, 4 SumUppers who were reshuffled will share their perspective on the program with you: from the butterflies in their stomachs when they were invited to try something different, to the difference they’ve made in their new engagements and how the reshuffle impacted their careers. We hope that, by sharing some of our stories, we can help other companies take advantage of such ambiguous times and become more resilient.

Leave a comment if you have any questions or thoughts — we’d be happy to hear from you!