Why Companies Fail at Internal Mobility and How to Fix It

Rea Rotholz: Thank you for joining today's webinar on why companies fail at internal mobility and how to fix it. My name is Rea Rotholz. I lead the learning solutions department at Hone. I will share a little bit about what Hone does and Stacey will share what Pyn does next, but I've been with Hone for about two and a half years now. Prior to joining Hone, I led learning and development at Dow Jones, which is the parent company of the Wall Street Journal and some other media publications.

So I've been on the in house side of thinking about internal mobility, as well as on the consulting side. So very excited to chat more about today's topic. And with that, I'll pass it. Stacy, do you want to do your intro?

Stacey Nordwall: Yes. Hello everyone. Thank you for joining. My name is Stacy nordwall, and I am currently the VP of People Strategy at Pyn.

I've been at Pyn for about four years now, so I've been helping to develop both the internal HR experience there, but also helping to develop and work on the product that we're building, which I'll tell you about later. Before that, I was at Culture Amp for five years, one of the early people team members there.

And before that, I was at another tech startup, so I'm just, an all around glutton for punishment. But, you know. It's certainly a hell of a ride. And Jeff, I'll pass it over to you.

Jeff Diana: Awesome. Hey, everybody. Jeff Diana. I'm the past CHRO at too many companies probably to rattle off, but a few of them for you SuccessFactors where I worked a lot on product as well as go to market and the HR function.

Atlassian, where I took them public and most recently at Calendly. And along the ride, I've continued to spend my time advising companies and CHROs at all stages of the growth curve on a whole host of topics on how to build your businesses and make them successful. So happy to be here.

Rea Rotholz: Thank you.

And we're really excited to have your perspective, Jeff, as we think about overarching themes that you're seeing in today's market and Stacy, your experience with smaller companies and in that consulting arm as well, really looking forward to that. I saw someone chat in wanting to know how you do this at smaller companies.

So that is great. Perfect. My 30 seconds on what Hone is. For those of you, I do see some customers on here. But for those of you who don't know what Hone is, we are a live learning platform that enables companies to deploy instructor led live training at scale. So instead of relying on the E learnings or the on demand asynchronous resources, we actually allow you to train live.

We have over a hundred classes in our course catalog that target the most critical skills such as communication, collaboration, leadership, DEIB, and they're live because people skills have to be learned with other people, right? We need to be able to practice them before we have to go do them.

Everything's run through our in house built platform to make it really easy to deploy at scale. And then we have a team of learning strategists, that's my team, so I'm passionate about it, where we can actually partner with you from the strategic standpoint to understand which classes should I be running, what does the long term learning journey looks like, how do I measure ROI, all of that good stuff.

So, if you're interested in learning more, of course, we will share more information at the end of the webinar. And Stacey, do you want to introduce Pyn?

Stacey Nordwall: Yes, of course. For those of you not familiar with Pyn, we're the employee experience platform that helps you build your ideal employee journey. Through our free Employee Journey Designer, you can map out moments that matter across the employee experience, from candidate all the way through to exit.

And then the best part, you can then automate communications for those moments using the expert written templates that we have included in our library. So Pyn is really out there leading the way to a consistent and employee experience, particularly for companies that have global and remote workers.

Rea Rotholz: I love it. Such a cool platform. The HR technologies out there are so innovative and so helpful. So let's now that's out of the way and you know who we are, let's talk internal mobility. I would love to hear from you all in the chat. What does internal mobility mean to you? You signed up for this webinar.

You're giving us an hour out of your busy day to talk about this topic. What, how would you define internal mobility? Go ahead and chat it in. We can learn from each other. We'll give you a minute or so

making friends in the chat. I love it. So what is internal mobility? You can just chat in whatever your definition would be, and we can read them all together. I'm obviously not going to read them all out loud, but you can skim them. So I see horizontal and vertical movement, cross promotion, moving within an organization, Preparing successors, career progression and movement cross training, absolutely, career development, global strategy, yes, Jennifer, there's a strategy behind your internal mobility advancing career within an organization, Awesome.

Awesome. I love seeing horizontal and vertical movement coming out as a theme. We're certainly going to talk about that today. So how do we define global mobile or excuse me, internal mobility? All of your answers were completely on track with the way we chose to define it. Of course, there's not just one answer, but it refers to the strategic movement of employees within an organization.

This includes lateral moves, promotions, transfers, and development opportunities. So no matter what size you are or what true roles might be or might not be available, lateral or vertical. Everyone has the opportunity to think about development in their organization, and that will drive internal mobility.

Thank you all for sharing your responses and for chatting in. Let's definitely keep it going. So when we were chatting about this topic in advance, we really felt like there was a spectrum of we're going to talk a little bit about maturity. I know that we have some smaller companies represented here, as well as some larger companies represented.

And regardless of size, you might have a beginner organization when it comes to internal mobility, or you might be more advanced. If you're more advanced, please speak up. We'd love to hear from you. There's not that many of you out there, in my opinion. But we'd love to hear from you, and we're going to launch a poll in a second, where you would self assess.

your organization. So beginner would be. It's very ad hoc. There might not be a true internal mobility strategy even if you know it's important. This is definitely for smaller organizations. Developing might be more. You're starting to think about a strategy. You know it's important and you can actually make some movements to define what would good look like.

