The covid-19 health crisis has turned the economic and business world upside down. Many recruitments have been put on hold, pending a recovery in activity, but companies still need skills!
What if Internal Mobility could meet your temporary needs and preserve your skills? Or even share them? A new form has just emerged.
We tell you more about Temporary Internal Mobility…
1/ What are the challenges of Temporary Internal Mobility?
We all have in mind the problem of overstaffing experienced by companies linked to the total or partial cessation of activity.
However, some companies (such as multi-site organizations or Groups with varied activities) experience a paradoxical situation:
- closures of some of their sites (or departments/BUs etc.) or a certain reduction in activity.
- Increased activity on other sites or activities. A telling example: e-commerce or drive activity versus distribution stores.
For these organizations, GPEC (forward-looking employment and skills management) has never been so important!
Indeed, skills requirements have been turned upside down, with partial activities affecting different sites or departments of the same company or group unequally.
There is also an unequal distribution of active employees (partial activity, sick leave, parental leave, impossible teleworking, etc.) implying diverse and varied internal availability!
The challenge for companies is to deal with :
- understaffed sites, waiting for skills that are essential to the running of the business,
- employees available for part-time work, but not on understaffed sites.
And for varying lengths of time, depending on the company!
Over the coming weeks and months, some companies will be gradually returning to business. There is therefore a need to consolidate and optimize available resources (between sites/departments/BUs and organizations within the same group).
Drawing on what happened in the wake of the 2008 crisis, the objective is clear: to avoid a talent drain and maintain our level of expertise.
2/ Temporary Internal Mobility: optimizing in-house skills!
What if one of our temporarily-available employees wanted to meet our punctual needs at one of our sites?
This is the question on which Temporary Internal Mobility is based. It’s true that internal reassignment, repositioning and internal replacement are HR measures that already exist, but are often “imposed” by the employer.
What makes Temporary Internal Mobility different? The employer offers to bring in volunteers to meet a specific skills requirement. This can take the form of one-off assignments, similar to interim management assignments, but this time using internal resources. There’s a sense of provisionality, volunteerism and mutual aid. In concrete terms, how does it work? It’s an internal, multi-site, operational and skills-sharing mobility scheme.
How does it work? The employer issues a call for contributions from its employees, who can respond on a voluntary basis. An exceptional assignment or temporary internal mobility contract is then signed by both parties (depending on the legal terms and conditions).
This mobility can be likened to geographical mobility. The employee is temporarily transferred. They may remain in the same function/job, but change location. Or they can be “time-shared” between 2 departments, if need be. But the employee can also make his or her additional skills available to meet a specific need of the company.
Examples:
Example 1: Damien from the Customer Relations Department, overstaffed in view of the business, agrees to come and work in the warehouse (near his home) for a few hours a week.
Example 2: Thierry, from the Caen breakdown center, which is currently closed, is available to go to the Rouen auto center, which is understaffed. He will reinforce the workforce for a few weeks. What are the advantages of Temporary Internal Mobility? As with “classic” Internal Mobility (seen more as CDI or CDD contracts), this temporary mobility enables :
- Optimization of internal resources and management.
- Capitalizing on skills.
- Sharing resources.
- An opportunity for the employee to develop his or her skills (cross-functional project, new environment, etc.).
- Improved employee experience (trust, development, commitment).
Further information
If you'd like to find out more about the benefits of Internal Mobility, watch the replay of our webinar on the subject.
A genuine skills transfer device, this variant of Internal Mobility is in line with current trends in collaborative working and innovative Talent Management. It puts employees at the heart of the company’s development, and lets them know it! It also demonstrates the company’s agility and ability to build trust with a transparent HR policy.
Case study – AccorInvest relies on temporary internal mobility
Recently, AccorInvest (real estate subsidiary of the Accor Group), a Keycoopt customer with its Internal Mobility and Cooptation platform, set up temporary assignments. The company offers its available employees the opportunity to temporarily reinforce the teams at hotels in operation.
For example: a receptionist at hotel A in Lyon (in department 69) can’t work, because his hotel is closed; whereas hotel B in Villeurbanne (in the same department) needs someone 3 days a week. The receptionist at hotel A can therefore offer to reinforce the team at hotel B.
On its digital platform, AccorInvest posts job offers for temporary assignments to its employees. On a voluntary basis, employees can apply to be transferred on an ad hoc basis.
This can also involve kitchen or maintenance jobs, etc.!
3/ Developing internal mobility through digital technology
Internal Mobility is the second module in Keycoopt’s collaborative digital recruitment solution. Suitable for all types of contract (permanent, fixed-term, exceptional assignments, temporary internal mobility, etc.), the solution enables :
- Targeted, automatic distribution of vacancies to employees thanks to a matching algorithm.
- Employees can apply internally, but also to recommend a colleague for an internal position or assignment.
- Facilitating the animation of the employee community to bring the Internal Mobility program to life and increase the visibility of vacancies.
What’s more, the platform’s functionalities facilitate digitalized recruitment management (dashboards, monitoring, KPIs, automation), centralizing information and optimizing efficiency.
Dedicated project managers (known as Keycoopt “enchanters”) provide specific support for each of their customers, sharing their expertise in internal mobility, cooptation and digital community management. share their expertise in internal mobility, cooptation and digital community management. They also provide strategic and operational advice, including feedback, throughout the implementation of the strategy (with a view to continuous improvement).
An exceptional solution, born of a particular context, Temporary Internal Mobility may well represent a new form of long-term to (vertical, functional or geographic internal mobility). Indeed, managing skills within a company was already a fundamental issue before the covid-19 crisis.
