A story about talent

Some Data
5 Days of work, 6 Facilitators, 64 Participants.

How do you attract new talents in a global organization, when you have an ambitious workforce expansion plan, the world of work is changing at a fast pace and people’s attention is mainly focused on dream jobs at big tech companies? This is the story of a multinational DIY company which realised that to attract new talents you have to unleash your current talents, and of how we worked together to design a shared framework for talent attraction.

Co-creation
To begin with, we needed to better understand this new challenge, gathering points of view from the company all around the world in the leanest possible way. This is why we started with a digital workshop held remotely in August 2018, in which 15 participants from eight countries worked remotely to explore the complexity of the challenge, its key dimensions and existing constraints, co-creating a brief for the design of the new talent attraction framework.

Complexity
Following this first iteration, two things were clear: the great passion of the people involved, eager to make their contribution and acquire new competencies, and the need to develop a greater capacity for managing complexity. It was time for the following steps: using the design brief as a guide to develop the new framework, working iteratively to create a prototype that could be put into action and tested as soon as possible.

Sharing
Therefore, three groups of people – from several countries and with different backgrounds – started focusing on the framework, collaborating remotely with our support. This phase culminated in a 2-day workshop held in September 2018, with over 30 participants exchanging experiences, discovering things in common and sharing successful approaches already in place among different business units. The perfect ground to create together a pre-prototype of the new talent attraction framework: a proof-of-concept able to be shared within the company with the wider HR community, in order to receive feedback and finalise an actionable prototype.

Value
The third iteration of this project started exactly with the remote collection of feedback from the human resources community. This activity culminated in a workshop held in October 2018, in which over 30 participants worked together to question, integrate and evolve the first prototype version of the new talent attraction framework. Something that until a few weeks before was not considered possible was now a reality, thanks to everyone’s valuable contribution.

Initiatives
The group was now ready to take an extra step: the representatives of each business unit defined the initiatives they wanted to commit to. What better way to immediately turn the framework into reality and start testing it? Furthermore, the range of action of these initiatives was not limited to a single business unit. Instead, it was often cross-unit and cross-country, further encouraging collaboration and leveraging diversity. A new approach was already in place!

FINAL THOUGHTS
“We have understood that to attract new competencies and skills we have to start from our own competences and skills.”

“We don’t need perfection, we need initiatives!”

This article was first published in our Cocooners N° 6