My eyes couldn’t have rolled harder. “You just need to get the right people in the right seats on the bus,” said the consultant. We’d already been meeting for hours to discuss hiring needs at the company I worked for, and I knew the recruiting team I led was beyond tired from months of trying to recover from the layoffs made earlier in the year.
As a senior HR executive, the problem, as I saw it, wasn’t a recruiting problem; it was a retention opportunity. We had great employees within our walls, and we just weren’t being strategic in how they were used now and next. So I cleared my throat and spoke up.
“What if we got better at moving talent around inside the company to leverage their unique strengths when they’re needed most?” I asked. Eleven sets of eyes turned in my direction, and while I expected more eyerolls, I was met with (mostly) curiosity.
“What needs to change for that to happen?” asked the CEO.
It was quite a bit, I knew. Luckily for us, most of it was within our control.
A new report released by McKinsey and Company this week finds that attrition and disengagement can cost a median-size company as much as $1.1 billion in lost productivity over five years. Too many great employees find their team fails to meet their expectations—and the price is steep.
This was the start of a year-long project to build an internal talent marketplace that helped us take the skills of our current employees and meet the expectations of our current and future goals. We leveraged four tactics that can help other companies get better at identifying— and relocating—these important passengers on the bus.
4 ways to create an internal marketplace within your company
1. Plan for what you need now and next: Most companies don’t have great workforce development plans. These plans, meant to help a company achieve its goals by assessing the knowledge and skills of the current workforce, should be paired with a prediction of the knowledge and skills needed for the future. This can impact training budgets and investments in tools at both the company and team level. Yet the plans are often incomplete or not fully implemented after they’re made. While often initiated by HR, senior leadership should ensure all levels of management make it a point to keep these plans updated and accurate.
2. Move the mindsets of all managers: Planning may be the first step, but little progress will be made without advancing the thinking of those who have direct influence over the day-to-day—the managers. Our first step was a manager training that provided the common language and how-to’s of operating within an internal talent marketplace. We agreed to use a standard employee bio that looked at an agreed upon list of the company’s most wanted skills. We paid extra attention to open communication between managers, how to identify staffing needs, and telling better stories about what they’re working on. We also created rules of engagement that ensured the current manager of an employee was in frequent communication with any potential new manager whose team they could move to.
3. Create opportunities for experimentation: Before employees even took on a new role, we had a chance to focus on preparing them for what might be next. This means managers must act selflessly and consider their organization’s needs instead of just their team. To motivate managers to develop their talent for another team’s gain, we made upskilling part of their annual bonus and tracked both group and individual development opportunities offered. And to make sure budgets were reasonable, we provided each manager with a list of development opportunities that were free or low-cost, like setting up observations on another team or making them a lead on a project that helps build a needed skillset.
4. Tell success stories: To sustain a talent marketplace, leaders have to get good at storytelling in town halls, team meetings, and one-on-ones. While sharing success stories of internal mobility is key to showing that the system is working to pique employee interest, leaders should also be skilled at telling tales about what their team is working on and the specific skills needed to achieve their goals. At my company, upper management provided tips on better storytelling and shared case studies of the leaders who were seeing success. These people also acted as informal mentors to other leaders who wanted to learn how to tell better stories about the work and their people.
These efforts helped our executive team learn to plan better, target our development, and retain more of our top talent. While some were initially leery of losing their best people, our tactics helped normalize internal talent mobility and rewarded those who became best at it. Now we not only had the right people in the right seats, but the right people driving the buses.