3 Ways to Boost Career Development in a Hybrid World
By Heidrick & Struggles’ Dorothy Badie, Lisa Baird and Steven Krupp
Amid the coronavirus pandemic, companies have been continuously adjusting their return-to-office plans, with many incorporating a hybrid option for employees. To ensure that all employees can grow professionally no matter their location, Human Resource (HR) professionals can leverage three tactics to address emerging learning, development, and inclusion needs and invest in progressive, differentiating career development programs. Companies that succeed may improve talent attraction and retention—and performance—which may give them a competitive advantage in the war for talent.
1. Reconsidering the need for mobility in succession planning
A historic barrier to career or succession planning has been mobility. One benefit of being hybrid or virtual is that geography no longer needs to be an issue. Human resources (HR) and talent leaders should consider if mobility or geography is still relevant for all roles and identify those that require location proximity or those that can be done anywhere.
While living and working abroad or spending time at headquarters is an invaluable experience, it is important to determine if it is necessary. Virtual options may facilitate more equitable upward mobility and create new options for those who can’t move. HR leaders should consider facilitating and highlighting creative alternatives that make the most of virtual, such as mentoring from another business or geography, working on a stretch assignment with a diverse global team, or studying expansion into a new market.
HR leaders may further benefit their companies by revisiting succession plan assumptions with these options in mind, as well as provide providing guidance on how managers can work with HR leaders and employees on personalized career paths, actionable succession plans, and more shared accountability for closing the gaps.
2. Building agile, borderless support systems
Take a dynamic approach to get the attention of people who are prioritizing their own development. Hybrid settings and digital tools help expand options for learning, development, and support, given that borders and silos should be less pronounced. In addition, with less time spent traveling to work, HR leaders may have a case to dedicate that time to more engaging activities and focus on deliberately facilitating these systems in partnership with people managers.
Some examples of actions HR leaders may take include:
- Build and value skills through virtual coaching and feedback. Being virtual helps make it easier and more efficient to connect for coaching since the participants can be anywhere. This means that the expectation for coaching and mentoring should be higher for all people managers. HR leaders may consider setting a standard by making coaching and mentoring part of their company’s leadership competencies, core values, performance management system, and training for leaders. One important expectation to set is that all people managers understand and enable career aspirations, double down on what is working, and tackle any old or new barriers to career acceleration head-on.
- Build virtual communities focused on development and opportunity. HR leaders should ensure people take advantage of the opportunity to expand their network of mentors, peer coaches, and sponsors beyond location or function. They can encourage and support people in being creative when identifying potential mentors, formal or informal and globally, and support the use of virtual meetings to expand horizons.
- Stay closer to high performers. In a hybrid environment, it should be easier for HR to set regular, perhaps more informal, checkups to understand how people are doing, revisit aspirations, refresh development goals, and monitor progress. HR leaders may also take advantage of including people beyond HR and direct managers. Other stakeholders engaged with talent development have the opportunity to share views via virtual meetings and collaboration tools in real-time.
3. Upskilling people at all levels so they can thrive in hybrid settings
New capabilities are more important as companies shift to digital and virtual ways of working. HR leaders can help identify and address their company’s specific gaps with refreshed definitions of core skills, capabilities, and solutions designed for new ways of working, such as the following:
- Being inclusive in a remote environment. Given the importance of inclusion, being able to lead inclusively and virtually is a critical skill for leaders at all levels.
- Presenting virtually with impact. Being persuasive and informative on-screen is no easy task, though the specific challenges vary from person to person and company to company. Leaders should work to become more comfortable with digital technologies, such as video conferencing solutions, in order to maintain their standards of effective communication.
- Collaborating effectively in virtual teams. With virtual work becoming the norm, companies may need to help teams work together, take advantage of digital tools, and optimize the upsides—while managing the downsides—of distance. One simple but powerful tactic is helping people build their skills, comfort, and confidence with activities such as digital sticky-note sessions and whiteboarding. This helps promote creative expression, open dialogue, and trust, which may encourage people to participate more actively in meetings.
- Leveraging the power of digital: As different interactions with employees, customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders are digitized, it is important for people to understand new technologies, as well as the data and insights they make available. HR leaders across industries are collaborating with business leaders to ensure their people learn about technologies that could affect the business, including everything from virtual dressing rooms for retailers to AI-driven customer support tools. Others are focused on ensuring people know how to ask the right questions of data, whether it’s customer data, HR data, or market data. Whatever their company’s specific needs are, HR leaders should help ensure people can learn what they need to support digital transformation efforts and accelerate outcomes for their business lines.
- Building agility for the long term: In adjusting to the hybrid environment, leaders are increasingly working to help people build agile mindsets and skillsets to adapt to new ways of working, uncertainty, and ambiguity in the long term.
Today, as people continue to consider their satisfaction and bond with their employer, companies face challenges in attracting and retaining talent. Addressing people’s new expectations for career development, and doing so in a hybrid environment, requires a talent-first mindset. HR leaders may need to reinvent strategies to make career development a core priority, regardless of where people work. Successfully developing and engaging their people is a crucial element to help ensure their companies are talent magnets positioned on the winning side of the ongoing war for talent.
This is the second blog post of a two-part series that shares three tactics for HR leaders to optimize career development and employee retention in a hybrid world. Read part one: The Overlooked Weapon in the War for Talent.
About the Authors: Dorothy Badie is an engagement leader in Heidrick & Struggles’ New York office and a member of Heidrick Consulting; Lisa Baird is the global managing partner of the Human Resources Officers Practice; she is based in the New York and Stamford offices; Steven Krupp is a senior partner in the Philadelphia office and a member of Heidrick Consulting and the CEO & Board Practice.
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