Insights by Andy: How Review and Mobilize Strengthens Your Workforce

Hi, and welcome to my September vlog! In August, we talked about Talent Management, and some of the trends we are seeing with our customers. For this vlog, I want to talk about how we developed the SHL Talent Management solution suite, as well as the ethos and thinking that sits behind them.

When we think about Talent Management at SHL — we think about three solution areas: Review, Mobilize and Develop. Today, I will focus on Review and Mobilize and will come back to develop at a later session.

Our customers often ask us to look at certain segments of their employees and run a diagnostic of the people. We have done these diagnostics for many different roles spanning from leadership, to sales, to manufacturing to give insight around their people and workforce.

During these reviews, customers often challenge us with questions like, “I want to move my org from A to B”, or “how can we help our employees improve customer satisfaction scores in a call center”, or “is my workforce ready for the digital transformations that we are planning?”

So, this Review phase is an important phase to analyze whether your teams are ready for key business strategies, but then the Mobilize phase is the next step in moving your employees forward.

At SHL, we have redefined and innovated in the Mobilize phase.

Within the Mobilize concept, organizations are typically making ongoing decisions around succession planning or digitalization of parts of their business. Traditionally, this is done through methods like development centers or assessment centers where employees are brought together, and they are assessed in their ability to transform. This method is quite expensive and not agile, especially in the new world where change is constantly happening.

Therefore, SHL decided to redefine the Mobilize phase ro minimize bias and provide agile insight that includes other information beyond assessment capabilities and science. We brought in the ability to host additional data sources that could complement the assessment information for each individual.

We developed a technology platform and started with a solution we used to call Leader’s Edge which was based on a highly scientific, three-year study of leaders that looks at 27 different challenges. The goal of the study was to learn how leaders responded and performed in specific situations and challenges (i.e. M&A or cultural changes).

In thinking about this research, we said, “why can’t we use that across the entire workforce?”. Essentially Leader’s Edge is looking at people through a lens that included understanding how leaders performed throughout different contextual challenges, but we could equally look at people through a remote work lens or a digital transformation lens, etc..

We then started to build out our insight products — allowing us to combine information around the individual that uses scientific assessment data, aiming to reduce bias, and then complements it with other data like manager ratings or experience or even 360 feedback as well. This allows leaders to look at how parts of a workforce, the entire workforce, or a specific individual would respond to any change in real-time.

So, we are finding that the combination of the Review, the diagnostic upfront, and then the ongoing Mobilize in a technology platform, enabling real-time decision making, is very powerful and resonating with our customers.

I hope that has been interesting! I will come on to talk about Develop in a future vlog.