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31,740
work days saved in one year**
57%
of Mastercard’s projects are related to developing new products and services
500,000+
unlocked hours
$55,000,000
of Mastercard’s projects are related to developing new products and services
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mastercard launched Project Possible, an internal employee matching initiative. Inspired by the program’s early success, leaders sought to scale it so employees could hone new skills and help the business meet ever-evolving demands. By rolling out its agile workforce OS, Unlocked, Mastercard empowers its entire workforce to expand their horizons and maximize the value they deliver for the business.
** Work days saved is calculated by multiplying the 3,181 projects assigned on Unlocked multiplied by 34 days saved
Mastercard is a global technology company that aims to connect and power an inclusive digital economy that benefits everyone by making their transactions safe, smart, and accessible. Their innovations use secure data and networks to help individuals, financial institutions, governments, and businesses achieve their greatest potential. With connections across more than 80 countries, Mastercard aims to build a sustainable world that unlocks priceless opportunities for all.
Mastercard’s transformation began with a once-in-a-lifetime call to action. The company’s then-CEO asked employees one crucial question: “How can we step up to help our customers?”. Amidst pandemic-induced uncertainty, Mastercard’s customers were looking for guidance to determine how to move forward.
The influx of employees who raised their hands to participate planted the seeds for Project Possible, an initiative to empower people to pitch in on projects across priority areas of the business. The program’s early success shed light on a much larger opportunity to build on the strength of Mastercard’s culture. After two waves of manually matching people to opportunities, leaders decided to scale up their initiative so that everyone could take part in it—and start honing the skills Mastercard would need to remain at the forefront of innovation.
As Lucrecia Borgonovo, Mastercard’s Chief Talent and Organizational Effectiveness Officer notes, “Based on the success we got from Project Possible, we realized that if we wanted to do this at scale and embed it in our organization’s DNA, we needed to do something more sophisticated. So we started looking for solutions.”
Mastercard developed a handful of goals to guide its transformation. These objectives included:
Disruption isn’t limited to COVID-19; instead, volatility continues to hallmark our working world. Recognizing this, Mastercard sought to encourage employees to dynamically develop skills while providing leaders with in-depth insights into these capabilities and foreshadowing any emerging knowledge gaps.
Now that disruption is the new norm, we really need employees to be on top of their game. They need to stay current, stay relevant, learn new skills, and become agile
explains Borgonovo. As Mastercard created development pathways, leaders would also need visibility into where these capabilities lie—which is where the skills intelligence tools within an agile workforce OS come into play.
Systems like Gloat’s Skills Foundation would equip leaders with the insights needed to make strategic decisions about how to reallocate talent effectively as well as determining future hiring and skill-building needs.
“People often get siloed, no matter what. People just get locked into what they’re doing and then getting them involved in other types of projects isn’t easy,” notes Rohit Chauhan, Executive Vice President of AI. Instead of limiting employees’ scope to their roles and teams, Mastercard sought to empower people to pitch in on projects across their organization.
Launching a talent marketplace would provide employees with greater insight into the breadth of opportunities available and enable managers to diversify their talent pools. “This actually provides internal consulting,” notes Fraccaro, describing the platform. “It gives people opportunities when normally the structures and the silos that we’ve got would prevent this movement of talent.”
In addition to helping them develop new skills, participating in cross-functional projects would broaden the impact employees make across Mastercard. Rather than relying on freelancers or contractors, managers could tap into internal talent that’s already up to speed on Mastercard’s ways of working, in turn enabling the enterprise to rapidly respond to emerging priorities.
As Chief People Officer Michael Fraccaro explains, “Our employees told us they want more opportunities to grow and develop themselves. We listened and worked to build a program that makes career and development opportunities readily available to everyone.”
Rather than relying on the same subset of employees for high-priority projects, launching an agile workforce OS would allow Mastercard’s leaders to work with talent that they may have otherwise overlooked. “So thinking about not just the skills and the workforce that’s immediate and right in front of us, but access to other pools of talent,” Fraccaro says. By harnessing the talent marketplace within their agile workforce OS, Mastercard sought to connect employees to diverse projects that aligned with their career goals and the needs of the business.
If we can do this now and make this not just as a standalone moment, but really create this as the fabric of our workforce planning, workforce design, upskilling, reskilling, democratizing our workforce, there's something powerful here.
With their goals identified, Mastercard began searching for a solution to equip leaders with complete skills visibility while simultaneously powering internal talent matching. Ultimately, executives decided to partner with Gloat to turn their transformation vision into a reality.
In discussing the factors that influenced their decision, VP of Digital Talent Heather Yurko explains, “What we learned from the conversations we had with Gloat was that they were thinking holistically about where the platform was going. It’s not just about our immediate needs, but also our longer-term vision.” As a self-described “data nerd”, Yurko was particularly excited about the in-depth analytics and comprehensive skills insights their forthcoming platform would provide.
