2015 HR SUMMIT EXCLUSIVE COVERAGE
HUMAN RESOURCES DIRECTOR HCAMAG.COM ISSUE 13.01
D O GO AT E R G S R O T A V O N N I HR TO
INSI
CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES 2015 FORECASTING
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A UNIVERSAL APPROACH TO HR COULD IT EVER WORK?
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BUSINESS WITHOUT BORDERS GLOBAL M&A FAILURES
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DELIVERING
RECRUITMENT
ACROSS
EMPLOYMENT
THE
AND
CAREER
SERVICES
LIFECYCLE adecco.com.au
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EDITOR’S LETTER / HUMAN RESOURCES DIRECTOR
THE THINGS I’VE HEARD...
2015 HR SUMMIT EXCLUSIVE COVERAGE
HUMAN RESOURCES DIRECTOR HCAMAG.COM ISSUE 13.01
D GOOA GINRNOEVATORTS
An insightful ‘truism’, an interesting observation, and a ‘top tip’, all gleaned from around the traps, kick off my first ed’s letter for 2015. When change is boiled down to the human level, it’s never a single event; it’s ongoing and has distinct phases. Any HR professional knows that – yet there is a temptation to become anxious if we don’t have all the answers right now. This is never more clearly seen than during times of career transition. “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” Steve Jobs spoke those words. They certainly ring true in cases where mature age workers find themselves out of a job, or indeed for any life-changing event. As human beings our minds fill with ‘what if’ questions and recriminations over events that have come and gone.
TO
HR INSIGHTS
CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES 2015 FORECASTING
CALTEX FROM:
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TOBACCO
TARI | SANI | LION
A UNIVERSAL APPROACH TO HR COULD IT EVER WORK?
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BUSINESS WITHOUT BORDERS GLOBAL M&A FAILURES
COPY & FEATURES EDITOR Iain Hopkins JOURNALISTS Chloe Taylor, Jill Gregorie PRODUCTION EDITORS Roslyn Meredith, Moira Daniels, Clare Alexander
ART & PRODUCTION DESIGNER Marla Morelos, Loiza Caguiat DESIGN MANAGER Daniel Williams TRAFFIC MANAGER Abby Cayanan
SALES & MARKETING MARKETING EXECUTIVE Alex Carr COMMUNICATIONS EXECUTIVE Lisa Narroway BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGERS James Francis, Steven McDonald, Gareth Scott
When change is boiled down to the human level, it’s never a single event; it’s ongoing and has distinct phases
CORPORATE CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER Mike Shipley CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER George Walmsley MANAGING DIRECTOR Justin Kennedy CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER Colin Chan HUMAN RESOURCES MANAGER Julia Bookallil Editorial enquiries Iain Hopkins tel: +61 2 8437 4703 iain.hopkins@keymedia.com.au Advertising enquiries James Francis tel: +61 2 8437 4766 james.francis@keymedia.com.au Steven McDonald tel: +61 2 8437 4757 steven.mcdonald@keymedia.com.au Gareth Scott tel: +61 2 8437 4745 gareth.scott@keymedia.com.au Subscriptions tel: +61 2 8011 4992 • fax: +61 2 8437 4753 subscriptions@keymedia.com.au Key Media keymedia.com.au Key Media Pty Ltd, regional head office, Level 10, 1–9 Chandos St, St Leonards, NSW 2065, Australia tel: +61 2 8437 4700 • fax: +61 2 9439 4599 Offices in Auckland, Toronto, Denver, Manila hcamag.com Copyright is reserved throughout. No part of this publication can be reproduced in whole or part without the express permission of the editor. Contributions are invited, but copies of work should be kept as HRD can accept no responsibility for loss.