What are some goals in this area? Established is really when you get at. We were more on the formalized program. So I would say at Dow Jones when I was there, we were more on the established, definitely not advanced, but more on the established where we had internal mobility programs, and we spoke to our C.

H. R. O. about it, and it was a priority. And then, of course, advanced again would love to hear from you. If you're at an advanced organization, this would be a fully integrated approach. You probably have a technology platform that's aiding in it. You have the analytics to optimize it. And. You're just really robust in your internal mobility tracking and offerings.

So we'll launch a poll. Where are you on this internal mobility maturity spectrum? Stage one, stage two, stage three, or stage four. We'd love to hear from you.

What would your self assessment be?

Stacey Nordwall: I hear what you're saying about not being, I don't think I've ever been in a place where it's been established or advanced, so I can, I definitely feel for those that are in the beginner and developing stages for sure.

Rea Rotholz: Absolutely. Okay. Results are in. So, Stacey, to your point, most people are in the beginner or developing stages.

It's probably why you signed up for this webinar. You want to learn more about it, right? So we have a little bit of a biased group, I would say. But we do have 11%, eight of you said established. So if you are willing to share your experience you can always chat in, what your perspective is on whatever it is that we're talking about.

We'd love to hear from you, but for those in the beginner and developing, we hear you, we see you, and hopefully you walk away from today with some tips. So with that, why do we care about internal mobility? And I love this slide because you can steal it and you can use it for your business case when you go back to the office, right?

We built it for you. So here's some of the numbers around why we should actually care about internal mobility, why it should be a strategic imperative for our organization. I'm not going to read through all of these, but Stacy or Jeff, did any of these stats, like one of them stand out to you? We were like, Oh, wow.

I didn't realize that.

Jeff Diana: Yeah. The one that hit me the most is the 21%. We often talk about attrition and we think about attrition of, good or bad or top talent. I don't think a first year attrition gets as much focus as it probably should. And seeing 21%. That seems pretty huge. That's higher than I would have thought.

Stacey Nordwall: Yep. Yeah, that was the one that stuck out to me as well. But I think also, it is important to bring this the stat you have around two years of, to gain the same level of insight about an organization. I don't think we often think about The importance of the organizational knowledge and what happens when someone basically leaves with all of that knowledge, especially in smaller early stage companies like that actually is a big hit to the org when someone's leaving with all of that knowledge.

And then it takes someone 2 years to get up to speed on it.

Jeff Diana: Yeah, I think you're right. And given where we heard where a lot of people are in early innings. On this journey, and that does often correlate to stage of growth of the business, right? Being an earlier stage business, that's really tough because you don't have all the knowledge management tools in place.

And when you lose that knowledge, and you have less folks and you're moving faster. You have that compounding effect on impacting business productivity and outcomes. So it's a big deal.

Rea Rotholz: Absolutely. Those stood out to me as well. The two years I was like, Oh gosh, so many people are switching jobs every two years.

Right. And it's you're switching your job right when you're starting to master it. Probably because you're getting a little bored, which is why internal mobility and development opportunities are so important. That's what I was noodling on when I saw this. So the other thing we wanted to share if you want to go the next slide is just some context into the HR landscape, right?

Because even if you're, you're dialed in here and you're like, yes, I believe in internal mobility. I think it's so important. I don't need these stats. Sure. And we love that. But of course your businesses and your HR teams and your priorities have a specific context that they're working in, right?

So a few highlights just to share and let us know if these resonate with you. I'm sure you're feeling some of these, if not all of these. So organizations are increasingly focused on efficiency and profitability. We know particularly for those of you in the tech industry, Companies have been going through layoffs, reorganizations and it makes it really difficult to think about mobility, right?

HR departments are under pressure similarly to optimize resources. That goes along with the efficiency. Do more with less. We're hearing, I know I certainly hear that from our customers a lot cost effectiveness and short term results. I know Jeff has his perspective, he'll share a little bit more where companies are focused on the short term.

And internal mobility is a bit of a longer term strategy, right? So if you're not going to see that immediate win, it's hard sometimes to prioritize. And then finally, this lean mindset presents as an opportunity to shine. We'll share a little bit more about maybe how you can position this to your executive teams or CHRO about why this can really be beneficial for you.

So that is our context setting. Stacey or Jeff, anything you'd like to add to some of that context that we just shared?

Jeff Diana: I think you hit it really well. I talk about all the time with HR pros, you got to understand the market dynamics and the state of businesses today. The, let me invest for long term benefit is going to fall on deaf ears.

We know we have to do that. We have to be thinking long term, but we have to package and sell things around shorter term business goals to match just the state of the business where investors are, the pressures from boards. Your executives are really worried about this quarter and next quarter, so I thought you summed it up really well.

