Real mobility is for everyone

For a long, long time, talent mobility meant one thing and one thing only: talent climbing up the organizational pyramid. It’s a familiar story. An employee gets in on the ground floor, puts in the time and effort, gets promoted, puts in the time and effort, gets promoted again, again and again until they reach the executive ceiling.

Want to know the problem with climbing a pyramid, though? It gets smaller and smaller the closer you get to the top. Anyone ascending it is in direct competition with the others ahead of and around them for footholds, and there are only so many to go around. And let’s be honest, those footholds are laden with bias and favoritism.

It’s the same way with any company. The higher up employees get, the fewer opportunities there are to keep moving in that direction. When the opportunities aren’t there at the company they currently work at, they can and will leave to find them elsewhere. The pyramid ends up weeding out all-star talent simply for lack of space.

This is where we need to expand our definition of mobility. Up isn’t the only way to move, and not everyone wants to move up anyway.

True mobility allows employees to move around, too. That could mean having opportunities to slide around the company to other teams and business areas, or having the freedom and support needed to learn new skills or take part in new projects, or even dial back when “life” needs to take priority. Everyone should be empowered to drive their own career path, no matter what twists and turns they decide to take.

There’s also the matter of a more literal mobility, which we see a need for all the time at WORQDRIVE when companies operate out of multiple locations and employ hourly workers.

Sometimes said workers are working in a location that’s not actually the closest to home, or they’re looking to pick up their roots and move elsewhere but don’t want to have to find a new job, too. These employees are faced with long commutes and/or logistical nightmares that could be easily solved if they had the opportunity to switch to a location that a) already exists and b) would work better for them. Too often, they either don’t have that opportunity or don’t know about it.

Indeed, one of the major roadblocks to talent mobility is awareness. Whether employees are looking to move up, around, or to another place, we have to both open those doors and make sure they know that the doors are open. Real mobility is for everyone, no matter what they want to be doing or where they want to go.