All of us have projects that we just don’t have the bandwidth to get done. Now it’s just out there that I can go into a platform, log into a project, and a whole bunch of people raise their hands and say they’ll get it done. How, I have no idea, but I know they’ll deliver.
Following their decision, Mastercard partnered with Gloat’s Change & Enablement team to develop a phased launch plan for Unlocked, their agile workforce OS. After a successful pilot, they rolled out their platform to their entire workforce at the start of 2022—and use cases and adoption haven’t slowed down since. Some key examples include:
Cutting-edge reskilling for the age of AI
Most companies know reskilling is necessary to thrive in the age of AI—but few organizations are putting these training programs into practice the way Mastercard is. “I’ve been able to take people on from different areas of the business who don’t have a background in AI and train them in these skills,” notes Chauhan. “It’s an incredible way to further diversify peoples’ career equity and give them more skills than they would have if they kept working on the same thing,” he says, in reference to Mastercard’s talent marketplace.
Seamless mergers and acquisitions
M&A presents plenty of opportunity for growth—and plenty of challenges. Fortunately, Mastercard has been able to overcome many of the obstacles companies typically face post-deal by harnessing their agile workforce OS to seamlessly integrate new employees’ skills into their existing workforce. “In the past 6 or 7 years, we’ve bought 20 different companies,” notes Borgonovo.
“So Unlocked has been pretty integral to help integrate this newly acquired talent into our organization. That has been an incredible opportunity for us in terms of realizing the value of the acquisition and helping drive a greater level of engagement and retention. Through the platform, people have been able to forge great relationships and see that cross-fertilization of talent so acquired talent can find mentors within Mastercard.”
Major product innovations—without major risk
As an industry innovator for more than fifty years, Mastercard is no stranger to the challenges that come with debuting cutting-edge products. As Chauhan explains, “Whenever you do product launches, you have to think about how you can minimize risks.”
By harnessing Unlocked to compile cross-functional project teams, Mastercard now benefits from a diverse array of perspectives that help leaders troubleshoot and maximize the success of every launch. “There’s nothing better than using this platform for [innovation] because there are so many people looking at the product that if there is something missing that’s not adding up, it will get raised by somebody. So it’s absolutely brilliant from an innovation perspective that we can tap into the entire organization to help de-risk our product development framework,” Chauhan concludes.
31,740
work days saved in one year
57%
of Mastercard’s projects are related to developing new products and services
hours unlocked
in unlocked productivity
By connecting employees to over 3,000 purpose-led career development opportunities, Mastercard’s agile workforce OS has unlocked its organization’s full potential—in turn leading to over 500,000 additional hours of capacity and a total of nearly 32,000 work days saved in one year. This impressive uptick in efficiency has netted Mastercard an overall savings of $55 million dollars, as leaders can now reduce their reliance on third-party contractors and freelancers and instead tap into the diverse array of skills and experiences their own workforce has to offer.
Mastercard’s agile workforce OS began creating impact almost immediately after it was launched, as Yurko recounts. “One of the things that we saw right away upon opening up Unlocked was people’s positive feedback on being able to meet colleagues they had never known before and their ability to do work that they had never even known existed within the company. From the beginning, we had very high rates of cross-functional and cross-regional partnerships.”
Less than one month after their global roll-out, Mastercard surpassed a 50% adoption rate, a KPI that typically takes businesses at least six months to achieve. Since then adoption rates have continued to soar, with nearly 90% of Mastercard’s workforce currently registered on the platform. In addition to an impressive array of statistics—including saving almost 32,000 work days by reallocating employees to open projects instead of waiting for full-time positions—Mastercard has a growing number of use cases that speak to the success of their agile workforce OS.
“Last year, the North American team reached out and said they were short on Sales Associates and they needed someone to help them meet their goal,” Chauhan recounts, telling one of his favorite stories that highlights Mastercard’s ability to rapidly respond to change. “One Product Manager from my team raised his hand…And honestly, initially, I just couldn’t picture him doing Sales. But he was so successful that I was taken aback. Sometimes we think things won’t work but you just have to give them a chance. We put ourselves in boxes and start drinking our own Kool-Aid, but I think these platforms allow us to start thinking of boundaries much beyond.”
Reflecting on the profound changes that their agile workforce OS has already set into motion, Fraccaro says, “With Unlocked, we can collaborate across regions and business units, uncover new ideas, challenge assumptions, and push one another to think in bold new ways. Unlocked is allowing us to open up the boundaries of our teams and expand our talent reach to ultimately grow and develop with each other.”
From a business perspective, there is nothing more gratifying than to see that I can tap into every pocket of available resources and put them to use to create value for our shareholders. That’s incredible.
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