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CONNECT
What we really should be doing is plotting the way forward. In a state of confusion and worry, that’s easier said than done – but to paraphrase one of the leaders in mature age transition, Alison Monroe, the key for employers with an ageing workforce, and employees themselves, is to start thinking about working longer but differently. Now, an observation related to the above: I was surprised and alarmed by the number of people who said to me during research for one feature in this issue, that they had seen or been a victim of age discrimination. Sadly it seems that yet another ‘ism’ – in this case ageism – is alive and well. Finally, a tip. This comes from an experienced HR practitioner at an event I attended in November. It’s perhaps to be taken with tongue firmly in cheek: if you want to gauge the mood or sentiment of your employees, take a covert expedition out to wherever it is that smokers gather. You’ll get people talking honestly and candidly about work issues – and sometimes more than work issues. Just don’t inhale…
HRD wants to hear from you. hrd_editor@keymedia.com.au
Iain Hopkins, editor, HRD
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CONTENTS / HUMAN RESOURCES DIRECTOR
COVER STORY
HR innovators Four HR leaders talk about how they are using innovation in their organisation to get the edge on the competition
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2015 The road ahead 2015: What’s likely to be on HR agendas in 2015? HRD explores what’s hot
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46 A universal approach for HR – could it ever work? Could there ever be a global best practice for HR managers? Would a global HR certification or a global HR conference ever be viable? Stefanie Hornung outlines the opportunities and difficulties of international initiatives
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Innovation by stealth Having worked with GE, Samsung, Philips and Pfizer, Paddy Miller knows a thing or two about innovation. He chats to Iain Hopkins about innovation blockers and why stealth innovation may be the answer
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48 Lifting the performance bar Want to lift the performance bar in 2015? Nicholas S Barnett provides his top tips on the 7 indispensable and inter-related habits that drive high performance companies
REGULARS 04 | In brief: HR insights 06 | News analysis: Generations at work 56 | Opinion
CHECK OUT THE HRD ARCHIVES ONLINE: hcamag.com
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ROSTERING TIMESHEETS FREE JOBS BOARD LEAVE MANAGEMENT AWARD INTERPRETATION EMPLOYEE FILE MANAGEMENT PERFORMANCE REVIEWS CONTRACTS & POLICIES EMPLOYEE BENEFITS INDUCTION PAYROLL
ONE SYSTEM TO RULE THEM ALL
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JANUARY 2015 / HR INSIGHTS
HR PRODUCTIVITY K What’s keeping you from doing more strategic work? A recent survey of over 1,300 HR professionals, the majority with over 10 years’ experience, has revealed where time is being wasted Top 10 productivity threats
1 EMPLOYEE MANAGEMENT
6 REPORTING
2 RECRUITING
7 COMPLIANCE
3 MANAGING TIME CARDS
8 EVENT PLANNING
4 UPDATING EMPLOYEE INFORMATION
5 MANAGING BENEFITS
9 LEGAL ISSUES
10 TRACKING ANNUAL LEAVE AND PAID TIME OFF
Where is HR spending most of its time?
71% EMPLOYEE MANAGEMENT (answering questions, resolving issues, recognition, discipline)
54%
54% COMPANY POLICIES
47% 37%
AND COMPLIANCE
(health benefits, workers comp)
42% RECRUITMENT (job fairs, listings and posts, reviewing resumes, reference and background checking, interviewing)
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HR thinks they should spend more time on... PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
CONDUCTING TRAINING
MANAGING AND OVERSEEING COMPANY CULTURE
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HUMAN RESOURCES DIRECTOR
Y KILLERS Professional development
Whose job is it?
2 out of 3 HR pros spend an hour or more educating themselves on HR updates weekly
82%
4 out of 5 HR pros attended HR-related training in the last 12 months
60% of HR pros spend an average 1.5 hours per week educating themselves on HR policy, procedure and compliance updates
of HR pros feel it’s primarily management’s responsibility to keep employees productive
65%
1.5 HOURS
of HR pros feel it’s primarily management’s responsibility to keep employees happy
In large companies, HR pros feel undertrained on:
However,
69%
WORKFORCE PLANNING
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
MANAGING AND OVERSEEING CULTURE
of HR pros believe they understand the needs and issues of employees more than management
Source: HR software provider, BambooHR
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NEWS ANALYSIS / GENERATIONS AT WORK
BRIDGING THE GENERATION GAP While managing multiple generations has its challenges, new research indicates that employers are not making the task any easier by persisting with ‘one-size-fits-all’ talent management strategies Five years ago, the ‘generation war’ at work was a hot topic. Much of the focus was on Millennials (also known as Gen Y) and just how ‘different’ they were to all other workers. Today we hear less about it – the media has moved onto other issues and perhaps employers themselves have simply accepted (if not embraced) the quirks that each generation brings. But at what cost? Today’s workforce is made up of four generations (Millennials, Gen X, Baby Boomers and Traditionalists). Yet only half (52%) of surveyed organisations have any generation-specific talent management strategies in place. Both employers and employees believe this is poor judgment; both cite the lack of differentiated strategies for a multigenerational workforce as the main mistake made by organisations when managing a generationally diverse workforce. Are we really getting optimal productivity from all generations at work? The answer is a resounding ‘no’.