You gotta tie these things to short term business goals while we plant seeds and do things for the long term, because we know that's part of our agenda is to make sure the business has sustainability.

Rea Rotholz: Any tips on how we might position this aligned with short term goals?

Jeff Diana: Yeah, I think, look, understand your business plan really well, right?

Everybody has an operating plan. They have key initiatives you're trying to drive. This could be, a key pivot in your business. This could be, we've got to get out this key product release. We're entering or accelerating in a new market. It could simply be we're trying to save time and dollars. And so there is we have less people now.

So the cost of turnover has never been higher when we lose people than ever before, and the cycle time to get the right people and the risk of a mishire when we have less resources than ever before is higher, right? Those false positives of hiring is still working on being a science. We all know it's not perfect by any stretch.

So there's a lot of those types of elements that you can pull on that your CFO and your CEO and your business leaders will care about to say why this is important, but if you package it about business and the here and now, you will get traction if you package it around. It's the right thing to do for our people or like our people need this for the long term.

I think you're going to fall on deaf ears.

Rea Rotholz: The hard truth. We're starting off with the hard truth, Jeff.

Jeff Diana: Well, we're there, right? We know better, right? We leaders live and die for today. If I miss a few quarters, the CEO's out, or the salesperson's out, or whatever, right? We know we want a business to be here five years, ten years, fifty years.

But we've got to tie it to things the business is trying to drive here and now. The good news, as you mentioned, there's strategic opportunity to do that. Businesses have to make moves in the short term. That means they typically have to do it with what they have in the building. They don't have a lot of time to go buy net new and resource it.

They've got to play with the team on the field, and most businesses have gone through and right sized their business. So in theory, they've done the work of having the best of what they have there. Now it's about optimizing it. And the one little quick trick I'll give you is. When you sell this about internal mobility, and I liked on one of your earlier slides, you talked about developmental opportunities.

Part of it is not about permanent movement to new jobs. It's around project oriented work, the swarming and SWOT effect of getting different groups of people around initiatives. That is an internal mobility of a temporary type that gives people exposure, make sure they're good for a permanent move.

Gets those organizations that might have that person permanently down the road, a little bit of a preview of the person. So it's a great primer of the pump for those permanent moves that we all know we want to do and are important to our people. But that project swarming is a great opportunity to get some motion around this quickly, given the shorter nature of that and the shorter window that people are focusing on because of the urgency of business results.

I

Rea Rotholz: haven't heard the term swarming, but I like that. It's we're bees.

Jeff Diana: We are. It's you got to swarm. You've got less people. You got to take a little bit of everybody's work, get them here and move them to the next, this, really bright lines around jobs. Just like many of you are in early stage businesses.

No, that, that doesn't come into play. The kingdoms and the fiefdoms and stuff happens as you move much further up the growth curve. When I was at GE, everybody had a lane, right? We were massive, but at my startup days, as it's all hands on deck and that feeds this ability to tap into skills and give people exposure to different things.

So take advantage of that. You may not have all the infrastructure and investment when you're smaller. Right. But you have that type of dynamic to lean in on that larger businesses typically will lose that muscle. So take advantage of the advantages you have, regardless of your stage. There are some.

Rea Rotholz: I love that.

Buzz,

Jeff Diana: Buzz.

Rea Rotholz: So when we think about internal mobility, the first thing that I think about is understanding. The capabilities that exist within an organization, right? How can you determine what needs exist or where mobility might be beneficial if you don't have that understanding of capabilities?

I'm wondering, maybe Stacy, you can start with sharing, Why is it important to understand capabilities? Do you have any tips on how we can better understand the capabilities that exist within our organization? Would love to hear how maybe you've done this before.

Stacey Nordwall: Yeah, I think, extending a bit on Jeff's point also is it's important, I think, for people to dig into this now because The job market is tough for folks, and I think that means that people are staying in jobs longer than they might otherwise be.

When the job market loosens up a bit, you're going to see people shifting. And so if you are focusing now on, this kind of growth and development, these development opportunities, you are I know we, Jeff said, not focus too much on the long game, but this is our opportunity to be strategic and focus on that long game a bit of, okay, we're going to make sure that we're, growing and developing people now, getting them engaged so that when the job market opens up, we don't see a stream of people.

Leaving and that creates kind of a future problem for us because we didn't focus on it now. So I think that there is that opportunity to really like it's a proactive retention measure right now to get in and start thinking about how we can Be thinking about internal mobility. And so, and of course, all the things we know that hiring people takes more time and energy and you're getting that knowledge and experience loss and all of those things.

So I do think it is a good, strategic opportunity, as we've said and also thinking about, for smaller organizations, you might not have a bunch of tools, programs, all of these things that you can use to assess what skills you have in the organization or what the gaps are. But I think you still have something, right?

You still have. So no matter what stage you're at, do you have people doing self assessments that you can review, performance reviews, 360 feedback? Is there anything within there that you're able to leverage and look at and see where the gaps are or where people might be strong?

Can you just go out and be talking to the department heads? Ask them, ask the managers, where are the gaps that you're seeing on your team? As you're thinking about the next six to 12 months where do you think people are going to need to be? What roles are you going to be hiring?

