About Deutsche Telekom
Deutsche Telekom is one of the world’s leading integrated telecommunications companies, with over 215,000 employees worldwide.
In more than 50 countries, Deutsche Telekom provides numerous services, such as mobile communications, internet service and information and communication technology solutions for business and corporate customers.
The Challenges: Identifying and Engaging Top Talent
The initial scope of the project focused on just the top one percent of their workforce, creating a space to engage, upskill and retain their most skilled and promising employees.
But, before they could even start thinking about how to make this a reality, the first challenge they faced was to identify this employee segment. As an organization of their size, this was no simple task. To do so, they created a rigorous comparative process with an array of assessments.
The second milestone in their path to retaining talent was creating an engaging space where their top performers would want to spend time. Their main goal was to incentivize and motivate them through different professional development opportunities, creating a place where top talent could learn and implement new skills with a tangible outcome.
This is exactly what we’ve tried to do with a number of opportunities: creating content, integrating it seamlessly in the digital experience that an employee has so that learning becomes almost a natural act of the workday of an employee.
Pranav Chadha
Senior Technical Product Manager at Deutsche Telekom
The Solution: An Engaging Talent Hub
Once they had identified the top one percent of their talent, Pranav explained, the idea was to “bring them into an environment where that development and placement journey with regards to succession can begin.” Deutsche Telekom wanted to provide an exclusive experience for their top-performing talent.
Instead of directing them to an internal career site where they could simply see open positions, they decided to implement an internal mobility strategy that engaged through communication and personalization, with a bustling talent marketplace at the center. There, employees could find suitable opportunities, such as jobs, projects and e-learning courses. In addition, they would work in collaboration with talent brokers, HR business partners and business leaders who would act as sponsors for their succession planning.
As regards personalization, they decided they had to implement the sharpest tool available in the internal mobility software market in order to deliver excellence to their top one percent of employees and business leaders who participated in the talent marketplace. They relied on Avature’s white-box approach to AI to customize and match the growth opportunities each employee received to their interests, skills and experience. As Pranav pointed out, “you want to give them what they need at the right place at the right time.”
To encourage communication, Deutsche Telekom leveraged Avature DNA to provide a community-like space where employees could share curated content and join different stakeholders to develop professionally. Holding conversations about burning topics around their fields of expertise and learning about projects or job openings, employees would find an attractive way to plan the future of their careers at the organization.
Communication and engagement are extremely critical to the success of any sort of talent space. And the reason for that is because talent is engaged and energized when they see business leaders take them seriously.
Pranav Chadha
Senior Technical Product Manager at Deutsche Telekom
Leveraging Data To Improve Results
Deutsche Telekom knew that one of the key factors in this project’s success was going to be reporting and real-time data. This would give them insight into the effectiveness of the program by granting visibility of the evolution of the skills and proficiency levels of their talent. Taking advantage of Avature’s comprehensive reporting capabilities, they created stakeholder-specific dashboards that visualized relevant information for each group.
This time-effective, transparent process means that everyone has access to actionable data when they need it, and HR business partners no longer have to manually create reports, improving the user experience for all parties involved.
A Glimpse Into The Future
We know that skills is the currency of the future or the new oil. At Telekom, because we want to be a software telco in the future, it is very, very important for us to have the right digital talent within the company.
Pranav Chadha
Senior Technical Product Manager at Deutsche Telekom
Skill-based organizations put their focus on identifying skills for the present but also those that will become a future need. With Avature, Deutsche Telekom brought a strategy to life that has empowered them to do just that, as well as providing their employees with the necessary tools and means to keep on developing their skillsets within the company.
Through effective talent mobility and engagement, the people at Deutsche Telekom are focused on futureproofing their organization. And as part of this ongoing strategy, the telco plans on broadening the scope of this initiative beyond the top one percent of talent.