TRADITIONAL VS NOW Research from Deloitte indicates that the new world of work is increasingly being characterised by self-forming teams responding to rapidly changing business challenges.
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Traditional approach
Emerging trends
Hierarchical
Networked
Direct
Coach
Top-down
Bottom-up
Process-focused
Outcome-focused
Autocratic
Democratic
Measures
Improves
External rewards
Intrinsic rewards
Fixed organisation
Matrix organisation
Annual cycle feedback
Just-in-time feedback
Weakness-based
Strength-based
Source: Deloitte, Human Capital Trends 2013 Leading Indicators
However, most talent management strategies have been slow to adapt. Cameron Judson, CEO of Chandler Macleod, confirms that although organisations have become more sophisticated in their talent management strategies, they are still not looking at diversity and inclusion as key considerations in that package – and this is most apparent when it comes to age diversity and inclusion. “Age is just a different lens to that in terms of how you approach diversity and inclusion,” he says. “Generally speaking, companies still apply a ‘one size fits all’ approach to talent management.”
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HUMAN RESOURCES DIRECTOR
Roughly what proportion of your workforce fall into each of the following generations?
3% Millennials (born after 1981) Generation X (1965-1980)
30%
27%
Baby Boomers (1946-1964)
39%
Traditionalist (1925-1945)
“Flexible working conditions and environments are desired by all workers”
Source: Talent Management: The Next Wave by Chandler Macleod
Which of the following generations does your organisation have specific talent management strategies in place for?
X 37% Millennials 35% Generation (born after 1981) (1965-1980)
11%
Baby Boomers (1946-1964)
4%
Traditionalist (1925-1945)
52%
None of these
Source: Talent Management: The Next Wave by Chandler Macleod
Common motivators across all age groups Enjoyment Recognition Flexibility Motivated by enjoying work 71% Baby Boomers 67% Gen X 60% Millennials Different motivators by age group Millennials – basic pay Gen X – responsibility & challenges Baby Boomers – responsibility; training Source: Kronos, Australia’s Choice: Live to work, or work to live?
The new era of talent management requires reaching into and embracing individual differences and equally similarities, and understanding motivation and engagement. Results from Chandler Macleod’s white paper, Talent Management: The Next Wave, provide some surprising insights. For example, while younger workers expect flexibility from their employers, older generations are open to it – but have different motivations as to why it’s important to them. Likewise, Millennials and Gen X might say there’s life at work and there’s life outside of work, whereas for mature age workers this is a newer concept; they like the idea of flexibility but they are not predisposed to it and it’s not the way they’ve previously worked. “There’s a similar motivation but a distinct and different need between generations,” notes Judson. Yet many organisations continue to misjudge what employees want – as this table reveals:
Millennials
What they want
What employers think they want
1. Flexible work conditions
1. Employee development
2. Employee focused environments
2. Regular goal setting
3. Training to keep up with the times 3. Continuous review of talent Gen X
1. Flexible work conditions
1. Flexible work conditions
2. Flexible work environments
2. Employee focused development
3. Training to keep up with the times 3. Regular goal setting 1. Flexible work conditions Baby Boomers 2. Flexible work environments & Traditionalists 3. Continuous coaching and feedback
1. Flexible work conditions 2. Regular goal setting 3. Position of flexible work environments
Source: Talent Management: The Next Wave by Chandler Macleod
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NEWS ANALYSIS / GENERATIONS AT WORK
For Millennial employees, employers focus on development, regular goal setting and continuous review of talent; however, Millennials rate the provision of flexible work conditions twice as effective as these strategies. Similarly, employers underestimate the importance to Gen X of training to keep up with the times, and while 17% of employers believe that social media is an effective strategy to manage Millennials, only 1% of Millennials see this effective in practice. There is a growing desire from employees of all generations to work for organisations with a solid reputation, reward for performance, clear career trajectory and a culture of collaboration. Ninetyone per cent of employees consider it important
NEXT STEPS Start by collecting the data. Study the generational composition of your workforce – and use that information to guide your HR strategies. In exit interviews, ask whether people would have remained with your organisation if they could have worked more flexibly. Survey your workforce to ask to what extent employees believe that your organisation helps them to balance their work, family and life priorities. Identify skills gaps in your HR team. Support them in developing the skills to become skilled business consultants with robust data analytic and problem solving capability. Match up your HR leaders with your IT leaders to help them develop a deep understanding of cloud, mobile, and social technologies. Adapt workplace practices for different worker groups. Adapt your approach for each generation; also consider differences such as location, religion, cultural and linguistic backgrounds and disability. Facilitate regular conversations about differences to increase understanding and help develop respect for other generations. Provide regular management training on diversity. Offer flexible work arrangements equally across the workforce. Flexible work arrangements need not be costly or resource intensive in their implementation. Often, existing conditions of service can be managed in a slightly different way to better meet employees’ needs, for example allowing them to take small blocks of annual leave over the course of the year. Implement a ‘Work from Home’ policy. This will be important as challenges around an ageing workforce and environmental impacts become increasingly relevant. Make sure your policy covers industrial issues, such as agreed work location, hours and duties, insurance, training and professional development, tax issues such as deductibility and FBT and an agreement that work will not be sub-contracted out. It should also mention technologies that encourage visual collaboration and reduce feelings of isolation and improve productivity, and an OHS risk assessment process to ensure the home office has been assessed from an ergonomic and workplace environment perspective.
