How ANZ is creating opportunities for their people through internal mobility

COVID-19 has changed how we live and work. As the pandemic disrupted our lives, talent professionals rose to the challenge to implement changes that previously would have taken months and years, in just days and weeks.

From mobilising remote workforces to transitioning talent internally to meet customer needs and providing support to organisation-wide pivots, 2020 saw workforce strategies put on hold as HR teams proved their resilience and adaptability.

In the past nine months ANZ’s Talent and Culture team has led the bank’s focus on internal mobility. Recently LinkedIn spoke with Kerrie Harris, the T&C Business Partner for Australia Retail & Commercial division at ANZ, and her colleague Lisa Robson, the Product Area Lead within the Joiners and Movers Tribe, to find out how they’ve managed to implement significant organisation-wide changes, while working remotely in challenging times.

Joiners & Movers is the Tribe within ANZ’s Talent & Culture function that is accountable for the employee experience across the journey spanning ‘choose ANZ’ through to ‘leave ANZ for now’. It therefore includes Talent Marketing, Recruitment, Onboarding, Internal Mobility, International Mobility and Transition Support.

Like many organisations, ANZ’s targeted recruitment marketing activity has traditionally focused on the external market, but as the pandemic unfolded the need to respond quickly to complex customer needs demanded a new approach. Underpinning the shift to internal mobility was the belief that ANZ had the right people to meet these new, unprecedented demands. They just needed to be made aware of these opportunities and encouraged to move into them.

Working closely with business leaders, the recruitment’s team first step was to identify areas where there was excess talent supply and match them with parts of the organisation that needed additional resources, Lisa says. For example, they were able to facilitate branch colleagues pivoting into increased demand areas in contact centers and customer operations.

Secondly, the team promoted opportunities to staff as if it were an external recruitment campaign. Information sessions, ”day in the life videos”, and panel interviews targeted internal staff as they’d expect in external recruitment, bringing the opportunities to life.

The third step was to streamline the appointment process, to make sure employees had a positive experience whilst also balancing the need to enable well-informed hiring decisions.

This new internal mobility focus is likely to pay dividends in the future too. Talent stays with organisations about 41% longer when there is a clear internal pathway, according to LinkedIn data.¹

Tapping internal talent didn’t just save time and costs for the recruitment team.

Kerrie and Lisa say the shift to remote work was challenging for them personally, but opened the organisation’s eyes to its workforce’s capability.

Kerrie says remote work was central to the success of ANZ’s internal mobility success. After trialing remote work, business leaders had more confidence to enable roles to be done in different locations than they had previously. Frontline colleagues are able to take up new opportunities that hadn’t previously been available to them in that location. Meanwhile, the team is now confident it has an experienced pipeline full to the brim with internal talent.

“COVID-19 accelerated our thinking in how we best leverage our talented people to best service our customers,” Kerrie says. “It was rewarding for our people to see new career pathways that may not have been an option in the past due to their location in head office to all of a sudden being opportunities that could do locally.”

Looking to the year ahead, the Talent and Culture team members can see they’re working in a vastly different organisation to that of 12 months ago.

The growth in the organisation’s culture has been profound, Kerrie says. New and creative ways to solve complex problems have been uncovered, while a workplace culture of adaptation has been embraced. Building flexibility and critical capability into the workforce strategy supports the changing business needs.

“The pandemic has taught us the power of adaptation,” Kerrie says. “Our leaders were hugely supportive and their willingness to sponsor this shift has made this idea turn into a reality. We managed to create more internal movement from our frontline in a number of months that we normally wouldn’t see over a number of years.”

Understanding that talent can adapt and rise to the challenge is what underpins internal mobility. Identify existing skills in employees and the ones they’ll need to succeed in the future using LinkedIn Talent Insights.

Inform your talent strategy by establishing what inspires your employees by using Glint. Understanding their skills, interests and aspirations is key to creating appealing pathways and opportunities within the organisation, so they are more likely to stay and contribute towards growth. Provide meaningful learning and growth to employees by using LinkedIn Learning’s expert courses and learning pathways.