It is often said that it is much easier to get a new job in a different company than it is to transfer to another department within the same organization. Employees today want new and different experiences. Yet most jobs are so specialized that people get stuck doing the same work over and over again, which leads to boredom and disengagement. Opportunities to work with different colleagues on different projects are exactly the type of dynamic learning experiences today’s employees seek. When employees are exposed to new leaders, work with new team members or are able to use their skills in a different context, there are constant opportunities for learning and growth. Not only are new challenges presented in those work teams, but employees also learn from different leadership styles and from their coworkers’ knowledge, skills and experiences.
Traditional job rotation programs have been around for a long time. Their main benefit is exposure to new managers, new teams and different types of work; they are a way of rapidly expanding an employee’s set of experiences in a relatively brief time. To gain the same amount of learning in a traditional role-based assignment would take many more years. Given that today’s millennials demonstrate impatience with the speed of learning in a traditional job trajectory, some organizations have turned to job rotations to provide employees with new experiences. But with recently developed technological capabilities, there are new ways to provide diversity and choice in work rather than rely on traditional job rotation programs.
When Tata Communications, an Indian telecommunications company, surveyed its eight thousand employees, more than 50 percent said they were interested in changing their roles.3 However, the organization’s internal job rotation program could only handle about four hundred rotations per year. Tata Communications also found that most of its departments had a lot of programs and projects they needed to complete; however, they didn’t necessarily have the skills on hand to get them done. This realization gave rise to the Tata Communications Project Marketplace, an internal opportunity platform. The company built its own system to capture the skills of current employees, then had managers post jobs in the marketplace that its employees could apply for.
Now, when employees finish projects in the marketplace, they get rated on their skills, much like the rating systems used by talent platforms such as Upwork, Fiverr and Wonolo. That way employees can shape their internal reputations around specific skills. Employees who take on projects do so on their own time, since they don’t get released from any of their primary work responsibilities. Participation in the marketplace is strictly voluntary, and Tata Communications believes that only employees who can invest extra time in personal development choose to take part. The company also uses this program to familiarize managers with hiring for project-based work. The intention is to train managers through experience to consider what work should be a project and what work needs full-time dedicated employees.
As organizations build new people practices, they need to consider what the employee or manager expects from those practices. When it comes to what attracts new employees to a company, the research is very clear: career advancement opportunities, challenging work and opportunities to learn new skills.4 So an ability to provide employees with a diverse set of experiences in which they can craft their own paths will likely attract the best talent. With the barriers to free-agent or contingent work being low and talent demanding more diverse work, greater choice and the opportunity to rapidly acquire new skills, there is pressure to create an employee experience like that of a free agent inside an organization.
By participating in short-term, part-time projects (much like a task-force committee assignment), employees get to learn while doing real and important work for their organizations. We are strong promoters of the idea that 70 percent of learning should come from on-the-job experiences. We just use the term job a little bit more loosely. When employees are allowed to opt in to projects where they can learn a new skill set, use a currently underutilized skill, or simply work in an area they’re passionate about, they’ll exert more discretionary effort because the work is based on their own personal interests.
THE CORE PRINCIPLES
In Part Three: How to Make It Work, we describe more fully this new talent operating model and the technology that enables the process. This new way of working is based on six core principles, which are elaborated on in Part Two; to be successful at implementing the new talent operating model, it is important to master each of them. These principles are briefly introduced here. At the end of each chapter in Part Two: The Core Principles, we’ve included a section called Perspectives from the Inside Gig that outlines how to put the principles into action from the perspective of the employee, manager or company.
Principle No. 1: You Get What You Give
Most members of the Generation X and baby boomer cohorts have grown up with a management style that focuses on owning and controlling employees on their teams or in their functions. For them, talent sharing across departments or functions is an uncomfortable concept. Allowing greater sharing of talent across organizational boundaries (talent mobility) can create abundance rather than scarcity of resources in an organization. Managers give away some of the time employees work to other departments; they can also get help from employees from different departments. Over time, this swapping of talent should equal out. The talent that managers are able to access this way might have a critical skill set not available from their current team members, but they don’t need to bring in an external contractor or consultant or open a position requisition to hire a new employee for a skill that is not regularly needed. “You get what you give” is one of the most challenging mindset shifts necessary to embrace the new talent operating model.
Principle No. 2: Know What You Have
It’s a common problem for companies not to be aware of the skills their employees bring to their organizations. At best, they know all of their employees’ job titles. And companies don’t take advantage of existing technology to monitor skill gaps and encourage employees to acquire new skills that are important to the company. Human capital management systems have traditionally been matched to an old infrastructure that emphasizes jobs and doesn’t easily illustrate an inventory of skills. An ability to clearly identify the full range of skills within an organization allows talent acquisition and deployment to be optimized by focusing on filling strategic gaps for work that has to be performed today while planning effectively for skills that will be needed in the future.
The talent supply chain is an application of traditional inventory supply-chain management to talent. Supply-chain management is the optimization of product inventory and supplies so that those items can arrive on time and to the right destination. Similarly, a talent supply chain is based on skills inventories and knowing how much to have “in stock” to ensure that supply matches demand. Organizations that deploy those right skills at the right time will be well positioned when emerging skill domains (such as artificial intelligence) reach higher demand than supply. Failure to manage supply of skills efficiently could lead to loss of market share and profits, and ultimately, if a company doesn’t have the skills that are crucial to pursue their strategic goals, failure to thrive.
Principle No. 3: Create a Learning Organization
Given that the half-life of skills is now only five years, employees must constantly update their learning. Millennials have a reputation for wanting continual career advancement. However, when we dig deeper to understand what that means, it is really a desire for nonstop learning and career growth. Being able to further their learning is an important incentive for employees in today’s relentlessly evolving business environment because, without continuous learning, skills easily become irrelevant. However, organizations have a difficult time keeping up with employee demands for personalized, dynamic, ongoing learning and development
