Workforce Redeployment: A Strategic Approach for Companies

At its core, workforce redeployment involves shifting employees from roles that are no longer necessary to positions where their skills are needed. This strategy has become more critical than ever as modern corporations find ways to respond to technological advancements and market dynamics in real time. Understanding and implementing workforce redeployment effectively can enhance your company’s resilience and help you retain skilled employees over time.

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Understanding workforce redeployment

When you hire an employee, you generally do so with the expectation that they will complete a set of job responsibilities and help your company remain productive and competitive. For example, if you deal with a large volume of data, you might hire a data entry specialist to enter, update, and manage your data sets. 

To fill this position, you would look for someone who is organized and proficient in the necessary software. Now consider that a new artificial intelligence program emerges that can perform the same role as your data entry specialist. What do you do when the circumstances change and you no longer have the same organizational needs? 

In some cases, companies might fire their data entry worker and begin to rely on the new AI program. However, with the rate at which new technologies are emerging, you might find yourself in a constant loop of hiring new talent and then finding your needs have changed. If so, this continual process is where workforce redeployment comes in. Instead of letting your data entry specialist go, you would look for a department with open roles and find one that utilizes similar organizational, statistical, and software skills.

Read more: Navigating Generative AI Business Transformation

How does workforce redeployment fit into business strategy?

Workforce redeployment is a type of strategic talent management within businesses. As innovation cycles become shorter, organizations face new challenges when building an enduring workforce prepared to take advantage of the latest technologies.

As requirements evolve within each position, you can take three approaches to manage talent within your workforce: redeployment, reskilling, and upskilling. You might have heard these three terms used interchangeably, but they represent unique ways to engage and utilize your employees’ skill sets. Upskilling and reskilling involve training employees on new or expanded skills to help them perform their current roles more effectively. On the other hand, redeployment consists of reassigning an employee from a redundant role to another position requiring a similar skill set. 

What’s driving workforce redeployment?

The COVID-19 pandemic changed how businesses operate, heightening the need for specific skills while reducing the need for others. This rapid shift led to higher rates of layoffs, leaving companies scrambling to find ways to close skills gaps and adapt their talent pool to the organization's new needs. In combination with upskilling and reskilling, workforce redeployment offered a way for companies to reassign their employees to understaffed areas while retaining their workforce.

For example, many hospitals became overpopulated with patients with COVID-19, while other units had fewer patients than expected. It led to rapid redeployment of medical professionals to COVID-19 units outside of their traditional specialty. 

While health care sectors redeployed their workforce as a crisis response, several companies, including Unilever, took the COVID-19 pandemic to test new workforce redeployment strategies to enhance employee engagement and productivity. For its pilot project, executives at Unilever created an employee redeployment pipeline where professionals could see openings on projects across departments. Teams advertised positions based on skill, and employees could apply to join. The project demonstrated that redeployment can be an effective and cost-effective way to tackle an organization's skill gaps. 

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Benefits of workforce redeployment

When businesses shift their resources to areas requiring attention, they can remain adaptable to current conditions. By choosing to integrate redeployment strategies, you might: 

1. Reduce costs associated with trying new things.

When you can easily redistribute talent and resources, it allows you to try new frameworks or methods without the high start-up costs associated with hiring new employees and launching new business endeavors. You can return to your initial setup if you try a new distribution and don’t see the intended results. 

2. Prevent layoffs and improve employee morale.

It takes time to hire, onboard, and develop the skills of new employees. Not only does this require financial investment, but companies with a reputation for quickly hiring after letting loyal employees have additional hits to their brand image.

Employees want to feel confident that you plan to keep them within the organization and will look for creative ways to use their skill sets. Investing in your employees fosters a more positive company culture and increases employee retention over time. This can also have positive effects over time. When you do need to recruit in the future, having an environment where employees feel valued and safe can translate into more interest from potential hires.

3. Retain employee skills and knowledge.

Regardless of their current position, the majority of employees have technical and human skills that make them an asset to your organization. When you lose an employee you’ve invested in, you also lose the expertise they’ve built directly in line with your company’s mission. 

In any position, employees in the modern workforce will need to continually expand their knowledge base and adapt to new job responsibilities. By using workforce redeployment, you can keep valuable employees and benefit from the insights of a seasoned workforce.

Challenges with workforce redeployment

While workforce redeployment can be positive in many cases, several challenges exist. Depending on the reason for redeployment, staff members may feel they’ve had insufficient training to meet the demands of their new position. This scenario presented itself repeatedly in health care during the COVID-19 pandemic, when hospitals transferred available health care professionals to unfamiliar environments with patient populations they hadn’t cared for before.

When creating a workforce redeployment plan, remember that while your employees might have the skills to succeed in their new role, they are still entering a new position. They will need time to understand new job duties and expectations and possibly adapt to new environments. During the transition, make sure to communicate clearly, offer adequate orientation time, introductions to new resources and responsibilities, and time for questions.

Read more: E-Learning: The Business Case for Your Organization

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Considerations for implementing workforce redeployment into your current systems

Considering several key questions can help you facilitate smoother transitions when you begin to roll out workforce redeployment strategies.

How will you manage changes in employee expectations? When reassigning roles, you need to ensure that employees positively perceive their role change and are fully aware of their new responsibilities, evaluation plans, and performance targets. In general, aiming to redeploy employees into positions where they are making a positive move or advancing in their careers can increase positive feedback.

Are the changes reasonable for your employees? When you reassign employees to new positions, in many instances, the positions should be in the same geographic region as the original positions and involve a reasonable amount of training. This training involves clear information about the new position and its requirements without leaving gray areas. Ensure employees have the tools they need to succeed and can begin their new role in a positive way. 

Are the redeployment efforts realistic for your organization? Take time to consider which positions you can fill with current competencies and which require additional training. If employees need extra training, consider how long this training will take with the current capabilities of your staff and make a plan that aligns well with your organizational resources. Sometimes, you might need to bring in additional support staff during uncertain times or hire for specific skills where gaps in your current workforce are more significant than expected.

How to begin your redeployment plan

To implement a successful workforce redeployment strategy, consider adopting the following steps:

• Identify transferable skills. Analyze the skills of potentially redundant roles and match them with those required in other parts of the organization.

• Communicate transparently. Keep employees informed about the reasons for redeployment and the benefits it brings to them and the company.

• Provide necessary training. Offer reskilling and upskilling opportunities to ensure employees can succeed in their new roles.

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Workforce redeployment is a proactive form of talent management that helps companies respond to technological change and fluctuating market demands. One such technology is GenAI, which is poised to be the largest technological revolution since the internet. 

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