Many HR leaders inadvertently found themselves heading up crisis management teams in the early months of 2020 as a global pandemic and lockdowns scrambled to support suddenly dispersed teams or essential workers uncertain about potential risks. We have become experts on scenario planning, on handling sudden changes, and on being able to quickly assess situations to help our organization function amidst chaos.
What this global health crisis essentially did is separate resilient organizations and leaders from those without resilience. As we move through the third year of a pandemic and currently face a turbulent economic outlook and talent marketplace, resilience once again defines how successful an organization will be when faced with disruption or change.
What is a resilient organization?
Resilient organizations are those that rebound and prosper after business disruption because they’re adaptive, elastic, and sustainable in the face of disruption. Resilient organizations don’t just bounce back; they bounce ahead. They take obstacles and turn them into opportunities to capture sustainable, inclusive growth. When challenges emerge, leaders and teams in resilient organizations quickly assess the situation, reorient themselves, double down on what’s working, and leave what’s not.
Sustainability has become part of every conversation in every other industry outside of talent management and HR. We talk about anything and it has a sustainable lens on it because the world has some problems that we need to solve in order to attain sustainability. Building talent resilience within your organization is about creating a workforce that is open to opportunities for upskilling or reskilling.
This means asking ourselves; what are the things that we can do for our employees that help them grow with us through good times and bad times?
A sustainable framework for talent resilience
The key to organizational and talent resilience is “grow with us.” We want to ensure that everyone reaches their potential and that they grow within our organization. In order to do that, we have to create a sustainable framework to do it right, because otherwise, it creates a lot of waste.
Consider this analogy. You’re going to cook pasta for dinner and you go to the supermarket without opening your fridge or looking in your pantry. How many boxes of dried pasta, cans of tomatoes, garlic, and so on do you already have? If you’re at the market, you have no idea because you didn’t check at home first. The amount of waste that that creates is exactly what's happening with talent today.
This is something that needs to be changed and it requires a lot of investment and someone to go out and do it. But the people that are starting to do it are going to see the benefits of having that sustainable workforce. How do we ensure that we create sustainable businesses that have the right talent in the right place at the right time, but still create sustainability through that talent?
This resilience is about creating a workforce that understands that they are going to continue to upskill and reskill with the organization and that no one will be left behind because they were not able to upskill and reskill. There's this resilience within talent that they have to understand that they're going to have to play a part in this ecosystem, that they're going to have to be open to exploring new opportunities, to stretching themselves.
How to unlock capacity for talent within your organization
Let me walk through an example of how this works. If I'm employee A and I want to grow, I can grow in different ways. A gig or a short-term assignment will allow me to extend my skill set and expand it. I can manage the risk of taking a new job and instead learn and grow within my organization.
From an organizational point of view, this also unlocks capacity. In most organizations, gigs and short-term assignments tend to be on top of your day job as a kind of discretionary effort. So you're actually expanding the capacity of your workforce by including those. But from a workforce perspective, you're allowing employees to access learning and experiences that they wouldn't have access to before. And then for that individual, that experience is far more positive. Who doesn't want to grow their career? Who doesn't want to have upward mobility?
A November 2022 SHRM Research Institute report, Better Workplaces on a Budget Recommendations, cites lack of career development and advancement as the second-highest reason for leaving a company. If employees want to grow within their organization but are not offered opportunities to do so, they will leave.
And then we have to fill those open roles. Employee turnover costs U.S. businesses $1 trillion every year. What talent resilience offers in the world of upskilling and reskilling is a far more cost-effective approach to help your employees grow and learn rather than starting over to find new talent.
How Reejig can support talent resilience
Optimize your workforce today by understanding what skills you have and where capacity can be unlocked. In tough financial conditions, hiring is typically the first thing to go on hold, leaving leaders searching for ways to unlock capacity within their existing workforce to deliver on their objectives.
Reejig gives your teams the power to manage resourcing constraints and pivot talent to where they're needed most. With 100% visibility into the skills of your workforce coupled with the ability to create project opportunities, Reejig creates a powerful marketplace to redeploy talent based on the skills you need.
Through matching and nudging talent to aligned opportunities, you can unlock capacity, reduce time to resource projects, and increase internal mobility. Aligning your internal jobs and opportunities with the skills you have in your workforce, starts with understanding who your people are and what skills and potential they have.
Results have seen a 232% increase in employee engagement for internal opportunties delivered via the Reejig Nudge Engine.
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