News

COVID-19 has impacted global organizations and their workforces in profound ways. Seemingly overnight, changes in supply and demand for products and services have significantly affected workforce strategies. At the same time, organizations have made necessary but challenging shifts to fully remote working. These and other pandemic-related shifts have forced leaders to challenge their assumptions about work, workforce and workplace and to create new solutions that break down silos to tap into the full power and potential of their existing workforces.

MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte’s 2020 Future of the Workforce Global Executive Study found that prior to the pandemic, only 34% of surveyed workers were satisfied with their organization’s investment in their skills development. Our research suggests that the organizations with the most effective approaches to skills development consistently found ways to provide greater access to and transparency into opportunity for their workforce.

In other words, to engage workers where their skills are needed most, organizations should invest in talent “opportunity marketplaces.” Building on the idea of a traditional marketplace where individuals come to buy and sell goods or services, the goal of a talent opportunity marketplace is to match worker skills to available work. From a workforce perspective, that means giving talent access to new internal opportunities that contribute to their personal growth and development. From a manager and organizational perspective, that means moving talent where you need it, when you need it, for greater organizational agility. The pandemic has been a wake-up call for many organizations on why this type of ongoing investment is so important to avoid getting caught flat-footed in the future.

At a time when traditional workplace structures are seeing profound change, opportunity marketplaces have been a useful tool for global businesses to align workforces with enterprise and digital strategies, to change organizational behaviors, and to gain meaningful workforce intelligence. For example, during the pandemic, a health care organization with a network of hospitals around the US was able to use its talent marketplace to shift local capacity to a cross-system staffing network in order to centrally manage staffing as talent needs shifted dramatically across the health system and to different locations/regions.

Opportunity marketplaces provide a platform to think about work beyond the confines of an individual’s role and match workers with internal opportunities for project work on top of their current role or new roles all together, accelerating redeployment processes to get people aligned with work where the organization is seeing strategic demands and to add a human-centered approach to using existing workforce skills from areas of the business that may not be seeing as much demand. During the pandemic, organizations that deploy opportunity marketplaces have been able to stand up call centers, shift supply chains, and assemble emergency response teams, all while tapping into existing talent - effectively breaking down individual, team, business line, and location boundaries.