And start really just talking to people and understanding the gaps. And that way looking, whatever it is that you have, it's like performance platforms. If you go back and look in, in your ATS and are doing searches to understand what skills you have. If. It doesn't always have to be about buying a new tool.

It can be just getting scrappy, leveraging the things you have going out, and having the conversations with those managers and department heads and really understanding what it is. So I think that's been in the past, the way that I've approached it, because I have not. I haven't had the resources or to go and do some big skills assessment or something like that.

So I think it's just, tapping into whatever it is that you have available to you.

Jeff Diana: The Stacy, I loved a couple of things you said, and I think we have to be the don't misconstrue me. We have to think about the long term. We just have to sell the initiative on the shorter term impact because the business is focused there, but we know better than that.

And I think you're right. Okay. When the markets open up the organizations that invested in their people and built loyalty and investment are going to be in the best position to retain their people and attract a new one. So there is the short sightedness is going to bite a bunch of businesses, I think for sure.

But one tip I'd add, and this is something I do anytime I advise. Company is because this skill thing and know my people can be such a daunting sort of Conversation and like how do I really size it up? I will always ask a leader Who out there in the market are we competing with whatever your function is whether it's in engineering or sales or whatever it is Like who are we competing with who's kicking our butt in the market?

Let's start with that Who do you worry about the most? And then let's pull up some profiles with whatever tool you have linked in online. There's tons of things you can look at that says let's look at some of the people inside those organizations and then let's look up a couple of the people inside our organization because now you have something concrete to do some type of comparison with.

And I find when organizations think about. Mobility and skills and what's my competency model and all that. Yeah. Yeah. That can take a lot of work and it can be valuable, but it's a very daunting task. We can make it simple and concrete. Here's some great people of a company that I know I worry about as a competitor.

Out of there people look versus ours. Now I'm grounded with some data to talk about what I might want more of or what I might have too much of or too little of. And it's just a much easier, quick conversation to have with a leader in it. It doesn't take a ton of effort to pull something like that off.

Rea Rotholz: Yeah, I think what you're saying is spot on. You got to use what you have because you're probably not going to be able to get a 100, 000 investment in some new technology platform, nor do you want it because we all have too many technology platforms, especially in the HR space. We know this. I think Josh Burson said we the average HR team has 50 once they hit a certain level.

It's ridiculous. But the other thing I would add, Jeff is. Understanding where the business is going. So I love the idea of comparing to competitors because that's very tangible. You could go do that right now and everyone has access to LinkedIn pretty much. So that's great. But also where are you going?

So one of the things I hear all the time now, as I'm sure you all here too, is AI. AI is revolutionizing our business. AI is doing this, AI is doing that. I'm using that as an example, but whatever your business goal is or vision, your one year vision, your three year vision. That's where you need to start building now.

So if you are going to become You know, a much more innovative technology company. Three years from now, you need to start understanding the current talent and where those gaps are going to be right. So that three years from now, you're not like, Oh, we don't have the engineers to build this new platform.

We imagined two years ago, right? I'm oversimplifying it as an example, but understanding the trajectory of the business and that could also probably help sell it internally to right. Here's how this

Jeff Diana: ladders up to our goals. It's strategy, right? Rather than it's a nice thing to do, we should do it, like then people go, the HR person's being the HR person, right?

It's no we want to get over here. What are the key skills that are going to get us there? Do we feel like we have them? Yes or no? Let's look at some data. Ooh, now I have urgency. I have an agenda and an initiative tied to a business strategy. Now I'm going to move some people and we all know this is a game as most HR work is where we control nothing we influence, right?

We have 1 percent of the head count and we've got to move these things across an organization. So the better you tie to those strategies that people care about, the easier it is to get people behind you.

Rea Rotholz: Yep, absolutely. And so when we think about mapping the capabilities, so let's say you take some of the resources that you have at your disposal that Stacy mentioned your performance management reviews your conversations.

If you have HR business partners, they're wonderful to lean on your interviews, etc. The question is, what do you do about that? Now you have the information and the vision, or, what your competitors are doing. What are some of the things that we can do to upskill, to fill those needs, to make those needs known?

Because that's really the next step here. I don't know, Jeff or Stacey, if you have any thoughts on that.

Jeff Diana: Yeah, I typically start by wanting to, and I think this is. One of my tips I would give to people in general, I think we always want to understand what's available in the market versus what we have inside the business.

So anytime I hear about, skill inventories are doing those kinds of analysis, we always focus on the internal and ultimately it's a build borrow by kind of conversation, right? And so it's hard to do that without understanding the alternative in the market because that really makes your case of if there's very little out there and I have it in here and it's a key skill, I got to do anything and everything I can to keep that if it's in high supply outside, how much do I really want to invest internally in development, which is valuable long term, but takes away short term productivity that time that could be put toward doing the work today.

So one of my tips would be, Thinking about, as you said, strategy of where you're going, key capabilities you need, and then understanding what's available on the market versus what we have inside. And there are a bunch of technologies that can help you do that that are out there. SeqOut's great at that, and it replaces LinkedIn in many ways both for recruiting and internal mapping.

