The benefits of talent sharing

The New Shape of Work podcast series addresses the challenges and uncertainty brought by the coronavirus and how to transition to a more agile workforce for the future.

Temporary talent sharing can help you optimize costs and workforce — and avoid layoffs — by flexing roles and talent, allowing employees to learn new skills in new environments. This conversation between Kate Bravery, Mercer Global advisory solutions & insights leader, and Brian Fisher, Mercer’s global leader for job evaluation and career frameworks, shares insights on:

How sharing employees, whether that is within an organization or across organizations, can help balance the workload between areas with increased demand with those needing to control or reduce labor costs.
How to address some of the challenges from finding the right skills match to ensuring employees are paid and have benefit continuity while taking on a new role.
How temporary talent share arrangement can support the employee not only with continued employment, but also developing new skills, and expanding their network.

Interesting moments from the podcast:

In addition to making good business sense these [temporary talent share] arrangements can have positive impacts on the local community by addressing supply and demand of essential services. It’s also a great example of companies leading with empathy because these talent sharing arrangements provide opportunities, and pay, to employees who otherwise would be experiencing or may be experiencing a loss of income.
[W]hat this pandemic has done is, is it has impacted different pockets of the organization in different ways. So more organizations have been looking into - how to address that internally? How do I enable and administrate the flow of talent from one area to another area?
Employees do stand to gain valuable experiences that support their future market value by learning new skills in in new environments. Building upon both technical skills, and also people skills or soft skills by operating in new environments. If I go back to the value for the organization as well. These organizations then rebound with a reenergized workforce that actually has new skills applied to new environments and might bring new thinking back to the organization.

Podcast Series