Novartis on how to unleash your people’s full potential

Pharma giant Novartis employs 110,000 people worldwide, and they are all on a mission to reimagine medicine.

To achieve this loft goal, Novartis needs to unleash the full power of its people. It does this by creating an inclusive and psychologically safe working environment, which allows them to be innovative, and develop those breakthrough drugs.

At UNLEASH World 2022, global head of talent Markus Graf shares the five big bets that Novartis has taken to transform talent management.

Five ways to unleash the power of your people

Overseeing Novartis’s approach to talent is their attitude towards skills. Skills, not jobs, are now the currency of HR and the future of work at the pharma giant – this is because skills are essential to how Novartis’s delivers on its value.

Within this framework, Novartis has made five big changes to double down on how it looks at their workforce, now and into the future. The aim is to ensure that the company is maximizing talent’s impact on the business.

The first bet they made is on precision talent. This means focusing on specific roles (50 or so) that bring the most business now (or will do in the future), to Novartis. There are around 50 roles that have been prioritized.

The second is accessing and developing the leaders of the future, and equipping them with the right skills and capabilities to lead in the uncertain current and future of work.

As a result, Novartis has dialed its assessment of leaders, and aims to ensure they are living and breathing the company’s values: “inspired, curious and unbossed”.

A talent marketplace is the third big bet – in this area, Novartis is working with Gloat to give employees access to development opportunities not just in their team or in their department, but across the entire company.

Graf is clear that there is a lot of buzz around talent marketplaces at the moment; technology is really transforming this element of career growth and ensuring that employees can easily access not just vertical development, but also lateral opportunities.

To date, more than 20,000 Novartis employees have signed up – and the partnership is only 100 days old.

Having a future-ready workforce is the fourth change. To do this, Novartis has to predict the skills needed for the future, and either hire them in, build them within the organization or borrow them from the gig economy for specific projects.

Success here is only possible with proper strategic workforce planning.

“Last but not least, Novartis has a major focus on data and insights for talent intelligence”, which is underpinned by technology like Workday, WalkMe and EdCast.

This includes looking around at the types of employers that Novartis is attracting talent from, and the brands and sectors it is losing employees to.