TechWolf is another one like that's out there that's more of a middleware that will take all of your system data and say, you want to do X, that requires these kind of skills, I can map your whole org, tell you who has them and who doesn't, and move you over. So there are technologies out there that can help you.

They do come with a cost, but they may replace some other systems. As well, but I think you have to do internal and external to answer that question and in my opinion,

Rea Rotholz: yeah, absolutely You know, I come from the lnd background so I don't know how many of you come from learning and development, but we Of course are always thinking about how do we upscale our current populations to fit the needs of the future?

And that could be the technical skills because we have this innovation vision, and we're going to have this new product, or it can be the power skills or soft skills because we know efficiency and productivity is really impacted by your manager and the leadership skills that exist. And so there's two parallel paths I think about when I think about upscaling to fit the needs of the future.

One is those technical skills and really. Thoroughly identifying what those are so you can either build or buy right depending on how quickly you need them. And then there's the power skills as you grow, as you shift or pivot your strategy, whatever it might be, it's always dependent on the employees you have in place, how motivated they are, How much effort are they giving you?

How engaged are they? Do they know how to do their jobs? Well, right? So another aspect of this, I would say is the build by, and then if you're going to build, which were, internal mobility, what exactly do you need to do so you can get started sooner rather than later? One of the things that comes up When we think about internal mobility sometimes and the movement, a lot of you said it's lateral movement.

It's upward movement. It's the opportunities to swarm a initiative like Jeff mentioned. But sometimes those opportunities are given to the loudest person in the room, the squeaky wheel, or the person who's already seen as a high performer because of X, Y, Z, and so sometimes there's biases that come up when we think about building internal mobility strategies.

I'm curious Stacey, if you have any thoughts on how companies can really understand how that plays out. a role in internal mobility strategies and anything we can do to mitigate that?

Stacey Nordwall: Yeah, absolutely. I think I, you were saying that it's like, who's the most visible person, right? Okay. That person gets the opportunity.

And I feel like, what I've seen most often to your point is that it's the luck of the draw. Did you get a manager who advocates for you? Did you get a manager who, mentors you are you seen as having high potential or are you just very good at advocating for yourself and being that kind of loud and visible person?

And if so, you're the person who gets connected to the internal opportunities. And I think, And you might even get opportunities that didn't even exist, right? Like opportunities end up being created for you because of that. And I think particularly, this comes into play even more so with hybrid and remote work because it's that much harder to be, quote unquote visible, right?

And so, for the folks who are Hey, I didn't even know this opportunity existed or my manager was never talking to me about this. It feels, demotivating. to not have a shot at those opportunities. So I think a big thing is really just about creating awareness. So it's like making sure that people know about the open recs or the recs that are going to be open, making sure that.

Whatever process you have, how to apply, what's the eligibility, what's the selection criteria, making sure all of that is really transparent and well known leveraging maybe other groups. So it doesn't always have to come from HR, right? Maybe, using ERGs or affinity groups to push out the opportunities and making sure that people are aware of what exists.

Talking about what does internal mobility even mean here, right? Like really having those conversations and making sure that's very transparent, I think is really important. And the other thing that we've I think, touched upon, which I think is important is that. Career, a lot of organizations are moving away from these strict career ladders.

Strict mobility means upward mobility, right? There is this, career lattice, jungle gym, navigate your own path kind of thing. And I think that's great and needed because not everybody wants to pursue upward mobility. And not everybody is good at that. It doesn't, being a good ice skater and I see doesn't mean you want to be a manager, right?

Like those kinds of things. But what I think that means off the back of that is you need to, there's an opportunity to help people understand how to navigate their careers and how to find the opportunities within your organization. So really also making that a part of the conversation of what does it look like at this organization to move around and get development opportunities.

And grow your career and it might not be a managerial role. It might be this, I think to Jeff's point, what are these project opportunities that people can jump on and just to get different kinds of experience? What are the lateral moves? So I think there's all of that really. Just surfacing a lot of that and talking about it more, making it more transparent, using the channels that you have to really create awareness about it.

So that's really, those are the things that I think of to try to make it just a more more equitable thing and to make people just more aware of the opportunities that exist.

Jeff Diana: Yeah, I'd say there's two things that for me that come into play here. One is if you have the ability to be as skill oriented as possible of defining the work.

It does remove a lot of bias. And then you just have to have whatever tools you use, whether it's formal fancy systems or self reported skill inventories type of stuff to take some of that bias out. I'll tell you the one thing I put in at the last two companies that I've worked out that. I think have been has been really valuable for equitable access.

We have committed to getting back personally to every internal candidate with how they stack against the job. And it's amazing when there's that accountability that the recruiter has, or if you have an HR person that does this, the fact that they have to tell the person how they fit or didn't puts a lot of accountability there to make sure they're being thoughtful around it.

