Why you need to build talent resilience into your workforce strategy

Talent resilience is the muscle that we as leaders need to be building.

Look at when we went through COVID — workforces that would have traditionally been nine to five at your desk, suddenly overnight had to transform into an organization that worked in the cloud where everyone could do their job remotely.

As we go through any form of changes in the future in our workforce, I think one of the really important things that we need to not forget is that building resilience in our people and talent resilience as a workforce strategy is incredibly important.

If we can create resilience in our workforce, where we'll be able to create opportunities for them that if something does change in the role — because things happen that we can't control — that we can move them into something else, and that they know that plan is in place.

Managers need to know that when they're putting in these new ways of working and when they're opening up their workforce to move more people around, they're actually building workforce resilience.

Some of the key things that you can do to build talent resilience are to try and create marketplaces internally where you open up opportunities so that folks can put their hand up.

And when change happens, understand how we can spotlight the good that comes from that. Finally, how can we create a workforce that no matter what, whether it's a good time or a bad time, we can unlock the folks we have within?

I mean, look at me, I'm a perfect example of if you give someone a stretch opportunity.

I don't have any traditional background in AI and technology. I didn't formally finish a degree because I didn't have access at that stage of my life.

But I was given lots of opportunities outside of my current day-to-day, which enabled me to think differently and give me this opportunity that means now I'm running a technology company.

Building resilience in our companies is one of the key things that we've got to do for the future. And this will protect not only our people, but it'll also protect our workforce.

So creating this new way of thinking around the orchestration and movement of people to opportunity is key.

And that will unlock not only incredible amounts of optimization of money for our businesses but also create these incredible careers for our people where they don't have to leave.

But more importantly, it protects them. It protects them in situations where things might not be so good.