Compass Staff |
The following is a recap of the Guild webinar, “Building Workforce Resilience: The Skills Powering Mobility in 2025,” which is available on on-demand here.
In today’s volatile environment, cultivating workforce resilience is essential. Employees must be open to developing new capabilities, adopting new norms, and reconsidering long-held mindsets and behaviors. Leaders must be willing to do the same.
But what happens when an organization must build resilience from scratch, in real time, amidst one of the most acute labor shortages in its history?
That was the situation facing OSF Healthcare, a health system founded by The Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis and based in Peoria, Illinois. Employees were burnt out, contract-labor costs were sky-high, and enrollment at the organization’s nursing colleges was dwindling. On top of that, academic institutions and external labor markets were under-producing talent for OSF’s pipeline.
“We just did not have the workforce,” Tiffany Nieman, vice president of organizational development at OSF HealthCare, said during a Guild webinar.
New research from Guild and Lightcast helps explain why that matters. The new study, “The Talent Resilience Index”, identified workforce mobility — the ability of workers to move, adapt, and fill in-demand roles — as one of the clearest indicators yet of resilience in action, and a key contributor to economic growth. Mobility also fuels economic value, the report found: $221 billion in additional annual earnings between 2016 and 2024 and an average 15% raise for workers who make a move.
But if the Talent Resilience Index surfaced the why behind workforce mobility, OSF’s story revealed the how. That is: a set of deliberate choices that made mobility — and therefore resilience — possible in a hurry.
1. Start where you are, and change what you can.
Nieman realized early on that mobility would never improve inside her organization until OSF changed its underlying systems and policies — many of them well-intentioned but outdated — that kept people from moving in the first place. Friction points like:
Upfront funding obstacles for education;
Manager approval for career exploration; and
Punitive rules for employees who wanted to shift pathways.
“We were creating constraints within our own health system,” Nieman said. “So we decided to revamp and rethink the way we invested in our talent. We redid our entire processes and policies to try to better align with the current market and how we felt like we could grow internally.”
Today, OSF gets a $3.11 return for every dollar invested in education and mobility. The organization has also seen a 60% reduction in contract labor.
2. Reframe mobility as a business problem, rather than an HR problem.
To solve the workforce challenges confronting OSF, Neiman knew she needed support from business leaders. She convened a cross-functional summit with clinical leaders, operations, HR analytics, regional executives, and educators, with the goal of reaching consensus on what was fast-becoming a business and organizational crisis: The talent system OSF needed did not exist yet.
“We brought everyone together. We looked at the data and said, ‘what are we willing to commit as a health system, both in financial resources, but also our people resources for [supporting] our learners?,” she said. “What do we want to become as a health system?”
Continuing, she added: “If I were giving one piece of advice, this was the really pivotal moment, because now we're all operating from the same playbook.”
3. Deconstruct mobility in realistic, near-term milestones.
At a tactical level, Neiman also knew that mobility would never materialize unless employees could see a path forward and feel progress along the way. Moving into a new role can be daunting, especially for workers balancing family, finances, and unpredictable schedules. Neiman decided to break OSF’s mobility pathways into a series of achievable “milestone steps” that offered both economic and psychological momentum.
As she explained: “Some employees, especially lower-income earners, are not going to wait two years to go through a certification process before they see economic mobility. So let’s break it down in some segments to give them that growth along the way. We've been able to do that in a number of pipelines, which incentivizes people to continue learning and developing and upskilling, not making them wait till they have reached ‘the end’ to experience mobility. Otherwise, they're easily poachable to another industry.”
4. Revisit your skills definitions.
To Nieman, OSF employees will soon operate in a “both/and world,” where AI assists with tasks but cannot replace judgment, ethics, contextual understanding, or interpretative thinking. To succeed, she says, workers need “blended” capabilities — part technical, part cognitive, part relational.
For example, in OSF’s “hospital room of the future,” seasoned nurses — some of whom remember practicing before electronic health records — were initially apprehensive about new technology. But their human value quickly became clear. When a tech-enabled system incorrectly matched a medication to a patient, an experienced nurse was the first to catch the error, relying on judgment and clinical context that the AI lacked. Meanwhile, newer nurses who were more comfortable with automation and digital tools were more inclined to trust the system’s recommendation.
For Nieman, this underscores the need for blended skills. To navigate this “both/and world,” organizations must support workers with deep knowledge of the underlying practices alongside those who have grown up fluent in the new technology.
Resilience in practice
Today, OSF gets a $3.11 return for every dollar invested in education and mobility. According to engagement surveys, employees feel invested in, supported, and encouraged to take steps they once believed were out of reach. That cultural effect preceded the business impact, yet both followed. The organization has also seen a 60% reduction in contract labor.
OSF shows that workforce resilience doesn’t come from waiting out the labor market but from redesigning the internal systems that help people see a future inside the organization. Leaders who want organizations that move quickly must first create the conditions for their people to move. The rest — performance, engagement, culture — follows.
