Getting Unstuck
Say you feel stuck in your job but would like to stay with your company. How do you go about landing your next position? Whoever you ask– your boss, your friend, ChatGPT– you’re likely to get similar answers. Build your network. Find a mentor. Scour the internal listings.
Sounds easy enough, but it’s often not. Why?
First, networks aren’t easy to build, especially in our virtual era. Plus the people we’re connected with tend mostly to be peers, who don’t know a lot about what’s out there, or have the connections to help us move forward.
Second, real mentors– senior people who invest in our development– are notoriously hard to enlist. Given how organizations are structured, there’s always a mismatch between the number of people who need mentoring and the number of mentors available. So people who could help us are often besieged by requests.
Third, internal postings rarely give us a good idea of what a job actually entails, making it tough to identify if it would be a fit for our experience and interests. These postings often list skills that we’ve had little chance to develop, leaving us unsure if we should even bother to apply.
The upshot? We often doubt we have the tools and connections we need to get unstuck. So we decide find a way to head out the door, or we tough it out and stay where we are.
This isn’t necessarily great for us, and it’s also not great for organizations, which tend to bleed talent when their people grow discouraged or become less productive when people stay in their jobs but mentally disengage because they can’t find a way to reach their full potential.
So what’s the solution?
Schneider Electric US, the Boston-based subsidiary of the French multinational, provides an example of how companies can address this conundrum.
As with many companies that employ highly skilled professionals– in Schneider’s case, engineers– retention was an ongoing issue, because the kind of people they hired had a lot of choices in terms of where they could work. So both attrition and under-engagement came with a high costs.
In 2018, Jean Pelletier, then an HR director at Schneider, committed to solving the problem. She explains, “Our internal surveys showed that three things matter to employees: compensation, opportunities for development, and having a boss they like. There’s this myth out there that development is something only Gen Z cares about, but it’s a big issue, and it cuts across generations. Good people want to expand their skills, be challenged, and move ahead. So we needed to focus more on giving them the chance to do so.”
Jean believed the company didn’t have a particularly effective system for helping people find jobs they liked inside the company, before they began to feel stuck. She added, “I knew that any solution had to be based on data, not feelings, but on evidence of what actually worked. And that it should be offered to everyone, not just to top performers.”
Looking around, she found two developers in Boston who had created an online talent management system (OTM) that operated differently than anything else that was then on the market. “It was a career hub that uses AI to sort through a huge number of options for people, and gets algorithmically better the more you use it, like Netflix finding you films to watch. In this case, it gets better at suggesting where you might be a great fit, in terms of your skills, your interests, your desire for growth. This helps you take more informed charge of your career and your development.”
Basically, any employee can log in whenever they want, without clearing it with anyone. They begin by asking the system three simple questions.
What positions in the company are available?
What projects could I work on that would help me develop in a way that benefits my career and makes me a more valuable employee?
Where can I find the right mentor?
The system then matches the user with jobs or identifies projects that could move them forward. And it pairs them with someone who can smooth the way, answer questions, and make introductions. “The career hub gives people opportunities without their needing know the right people. By decoupling matching from networking, it operates without bias.”
As more people began to use the system, the company was able to identify a few specifics that had been holding people back from looking for jobs in the past. For example:
People hadn’t wanted to tell their managers they were looking for something new, which can be perceived as disloyal. The systems did not require them to do notify anyone.
The company had a long-standing policy that people had to stay in their present job for 3 years before they could apply for another internal position. However, given the company’s commitment to making the OTM system open to everyone, with no preconditions for signing up, this policy no longer made sense and was done away with.
The company had also previously relied on performance reviews for matching people with jobs. But because the new system stressed employee autonomy in regard to searches, it began using employee inventories, likened to “resumes on steroids,” instead. This encouraged people to focus on building skills that could move them forward.
Jean observes that these changes helped the system “serve the employee rather than the bureaucracy,” by removing a middle layer and taking HR out of the process. “It’s human-centered now,” she notes. “And because HR doesn’t do the connecting, they’re free to address any conflicts that crop up.”
For example, HR was getting a lot of pushback from managers who didn’t want their people applying for jobs without them being involved. “They’d come to us and say: ‘I thought that person was happy in their job!’ Well, maybe they were happy, but they wanted to try something else now, or develop new skills. It’s counterproductive for the company to stand in their way.”
Jean also heard complaints that other units or divisions were ‘poaching our people.’ “No!” she says, “Our competitors poach, not other people at Schneider. This is our company, we’re all in it together.”
The timing of Schneider’s OTM system proved fortuitous, given that Covid, followed by “the great resignation,” arrived the year after rollout. This enabled the company to actually reverse its attrition problems even as other organizations were struggling to hang on to talent. “People didn’t leave, the company remained stable, and our engagement now is very solid. And so far 100,000 out of 140,000 people have signed up. Our employees feel empowered by a system that lets them take charge of their careers. They love that, and so don’t want to leave.”
In other words, Schneider found a way to help its employees get unstuck. I’d call that a win-win.
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