Customer Stories 
Summary
As an organization with a rich heritage of long-tenured employees, Deutsche Telekom is constantly looking for ways to improve employee motivation and engagement strategies and upskill their workforce. As a result, enhancing their internal talent mobility strategy was of the utmost importance.
We all know that the war for digital talent is heating up and we want to give our employees that we worked so hard to attract good enough opportunities and reasons to stay in the crew.
Pranav Chadha
Senior Technical Product Manager at Deutsche Telekom
Deutsche Telekom chose Avature Internal Mobility to bring their vision to life, showcasing internal professional growth opportunities and creating a collaborative space for top talent to connect and engage with business leaders. Partnering with Avature, they created a one-stop shop where teamwork and development co-existed.
About Deutsche Telekom
Deutsche Telekom is one of the world’s leading integrated telecommunications companies, with over 215,000 employees worldwide.
In more than 50 countries, Deutsche Telekom provides numerous services, such as mobile communications, internet service and information and communication technology solutions for business and corporate customers.
The Challenges: Identifying and Engaging Top Talent
The project’s initial scope focused on only the top one percent of their workforce, creating a space to engage, upskill and retain their most skilled and promising employees.
However, before they could even conceptualize this, they needed to identify the employee segment with which they were working. This was no simple task, given the size of their organization. To achieve this, they created a rigorous comparative process with various assessments.
The second milestone in their path to retaining talent was creating an engaging space where their top performers would want to spend time. The organization’s primary goal was to incentivize and motivate top talent through different professional development opportunities, creating a place where they could learn and implement new skills with tangible outcomes.
This is exactly what we’ve tried to do with a number of opportunities: creating content, integrating it seamlessly in the digital experience that an employee has so that learning becomes almost a natural act of the workday of an employee.
Pranav Chadha
Senior Technical Product Manager at Deutsche Telekom
The Solution: An Engaging Talent Hub
Once they had identified the top one percent of their talent, Pranav explained, the idea was to “bring them into an environment where that development and placement journey with regards to succession can begin.” Deutsche Telekom wanted to provide an exclusive experience for their top-performing talent.
Instead of directing top performers to an internal career site where they could see open positions, Deutsche Telekom implemented an internal mobility strategy that provided engagement through communication and personalization, with a bustling talent marketplace at its core. There, employees could find suitable opportunities, such as jobs, projects and e-learning courses. In addition, employees would collaborate with talent brokers, HR business partners and business leaders who would act as sponsors for their succession planning.
Regarding personalization, Deutsche Telekom decided they had to implement the sharpest tool available in the internal mobility software market to deliver excellence to their top one percent of employees and business leaders who participated in the talent marketplace. They relied on Avature’s white-box approach to AI to customize and match the growth opportunities each employee received according to their interests, skills and experience. As Pranav pointed out, “You want to give them what they need at the right place at the right time.”
To encourage communication, Deutsche Telekom leveraged Avature DNA to provide a community-like space where employees could share curated content and join different stakeholders to develop professionally. Holding conversations about burning topics around their fields of expertise and learning about projects or job openings, employees would be enticed to plan their careers within the organization.
Communication and engagement are extremely critical to the success of any sort of talent space. And the reason for that is because talent is engaged and energized when they see business leaders take them seriously.
Pranav Chadha
Senior Technical Product Manager at Deutsche Telekom
Leveraging Data To Improve Results
Deutsche Telekom knew that one of the key factors in this project’s success would be reporting and real-time data. This would give them insight into the program’s effectiveness by granting visibility of the skills’ evolution and talent proficiency levels. Maximizing Avature’s comprehensive reporting capabilities, they created stakeholder-specific dashboards that visualized relevant information for each group.
This time-effective, transparent process means everyone can access actionable data when needed. HR business partners no longer have to manually create reports, improving the user experience for all parties involved.
A Glimpse Into The Future
We know that skills is the currency of the future or the new oil. At Telekom, because we want to be a software telco in the future, it is very, very important for us to have the right digital talent within the company.
Pranav Chadha
Senior Technical Product Manager at Deutsche Telekom
Skill-based organizations put their focus on identifying skills for present and future needs. With Avature, Deutsche Telekom brought a strategy to life that has empowered them to do just that, while providing their employees with the necessary tools and resources to continue developing their skillsets internally.
Through effective talent mobility and engagement, Deutsche Telekom is focused on future-proofing its organization. And as part of this ongoing strategy, the organization plans on expanding this initiative beyond the top one percent of talent.
