3 Steps To Workforce Agility
What is workforce agility?
Workforce agility refers to an organization’s ability to move people to support changes in the environment. I think of it like supply and demand. Workforce agility enables you can easily move people from one place, where demand is low to another place where demand is high.
For example, let’s look at how automation can impact your workforce needs.
If automation is being applied in some area, such that the people need is lower, I need to be able to move people who used to do that work to a place where they have the right skills and demand is higher
If automation is being applied in some area, such that the skills associated with that work change, I need to be able to upskill people to do the new work, or move people with the right skills to that area
I like to use an analogy of a sports team. Every team has different positions people need to play regardless of the sport. Usually, you try to have some “depth”, people who can play the position when the top player gets tired or hurt. Other times, you don’t have sufficient depth, you need someone with different skills (shooting, blocking, running, passing) and you bring people up from the practice squad, trade, or draft these players. Just like a company is always tweaking its corporate strategy, a sports team is finding a strategy that will help it win against the competition. A run-first offense may become a pass-first offense and need different skills.
Not everyone can be a quarterback, pitcher, goalkeeper, or point guard. But they can build transferable skills that give them the ability to be shifted to where they are needed most. And they can be upskilled to play their new role.
How does workforce agility impact my organization?
Workforce agility does not need to be a permanent condition. It can be a temporary one driven by predictable (e.g., seasonal) or unpredictable changes in demand. One of our customers often has a project that will take several weeks or months that requires additional resources – they simply need to know who can participate.
Take the current situation. Several of our customers serve multiple industry verticals with multiple solutions. Prior to the pandemic, people focused on certain areas and had developed special expertise, and people were assigned to serve those verticals based on the demand they have. Almost overnight, business opportunities in some verticals disintegrated while others went from duds to darlings. Getting people to upskill for the prosperous verticals and products they need takes speed and the right upskilling approach. It also takes decisive executives who can quickly pivot the organization to take advantage of new opportunities without the need to furlough staff.
Others may find that while manufacturing is down, call volume is up. Can you move manufacturing personnel to support the call center or vice versa? Can you move manufacturing personnel from a line that is shut down to one that is now working overtime?
Steps to create workforce agility
If you now believe you need workforce agility, let’s get to the 3 steps to create it.
Identify what each position/role needs to be able to do. That’s a role-based competency model, that includes what people NOW need to do in that role to be successful.
· In the pandemic example, that includes what you need to be able to know about various verticals and products/services in demand.
Identify who has what skills. That’s a competency assessment. This is NOT so you can see who gets promoted… this is about workforce agility. You can’t upskill or reskill without a skills assessment.
Leverage technology to enable:
· People to upskill within their existing role with personalized, competency-based learning
· People to reskill for new/temporary roles with personalized, competency-based learning
· You to explore who has sufficient skills to be moved temporarily or permanently, depending on the need. Our competency development system (the Self-Directed Learning Engine™) has a dashboard that lets you see capability analytics including who has fewer than 2 skill gaps for another role, with sufficiently overlapping skills.
· Using personalized, competency-based learning means they can focus on closing ONLY the delta between what they can do already and the requirements. It’s efficient and optimizes resources – 2 things senior leaders love.
Workforce agility can drive innovation and employee loyalty
Make sure that you make workforce agility a benefit.
Be transparent.
Share changing skill requirements for a role.
Share supply and demand trends.
Encourage people to develop skills for their own role, as well as roles in high demand so they can be used when needed. Inspire them and empower them to assess their skills against current and other roles and be provided with a personalized learning plan to close any skill gaps.
Offer, rather than demand, a move: “Would you like to work on this project for 2 months as a way to build experience outside your area?” or “Demand in this area is going down, but we could really use someone with your skills in this other department.” Promote these transfers as a reward.
A crisis often drives innovation. You may find that people who make the shift find new homes in their temporary roles. They may develop skills they may never have had the time to realize could be strengths. And it will solidify their loyalty to an organization that seeks to find a way to redeploy resources instead of eliminating them.
Check out this article from Harvard Business Review: “How the Coronavirus Crisis is redefining jobs”, with more examples of workforce agility during this crisis.