The global pandemic has brought increasingly difficult financial decisions into focus for many organisations.
Realigning, stretching, and strategically redeploying human resources has become increasingly important alongside cost containment initiatives.
Staff have been redeployed into new areas to meet the critical business priorities often at short notice and under pressure. A recent example we heard of has been happening in hospitals.
Nurses who do not normally work in intensive care wards have been trained to work in these new wards, as they became the key care priority during the COVID-19 crisis.
By repurposing human resources and retraining, business priorities can be met while ensuring critical skills and experience built up over time within an organisation is not lost.
This human capital may be required now, or it may be needed in the future.
Repurposing can provide resource flexibility and agility to companies managing cost. It can deepen and enlarge a company’s skill inventory, as well as securing ongoing employment for affected staff.
Repurposing considerations may involve senior executives and Human Resource (HR) managers reviewing the strategic resourcing requirements of the organization, ensuring all key roles have comprehensive succession plans in place, identifying work priorities and key roles as well as assessing the work being performed.
The task may also involve understanding and assessing individual skills set, management of the individual impact of change, reskilling or upskilling, and measuring and monitoring the implementation and impact.
Repurposing and Retraining Talent at Speed
Organisations which normally operate in highly volatile situations may already be well-versed and experienced in repurposing and redeploying their workforce to maximum effect.
They have learned that to be successful takes structure, focus, and an integrated HR platform.
For many other organizations, however, this quick shift has been incredibly challenging as their usual stability has been undermined by the pandemic.
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Central to being able to quickly reposition human resources is being able to capture the current level of skills and experience of your workforce: the level of proficiency and aptitude.
Once captured, the data needs to be easy to access, analyze, and model. This can then be profiled against the critical roles where ideally duration and location have also been confirmed.
Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) embedded in your Human Capital Management (HCM) platform allows you to run multiple scenarios and assess the potential employee fit and development requirements.
The outcome of such an exercise will enable the learning and development team to deliver targeted training and learning resources, and increase time to effectiveness.
Employees also receive the benefit of having required learning “pushed” to them based on knowledge gaps in their current role as well as required learning for roles identified as part of their career development plans.
As with any organisational change, change management will need to be carefully considered. If repurposing is seen as a permanent change, important considerations include employee-related aspects such as location, pay, benefits, work patterns, team structure, performance management and employee wellbeing needs to be taken into account.
From our personal experience, the implementation of such changes normally involves capturing significant amounts of documentation, contract changes, approvals, HR data changes and payroll administration. This will ultimately fall to HR services to manage.
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