Penna Consulting : Are you retaining key talent during times of change?

Maintaining competitive advantage in today's global market place is driving the talent agenda for many organisations. Agility and speed of response to changes often underpin the difference between success and failure. For many businesses, this can mean realigning or changing the focus of teams to ensure business growth objectives are met; often triggering major business transformations that impact entire business units or functions. Yet, as is the case with the complexities of modern business, as one area undergoes change, others may be experiencing exceptional growth, outperforming expectations.

During times of significant change, when faced with the need to cut costs or improve operating margins, the thought of retaining employees may feel counterintuitive. However, for the reason just stated, often as one area of business undergoes change, another's focus may be on hiring more talent. Mobilising 'at risk' talent around the business therefore makes sound commercial sense, but it doesn't happen organically. For it to be successful requires thought and planning with employee engagement and effective communications becoming business critical in retaining and redeploying talented employees that could serve the business elsewhere.

Managing costs is of course an important driver within the scope of change; organisations need to balance traditional costs incurred such as severance, outplacement and loss of intellectual capital, against cost benefits of the changes. Poorly managed change can result in decreased engagement and productivity; survivors who have experienced a great deal of change and uncertainty may suffer from low morale, which can have a limiting effect on the overall objectives for the change. Costs of recruiting and training new employees may rise too, as all too often the damage caused by not managing change well will have an adverse impact on the company's employee value proposition and undermine its hard-earned reputation.

Another challenge organisations face is the very real 'war for talent'. Whilst economic conditions may remain volatile, an overwhelming demographic fact persists; as the baby boomer generation retires, follow-on generations are simply too small to fully replace the numbers, compounding the already all too real skills gap. Where will organisations find the talent to help them thrive in the future? Do they not risk losing hard, or even impossible to replace talent during a change? What happens when the business cycle turns and conditions improve?

Our experience suggests that encouraging talent mobility, as part of the wider talent management agenda is growing in importance for organisations as they look to retain their most talented employees: exploring innovative approaches that help them keep hold of their ultimate competitive advantage.

Redeployment is one such solution that helps employees impacted by organisational change move into new roles elsewhere in the company; retaining valuable skills and reducing costs and, more importantly, increasing employee engagement. It's not just about moving people around either. A well-defined and clearly communicated redeployment solution offers a multitude of benefits to businesses. From a talent perspective, it plays a pivotal role in developing a much more resilient, agile and adaptable workforce quick to respond to changing business needs. It actively encourages individuals to manage their own careers by identifying new roles that align to their skills, experience and qualifications elsewhere in the company, it also ensures that key talent is not lost. This commitment to employees continued success also helps them to effectively navigate change, ensure high levels of engagement and protection of your EVP. Put simply, people stay with organisations that demonstrate they value and care for their employees, and redeployment is a powerful strategy for achieving this.

Penna case Study; Keeping a world class Engineering firm truly world class

When an existing client announced that they wanted to review how it supported those impacted by ongoing business restructure, they were keen to understand how we could help them to better mobilise talent to other areas of the business through a simplified and integrated redeployment support service.

Their key objective was to build a market leading redeployment support service that maximised the probability that employees using the service could successfully move to alternative roles and mitigate their potential redundancy, thus:-

• Reducing the disruption to their employment
• Retaining valuable skills and knowledge within the organisation
• Saved costs of redundancy/recruitment/outplacement and exit services

Our response was to create and implement end-to-end redeployment support that not only provided impacted employees with direct access to redeployment opportunities, but went one step further in providing them with the tools, skills and support to identify and apply for suitable opportunities elsewhere within the business.

The results: 1,036 colleagues were successfully retained, redeployed within the business resulting in £20 million avoided restructuring costs.

Helen Morgan,
Head of Redeployment