Why Internal Mobility Programmes Fail: Causes, Use Cases and Solutions

Tight timeframes, skills shortages, budget constraints… Sound familiar? Challenges like these are why tech leaders increasingly look first and foremost at their own teams when seeking additional delivery firepower.

This is where internal mobility programmes come in.

Alongside straightforward promotions, employee movement can be lateral, project based, internal gig based, and more. This flexibility brings a range of benefits such as rapid redeployment, improved talent retention, and reduced risk of staff burnout.

As rosy as this picture may be, sometimes the best intentions don’t equate to success. Internal mobility programmes can fail, and skills shortages persist, burning more of your diminishing budget.

Here are some of the common scenarios around that failure, and what you can do to mitigate against this outcome.

1. Culture

Organisational culture is huge when it comes to internal mobility, and it can contribute to the failure of your programme in a number of ways:

Lack of encouragement across the business

Problem: internal mobility isn’t visibly encouraged by leaders, and employees don’t feel confident about exploring other roles within the organisation.

Solution: a company-wide endorsement of the programme, at all levels, increases the likelihood of success.

Department heads fear losing critical talent

Problem: managers are short-staffed and under pressure to deliver, so they naturally hesitate to recommend employees for roles outside their department. This fear of losing key players creates bottlenecks in the mobility process and frustrates employees who are otherwise eager to expand their skill sets.

Solution: incentives. Managers are partly responsible for employee growth, so they should be rewarded for it. Similarly, if this contributes to the organisation’s goals, they should be suitably incentivised and rewarded.

Lack of employee engagement

Problem: employees can’t see a clear benefit to engaging with the mobility programme. They see headaches, stress, and extra work for little reward. Worst of all, employees fear resentment or reprisal for attempting to work outside of their team. You’re on a clear path to failure.

Solution: incentives combined with a compelling value proposition can put fire behind your mobility programme. This goes hand in hand with a company wide endorsement of the programme.

2. Processes

Legacy processes tend to prioritise hiring and promotion as the engines of mobility in an organisation. Here’s how this can doom your internal mobility programme to fail, and what to do about it:

Preference for external hiring

Problem: external hiring presents obvious an appeal for open positions, and there is often an allure around external candidates as more experienced and ‘fresh’. This is compounded by an assumption that there is no talent available internally for the job.

Solution: prioritise internal candidates by creating a policy to first evaluate internal applications, before going external. This alone will not ensure your programme’s success, but it is a step towards addressing the ‘external first’ culture.

Lack of speed and agility in matching skills to needs

Problem: it’s all very well having widespread buy in, but how quickly can you match needs to skills? Fast enough to be effective? Lengthy processes slow down responsiveness, leaving critical roles unfilled and reducing the programme’s overall effectiveness.

Solution: keep the process as simple as possible. Reduce steps and give managers the flexibility to offer roles quickly to suitable internal candidates, keeping the momentum up and ensuring that talent is deployed where it’s needed, without unnecessary delays.

3. Visibility

In many ways, visibility is the crown jewel of a successful internal mobility programme. It’s essential for success; its absence ensures failure, as follows:

Lack of visibility of opportunities

Problem: without a clear view of available opportunities, your programme is a non-starter. Even though your employees are bought in and interested in moving within the company, they can’t move effectively because they’re limited by work-of-mouth information or only hear about opportunities in 1-1s and PowerPoints.

Solution: use an easily accessible platform to make all opportunities visible across the organisation.

Lack of visibility of talent and skills

Problem: your mobility programme is hamstrung because managers across the organisation don’t have a clear view of ‘the bench’. You’re relying on the initiative of employees to apply for positions, but they’re not taking up opportunities quickly enough, and it’s reducing your programme’s speed and effectiveness.

Solution: internal talent visibility is your game changer here, and the first step to mobility. And how do you achieve this? Let’s look at our next point: having the right technology.

4. Technology

Having the appropriate tech is make or break for your programme. Here’s why:

Outdated HR Tech

Problem: your outdated HR system is a showstopper because it doesn’t offer employee skills tracking, visibility of the bench, or effective matching of talent to roles.

Solution: to address this and many of the challenges above, especially visibility of skills, visibility of opportunities, and matching needs quickly to skills, the right tech is a gamechanger. Invest in an AI-powered platform that allows you to tag, track, and analyse employee skills, experience, and performance. These systems can recommend suitable roles to employees based on their profiles and help managers identify talent swiftly.

Conclusions

Internal hires are typically 18-20% less expensive than external hires, while external hires are also 21% more likely to leave during their first year.*

There may be a skills shortage, but right now you’re sitting on a wealth of talent and much of it might be hidden from you and your organisation. Investing in internal mobility should be a no-brainer if you want to unlock these skills – and with them, innovation, adaptability, and resilience – in an increasingly competitive landscape.

This is a ship that you need everybody to board. It might not be easy, but the rewards are well worth the effort and investment.

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*Sources: Sage Journals: Paying More to Get Less: The Effects of External Hiring versus Internal Mobility, Dec 2011; Deloitte: Are you overlooking your greatest source of talent? Jul 2018