And it usually means they do a better job of getting feedback from the hiring manager as well in that process. So just that little touch, and yes, it takes time, and I know our teams are stretched, but by making that one commitment, I feel like you're making more equitable decisions because you're being more thoughtful, but the person in the process is feeling more heard and thought about and cared about.

So there's also a perception here that matters around whether people are treated fairly. And so that one little trick has had a lot of impact in my last two CHRO gigs.

Rea Rotholz: I can imagine nothing would be more frustrating than an employee applying for a job internally getting rejected because an external candidate was hired over them and then looking around like what the heck and then you're super demotivated.

You don't want to go do your same job. You feel undervalued. I can just imagine the long term impact, right? But by being transparent and having that candor and really focusing on here's your development areas and what you can work on over the next year so that you'll be ready in the future for that next opportunity.

And we're going to, by the way, invest in you. We're going to help you collect. I had a boss who always told me you need to collect experiences. So before you expect to be promoted, think about the experiences that are required before you'd be ready to do that job. What are the experiences? Let's collect them.

Let's figure out what those are and how you can get that, right? So you're investing then actually more. In the person who had applied to the role. Yeah, that's an odd. I've never heard that tip before, Jeff, and that I think that's phenomenal. We got a question from Stacy who put this in the Q& A box in the beginning, and I think it's super relevant to what we're talking about here.

And quick plug, if you have questions, we have 20 minutes, so put them in now. Stacey said, would love to hear about entitlement. We struggle with people thinking that the job is theirs to turn down when they apply to an internal position and then are really angry or hurt when they aren't selected.

So, very similar to what we're talking about here. I could also see entitlement being the other way, where people assume I've been here a year and I should be promoted, no matter what, right? I'm entitled, I worked hard, I should be promoted. Yep. Stacey or Jeff, do you have thoughts on Stacey's question?

Jeff Diana: Casey, you first. Yeah.

Stacey Nordwall: I think the thing about people just like assuming, I did everything that's in the leveling structure. So where's my promotion? That is a huge one that people have to tackle for sure. I think that. You know it, and this is really why I go back to the thing that we had just been talking about around how transparent can you make everything?

If somebody comes in with that, they're making a lot of assumptions about what the process is, right? They're making assumptions that it's just a check the box thing. I said, I raised my hand and then I've got the job. Right? And so it is something for me where I think, okay, maybe there's just an educational component or not just, but part of it is an educational component around saying.

Okay, this is actually the process. It's not a guarantee. Here are the things that we're going to be evaluating, a lot of the stuff that we've already talked about, and really making sure that person's aware of what, what's going to happen. And then to Jeff's point, okay, and then we're also going to let you know, If you didn't get it, this is why these are things and we're going to work on this development plan.

So for me, I think, I totally understand that question and have experienced that. And I think it really is about, okay let's go. From the jump be very transparent about what's going to happen throughout the process and what they can actually expect and if try to tease out some of those assumptions and say okay, great.

I'm excited. I'm glad that you're excited about this opportunity. This is what you can expect through the process. So, that's really the way that I view it. I'm interested to hear what y'all's experience has been.

Jeff Diana: I'll add to what you said. I think the energy that goes into building career paths, and that can be lateral, that can be up, etc.

I always focus on a couple things there. One is, The typical time it takes to move between jobs. Number two, I literally, because that's our way to set expectation though. At this level, you're probably here for two to three years at this level. It could be less or more like I want that documented black and white.

Cause I think that helps managers have the conversation. HR people say, Hey, we've been transparent on that with you. The second thing I always put on a career path. And I never let it go without this. Cause you usually get this nice little matrix of the skills and what you need. I literally put at the beginning of every single one, that job movement is dictated by when the business has an open rec and a business need to be filled because you're right, the entitlement, what you get with career paths, as soon as you launch and people are thrilled, they know how to move around.

Then they go, but I check all the boxes. So I naturally get the next level, right? And you're like, no, what that means is you're a really strong candidate when the job becomes open at the next level. And so making sure you never, ever separate that path from that type of statement again. It sounds silly, but it's really important.

And the last thing I'll say is we started doing this at Calumley with every recruit before we made a job offer, the recruiters had to share and walk through the career paths. Because what happens is hiring managers want to just find someone with the skill if they're lucky enough to get them and the person wants to be promoted in 12 months or get a bigger pay raise or whatnot.

Managers like yeah, we'll figure that out when you're in here because they don't want to risk losing the person. Well, that feeds the 21 percent on your stat chart of why people leave in the first year. So we make sure recruiters go through that and say, if this doesn't match your career aspirations, we're probably not the right place for you because I'd rather not have that attrition a year and I'd rather get someone that's Motivated by the likely time frames that we have for movement and the last thing I'll say is have some sense of compensation strategy really well linked to that because sometimes it is purely skill development and career promotion for the development or scope of work, but a lot of times what's hidden underneath that is a comp desire.

To move comp faster and you those things are intimately tied, whether we want them to be or not. So we should lean into that tie and give people a sense of expectation around size and timing of pay increases and mobility together. And that gives us something strong to then hold the line on. When people complain and managers go, well, we just have to do it whether I need the job or not, because I can't lose Sally.

