How Uber’s Approach to Internal Mobility Helps Employees Find Roles They Love | LinkedIn Talent Blog

As firms find ways to engage, retain, and unlock their workforce’s potential, this article highlights Uber’s efforts to fuel its internal mobility strategy. These efforts focus on encouraging lateral role moves—which can be to non-obvious work areas—and short-term assignments and projects that take up 5 to 15 percent of an employee’s time. On average, anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of Uber’s hires result from internal movement, enabled by an employee self-service model on the firm’s internal “gig market” platform. The article notes one challenge in implementing an internal mobility strategy is managers’ who hoard talent. Uber addresses this issue by using “hard data” to show how employees are more likely to leave when they don’t have internal opportunities. For example, employees who move into a new role at Uber stay twice as long with the company as peers who don’t change roles. It augments this tactic with storytelling, where employees share the impact of internal mobility on their engagement and desire to stay with the firm. Other tactics include having a leadership team committed to internal mobility and revisiting old policies to ensure they’re not impeding access to opportunities.