Much continues to change in the post-pandemic world of business today. Processes are getting digitalised, employees are shifting to a hybrid working model, and companies are innovating business models that better reflect the realities of this new world with new opportunities and challenges. 

The reality of disengaged employees is one such challenge that is worsening.  

Disengagement is costly

One of the biggest disconnects that an employee experiences today are between her/his aspirations and the current job profile. For many mid-to-large companies, this disconnect is often easy to overlook. Hidden below layers of ‘big picture thinking', leaders often fail to create the right ways to listen to their employees and address their hopes and aspirations. It’s not surprising, therefore, that the recent Microsoft Work Trend Index notes that business leaders are “out of touch with employees and need a wake-up call.”

A popular marker of employee engagement, Gallup recently noted that only 25% of Indian employees reported being engaged in their work. Companies have to do a lot more to engage their employees! Especially when many face the business cost of having a disengaged workforce. Symptoms of disengagement like absenteeism and poor quality of work impact a company’s performance, with a Gallup study estimating that low employee engagement costs the global economy $8.1 trillion.

Many employees experience a disconnect due to a lack of clarity on how their career is developing. Research suggests that this remains one of the top reasons for employee disengagement today. The perception that employees are stuck in their jobs without access to the right career growth opportunities fuels attrition, leading to both employees and the company bearing the cost.  

Leveraging the power of an organization’s internal network

Today enabling talent mobility and providing a wider array of career development channels is a vital tool with HR professionals to address employee disengagement. But to do so, companies need to reconfigure how they provide such opportunities to their employees. 

Every organization has tremendous opportunities to offer to employees. This could be in the form of new job roles, on-the-job sabbaticals, new job locations, re-skilling or up-skilling opportunities, mentor/buddy support, the opportunity to work with someone inspiring, and the ability to connect with like-minded colleagues to work on an idea, moonshot or personal interest. These opportunities are not being tapped into effectively in organizations and hence we are not leveraging them to address disengagement.

It's here that Virkware’s AI-based Talent Marketplace for global, hybrid teams can help you unlock the opportunities within your organization. It supports you to drive organization-wide initiatives for talent management, connecting individual aspirations to opportunities and driving an employee-first culture. 

The role of Virkware’s Talent Marketplace

When it comes to a super-intuitive and all-inclusive digital platform that can easily facilitate talent management, there remain few options. Traditional talent management platforms often do not offer the agility or personalisation required to make such efforts a success. Most remain cumbersome and depend upon year-end feedback and annual cycles to allow employees to create the career path they demand. 

Gone is the world where siloed working was enough to motivate and engage employees. Today employees require better, holistic ways to develop their skills and contribute to their company’s growth. To this end, Virkware’s talent marketplace provides the following advantages: 

• Active Skills Growth: Allows employees to work across functions and enables them to work with someone they want to learn from and build new skills. Skills growth can easily be monitored and matched to relevant gigs based on the platform learning capabilities. 
• On-the-job Mentoring: Enables employees to easily connect with like-minded employees on work and non-work-related events. Facilitates mentoring and buddy programs with a simple and easy to use user interface.
• Seamless Internal Networking: Increases networks and facilitates the creation of deeper connections between employees across different verticals of the company. By enabling employees to be part of the projects they want, the platform provides a unique way to work to match their aspirations with opportunities. 
• Rich Real-time Insights: Provides Senior Management & HR with rich insights in real-time on the organisation's pulse, emerging leaders, moonshots and trends related to skills. This creates better visibility into the talent pool
• Real Transparency: Helps make employee decisions democratic and transparent. With the employee experience and skills easily visible to all within the organisation, the platform allows for easy deployment of talent and offers employees a chance to grow skills in areas they might lack. 

The gap between the demand and supply of talent is poised to widen in the coming years. Companies need innovative ways to retain and engage talent. Virkware’s talent marketplace is a tool geared toward the future that will help create a winning culture throughout the organization.