It's nope, not something we're going to do because we've already set that contract up front.

Rea Rotholz: Yeah. And research has shown that people don't often leave solely for comp. If that's really the only thing that, they want to make a little more money, they're not going to leave if they love their manager, they love their work, they feel respected, right?

So it's always, whenever I hear or we see, and you worked at Koltrium for a year, Stacey, whenever we see like compensation come up as, Demotivator, it's red and your employee engagement survey. I'm like, let's peel back. If you're meeting the market standards, by the way, if you're not meeting the market standards, that's another conversation.

But if you're meeting the market standards, right? What else is actually going on this team or with this manager or etc? That we can pull that lever instead of just automatically assuming it's comp. And we had a question about I like this one. Employees. Okay, we have employees who also expect compensation for lateral moves or for jumping into new experiences.

They're doing additional work. They feel like they should be compensated. Any tips on those expectations? I would love to start with this one because I have also worked at a lot of startups where compensation is not a priority. It's not a possibility, period. Or I've worked at really big organizations where it's so over processed that it's also not really a possibility, frankly.

Right. When you look at these, conglomerates. So one of the things that I always talk to my employees about is the difference between meeting expectations and exceeding expectations. 80 percent of your organization meets expectations and the expectation is you're going to do your job really well.

If you truly want to be that high performer, then it's going above and beyond the expectations, which by the way, the expectations are pretty high. So if you want that, if you want that experience, then, and you want to set yourself up eventually to move in your career, then it is important to collect those experiences so that in the future, you can Get that different role.

I think the challenge with the lateral movements is we have to be we have to be really transparent. That's been a theme. Both Jeff and Stacy. You've definitely nailed the transparency theme about what's possible and about if the lateral movement truly is lateral. Why would you receive more comp for that lateral movement?

Right? And having the frank conversation, I feel like often it's like behind the curtain, the comp decisions, I'm not part of them. I don't really know what went into the decision. The more we can share the reasons why as a business, Jeff keeps getting at the business priorities, because at the end of the day, we are still business.

The better it's going to be for those conversations. Anyway, Jeff or Stacey, did you have anything to add to that? I feel like I've had many experiences. I feel passionate about this.

Jeff Diana: Well, one tactic I use, cause whether it's people taking a lateral move or choosing to leave the organization for a new opportunity, I think Part of that is new experiences.

They feel like they're growing skills. They're also looking for comp, right? It's usually in there, whether it's the first or second or third priority. And one of the things I always try to map with people is where are you trying to be three to five years from now? And oftentimes they're trying to get somewhere.

And so if you look at, Hey, if you take this lateral move and you add these skills and you're in that for two years, your next job is here. And then your next job is here. And you look at the personal growth And the cop growth that comes with that, they often will end at a better spot than staying where they are in their particular functional area.

And saying, well, I'm just going to wait here till I move up and get pay increases because they're thinking short sighted. It's what's the return for this next action? I take and most people have a long career in front of them. So, if we can get them thinking about, well, these are your options, stay where you are.

And here is what you'd look like in 2 moves. Make this move. And in a couple moves later, here's where you are. What's better? Right? And I have that conversation all the time. It's what are you optimizing for? Is it scope of work? Is it comp? But you can't look at this move in isolation. You have to look at it with the next few moves that will come after that.

And usually that lateral move they're making for an investment to get somewhere else around their career. That has more longevity to it. So let's look at where they're trying to get to, what will position them best to get there, whether that's job scope or comp, and map those two things for them. And that's often a really good way, don't get me wrong, do employees still want to pay for the lateral move?

Yes. But now they have a choice. You've helped them make choice of you're not going to get that. And if you make this move, here's where you'll get to. If you turn it down because you're not getting pay and you think you're your next two moves, here's where you're going to end up. What's going to be better for your goals with the items that you care most about?

Your choice. You're empowered. But let's paint that picture beyond this one move.

Stacey Nordwall: Yeah, I think to add on to that, we haven't necessarily talk about it yet because a lot of what we're talking about is really getting people to stay, right? To be engaged and grow and develop and retained within the organization.

But some of those frank conversations might actually need to include this organization isn't going to get you to your goals. Like it, we can't actually do. What you want or what you're not going to these next two years, if this is where you want to be, the business actually doesn't need that role.

That isn't going to happen or it's, whatever it is. And that, that I think has to, if we're going to be, trend, truly transparent with people, that's. Sometimes going to need to be part of the conversation as well.

Rea Rotholz: 100%. Isn't it quiet quitting? I don't remember the phrase now, but the idea of if you don't see a career path, you're going to chill in your role.

Right. Is that the latest term? I don't know.

Jeff Diana: I don't know. Someone tried a new rebrand. It's a similar, who's doing the marketing exercise on this. Yeah, totally.

Rea Rotholz: We did get one other question in the Q and a that I think is interesting. Which is. Who owns internal mobility in an organization?

