The 2023 LinkedIn Learning Report “Building the agile future” focuses on the need for individuals and organizations to be agile to ensure growth. This has important implications for organizational learning and development:
“And what is agility if not constant learning? To build a resilient and adaptable future, learning leaders are working across HR to ensure everyone has the tools, the career paths, and the skills to succeed.”
Over the next few weeks, we’ll discuss some of the ways a focus on L&D creates opportunities for growth. Today, we’ll focus on the benefits for employee retention and inward mobility.
Employee Retention
The report states that 93% of organizations are concerned about employee retention. That’s a huge percentage!
Retaining talent is a widespread concern and examining why people are leaving, or considering leaving, your organization is essential.
The report provides five factors that outline why people will consider leaving:
Compensation and benefits
Flexibility to work where and when I want
Doing challenging and impactful work
Opportunities for career growth within the company
Opportunities to learn and develop new skills
While it’s tempting to jump to conversations about compensation, benefits, and flexibility, we don’t want to overlook the importance of investing in people and specifically investing in meaningful growth. Our mission at Lightbox is to support this type of work - investing in people so they can flourish and organizations can grow. We’re passionate about finding ways to engage employees so that they feel valued and have room to grow within the organization. This can involve larger initiatives or it can start small and build over time. This is especially important if you are a smaller organization or face budget constraints for L&D. Here are a couple of ways to get started:
Identify one new skill that would be helpful for a project or for an employee’s role. Map out a way for the employee to learn this new skill and apply it to their work. For extra impact, have them teach this new skill to others on their team.
Discuss what meaningful work looks like for your employee. What motivates them? Where do they see themselves making a real difference? What challenge would they love to tackle that would help the organization? Once you have this feedback, outline a way for your employee to connect with a meaningful challenge or project. Sometimes this can be done through adding another element to an existing role or project.
Sometimes employees feel stuck because they don’t see the opportunities that could exist within the organization, their team, or their role. Having open communication about where opportunities currently exist, or what new opportunities could be created, helps an employee to see themselves staying at the organization. Another way to think about this is through the lens of “inward mobility”
Inward Mobility
“Helping people make an internal move boosts retention. And by expanding people’s networks and skills, internal mobility naturally creates more organizational agility.”
Inward mobility opens up avenues within your organization for employees to stay engaged and learn new skills. A few highlights from the LinkedIn report:
An employee who made an internal move was 19% more likely to stay with the organization versus an employee who had not made an internal move
Only 14% of employees say their organization helped them with a career plan
C-suite executives see internal mobility as their second most important priority after employee motivation and engagement
To make internal mobility a productive reality, you need to focus on two main aspects:
Talent acquisition - with the pressures on hiring, finding top talent, and ensuring you have the right people, talent acquisition can be a real challenge. Organizations should look to their internal talent when determining who might fill new roles or open opportunities, not just look for external candidates. This might involve a change in mindset, hiring practices, or a process to create visibility within the organization for roles as they emerge.
Pathways - creating pathways for people is an essential part of internal mobility. This is often a two-way process. Employees need to know about the potential within the organization, and the organization needs to know what employees are looking for. While some of the changes needed could be process-oriented, often this starts small with key conversations that engage employees and learn about their goals, interests, and skills they’d like to gain. A skills-gap assessment is another vital tool that will help your organization know where to start and how to plan ahead. Data from this type of assessment helps outline what skills you need to fill and how to structure opportunities.
Whether you’re working on employee engagement or inward mobility, Lightbox provides a range of solutions to help your organization thrive. Contact us below to learn more.
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