Forging a three-way partnership to build careers and drive business performance

Overview

A joint venture is a partnership in which people collaborate for mutual benefit. In a Career Joint Venture, organizations engage their managers and employees – as one element of an overall workforce strategy – to improve career management practices and outcomes for the benefit of all three parties.

In this paper, Mercer explains why now, more than ever, organizations must work to create and sustain Career Joint Ventures. We will address several key questions.

We explore how organizations can leverage the Career Joint Venture to build a stronger employment brand, improve attraction and retention of key talent, drive greater employee engagement, and increase customer satisfaction and business results. We’ll also share the experiences of organizations that already have initiated Career Joint Ventures.

Could your organization benefit from a Career Joint Venture? We have provided two detachable assessment tools at the end of this report (on pages 23–24 of the PDF) to help you evaluate your organization’s career management needs and priorities.

Defining the Career Joint Venture

To varying degrees, organizations recognize the basic premise of a Career Joint Venture: developing careers can help build an internal talent pipeline, grow business capabilities, and enhance the employee’s value both to the organization and in the marketplace. While some organizations hand over responsibility for career management to employees, others have chosen to be involved selectively.

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Still others are committed to actively managing careers for both the business’s and the individual’s benefit. It is these organizations that will win the race to attract, engage, and retain their workforces.

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They have realized that, in addition to compensation and benefits, employees consider career-related rewards – including training and development, lateral moves, stretch assignments, and career incentives – a significant and highly motivating component of total rewards.

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These are the organizations with higher performance, employee engagement, and retention – the ones that will be best positioned to deliver career outcomes and improved business results.