Whose job is it to come up with the strategy? Is it talent? Is it recruiting? Is it HRBPs? Is it business leaders? I can share at Dow Jones, it fell under the talent umbrella. The talent umbrella had the L& D arm, which is what I led, and then the org effectiveness arm, which is where this fell. And so that department focused on things like performance management, like Stacy said earlier, you can connect these things to performance management.

They focused on internal skills. skills inventory. So again, if you're more sophisticated and you have that opportunity, you can do that. As well as job formalized job shadowing programs and succumbent programs. So if you are a little more sophisticated and you have the capacity to do so, you can You know, you can do the swarming regardless of what size you are, right?

You have a company initiative. It doesn't matter if you're big or small. You want people to provide diverse perspectives, cross functional, et cetera. But then there also might be opportunities. Hey, we want a three month experience. We need someone to help with this one project on the marketing team. Can we get someone to fill that?

So, there are more sophisticated ways to go about internal mobility if you have the capacity and the size to do it. But it was the talent team at Dow Jones. Stacy, Jeff, where have you seen this fall in your experience?

Jeff Diana: I really depends on the org. I think it different stages. It's different places when you're smaller.

I think you have more generalists that do this work as you get larger. As you started to mention, you have specialist areas. It could be talent management that drives this. The execution of it could be there. Sometimes purposely don't highlight the separation of recruiting and HR. I always find it a little odd to be like, we have recruiting and HR.

Well, it's all part of HR, but depending on how you segment that can dictate some of that as well. But what's most important to me is the people that push this, not execute the mobility. Has to be the HR business partner, wherever that work sits, that could be the head of HR. That could be an HR generalist.

That could be a recruiter doing both. It could be true HR VPs, but they have to drive this because they have to understand the strategy of their function, where it's going, what's its org structure today, what's the level of capabilities today. And as you mentioned earlier, like where are they going to be in one to two to three years, like that exercise.

should dictate and start the ball moving around what type of skills we need, and then it can be executed operationally in any number of places, but that's usually where the thought process comes from.

Stacey Nordwall: Yeah, I think, again, my experience is much more at smaller org. So we did not have, large HR teams that were split into a bunch of different departments.

It wasn't really that way. So it was a, anyone who can get a hand in to do some help on it. That's what we're, that's what we're going to leverage. I think one of the things, obviously I have my pin hat on, thinking about like employee journey design, there is that moment, when you're doing that kind of design to sit down with whoever is on your team, right?

And thinking about whichever moments you can capture within the employee experience and say actually, this is a good moment. Six months after onboarding, we're going to have somebody touch touch base on this part and tell them more about our internal mobility program. And, may end.

Maybe within as you're sitting there with the different members of the team, who are performing the different functions, they can tag in and say actually, this is a good moment. I'm finding that when people move from a level three to a level four they're having really, they're really struggling.

And so this is a good moment to come in with materials, right? And training, because, It's great for us to do all of this work for an internal mobility program, but we have to make sure that then whatever moves people are making, they're successful, right? Because we don't want them to get a promotion.

We don't want them to do a lateral move and then struggle. So how is it that we can time, the communications, the support, whatever it is, and building out this journey to make sure that people are actually Support it. So I think from my perspective, if you, especially if you have a smaller team, that can be an exercise where you all can come together and decide.

And maybe it's not one group that owns that. Maybe, you develop this larger picture and then different people are doing different parts of it. So, yeah, I think, there is a bit that's just it. You my, my startup background just says you be scrappy and do work with what you have, because this, you might not have a lot to work with.

So just do work with what you have and do what you can, because whatever internal mobility program you bid, you build has to be just something you can actually support, right? There's no point in building some huge program that you can't actually support. So, yeah that's my perspective on

Rea Rotholz: it. I think that's a perfect.

Summation and take away for the group, right? If you are that smaller organization, or you need to be scrappy, doing something is better than doing nothing, right? And do something that makes sense for your organization. You don't want to put together a whole lofty strategy that's going to require additional resources that you're not going to get, right?

I think that's a perfect summation, Stacey. Jeff, we have two minutes. Do you have, a 30 second key takeaway for our audience?

Jeff Diana: Yeah, I think my one takeaway would be back to make it about business results. So when you measure the effectiveness of your mobility strategy, It's not about attrition rates or promotion rates or how happy people are.

Those are the obvious things we look at in HR. You will wow your business if you talk about, after we put in this program, we went from achieving x percent of our OKRs to y percent of our OKRs. We were able to actually deliver on our op plan goal or this functional goal at a much higher rate.

We shipped more code. We handled more tickets in CX. We tie it to functional or business metrics, even though we're going to track the other stuff and you will get buy in and support, and you will stand out as someone who gets business.

Rea Rotholz: I love that for any HR initiative. I feel like that is the key, tie it to business.

I know we have about 30 seconds. If you want to experience more Hone or Pyn, check us out. I want to give a big thank you to my fellow panelists, Jeff and Stacey for joining us today.

It's been a pleasure and for all of you on the line, thank you for joining and for participating. It was really fun afternoon or morning. If you're on the West coast, thank you all.

Stacey Nordwall: Thank you.

Jeff Diana: Thanks everybody.