Building career engagement during major business transformation

This was the issue raised by our provocateurs Lizzie Da Costa, Head of Talent Management and Madi Clark, Group Talent Manager at Anglo American, in our latest Virtual Roundtable. We discovered how they had managed to continue to build career engagement during business transformation, and the lessons they learned along the way.

Two sides of the same coin

Anglo American had greatly developed its talent management practices, though it knew it had more to do for its employees in helping them feel empowered and equipped to manage their own careers. Just as the business was set to start work on the latter strategy, the organisation announced a significant transformation programme.

Talent management practices were clearly important in this moment because the business needed to know who the key people were, the opportunities to move them into growth roles, and who was at risk of leaving. To have a career management conversation felt less easy during change, but the organisation nevertheless chose to keep its careers preparation work progressing – to be ready to share more widely as and when the timing was right in the organisation.

Reasons to keep careers work moving forward.

Why was it so important to keep making progress around careers? There are several good reasons:

• Investing in career development drives employee engagement, leading to improved retention and performance.
• Continuing the investment in and development of a career strategy, ready for the moment when there were new opportunities available following restructuring.
• It was important to challenge the myth that opportunities for development and growth are only available for some. Everyone had the potential to grow and find new roles.
• Leaders needed to prioritise their ‘people work’ during times of change, while employees needed to be active in their own personal development and career management.

There was clear value to both Anglo American and its employees in continuing to focus on careers. The organisation still needed to engage, develop, and retain employees, to enable growth and productivity. And employees still wanted a clear, inclusive, and compelling career offer to give them the confidence and skills to manage their careers.

Enabling careers

There were three main pillars of the careers strategy the team at Anglo American developed. These were:

• Defining what career really meant for Anglo American, including principles, roles, and responsibilities, aligning it with the Employee Value Proposition and organisation model.
• Outlining broad career types within Anglo American. These are brought to life through career stories and maps – to create clarity and positive mindsets about opportunities.
• Refreshing new Career Development Resources to equip people to feel confident in managing and navigating their careers.

Lessons learned

Anglo American learned key lessons in their work to enable careers during business transformation.

• Meet the business where it is. Different parts of the business were facing different amounts of change, and it was important to be sensitive to the readiness to respond.
• Be ready to adjust your pace & plan. It was necessary to find new ways to get the insights needed to develop the plan – and sometimes do things in a different order.
• Do not down tools – be ready when the business is ready. It was vital to keep initiatives moving forward, even in the background, in the knowledge that they would soon be needed.
• Keep scanning for adjacencies and opportunities to progress. Good communication and curiosity were really important in staying connected with teams during change.
• Once assets are in place – opportunity to use these through transformation. As parts of the business have emerged from change to readiness, career opportunities have emerged.

Our view

Anglo American’s experiences fit in with the Chaos Theory of Careers ¹, in which managers and employees try to make sense of an uncertain world, meaning career development becomes less about prediction, planning and control than being able to live well with uncertainty.

Seeing careers in these terms encourages both employers and employees to see the world in a more agile way and the potential for career opportunity as events unfold. And this is why career skills are increasingly important for growth, even when a business is changing around them. Employers and employees alike are continually affected by change and questioning what their future looks like. So it helps in these situations to have a strategy and tools that support engagement and agility:

• Have a clear career strategy that aligns with other people priorities and supports the business for the future,
• Give managers and leaders the support they need to manage career conversations through change to retain talent and provide opportunity,
• Support employees to build and use career skills to develop the capabilities they need for the future, and seize internal career opportunities in a rapidly changing workplace.

You can find out more about our Virtual Roundtables here. And for strategic career support, explore  our solutions here.

¹ Robert Pryor, Jim Bright (2011) The Chaos Theory of Careers: A New Perspective on Working in the Twenty-First Century