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that their workplaces provide some greater purpose than making money, and 33% of employers have re-shaped their talent management practices to include a greater focus on meaning. It appears flexible working conditions and environments are desired by all workers, and fortunately the uptake of new technology is facilitating this trend. However, although 76% of employers agree that flexible working arrangements provide a positive ROI, one in three believe there is an inverse relationship between flexible work arrangements and productivity.
Do you agree or disagree with the following statements? There is an inverse relationship between flexible work and productivity
6% 26% 29% 32% 7%
Providing flexible working arrangements to staff generates a positive ROI
22%
54% 19% 1%
Strongly agree
Agree
Disagree
Strongly disagree
4% Neither agree nor disagree
Source: Talent Management: The Next Wave by Chandler Macleod
Although organisations have a range of strategies in place to manage offsite employees, many offsite staff are not aware of these, indicating there is still work to be done in promoting flexible work options. Despite this, both employers and employees believe that those who work offsite are more motivated than their onsite counterparts. One thing is clear: organisations need to implement some form of flexible work. When Kronos surveyed some 1,600 people across a variety of industries the key finding was that Australians want to work to live, not the other way around. Some 40% of surveyed workers wanted to work as long as possible to remain active as they aged – a clear indication that flexible work options will become increasingly important.
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HUMAN RESOURCES DIRECTOR
IT STARTS WITH A CONVERSATION Judson for one believes there are more similarities than differences in terms of what people of different generations look for from work; fundamentally, everyone wants to be treated as an individual. And that requires individual conversations with workers. “It’s the same conversation you’d have with anyone else you thought was talented in the workplace,” says Judson. “If there’s a way to engage the right audience and deliver on what you promise, that’s the future of talent management regardless of generation.”
ACT NOW The primary cost of poor management of a multigenerational workforce is, at best, lack of engagement, and outright inter-generational conflict at worst. According to the Kronos study, 51% of surveyed respondents agreed that younger workers did not appreciate the knowledge and skills of their older
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counterparts, while 62% of Baby Boomers felt hiring younger workers who demanded more pay undermined the importance of experience. Thirtyone per cent of respondents agreed it could be challenging for workers of significantly different ages to work together, with Millennials (37%), casual workers (42%) and retail employees (39%) most likely to hold this belief. The overarching theme of Chandler Macleod’s white paper was that tension between generations usually occurs due to misunderstandings, stereotypical views, and a failure to seek to understand and acknowledge differences. “Conflict might be overplaying it but it’s often about misunderstandings or lack of respect,” says Judson. “You can have a stereotypical conversation that says ‘we’re different’ or you can have a conversation about how we similarly aligned to achieve goals for the organisation. It’s about reframing the conversation and tackling the unconscious bias we all hold.”
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NEWS ANALYSIS / GENERATIONS AT WORK
CASE STUDY: TEACHERS MUTUAL BANK Core
Teachers Mutual Bank is one of the top five largest mutual financial institutions in Australia, with assets of $4.4bn and 163,000 members. HRD talks to CHRO Helen O’Reilly about how her company revamped its approach to talent management, and why a special focus on the mature age cohort was required
HR Director: What are the age demographics of your organisation? Helen O’Reilly: We have a large chunk, almost a third of the workforce of 450 people, over the age of 50. Then there’s a further 13% over the age of 45. At the other end of the scale we have 6% under 25 and 48% between 25 and 44. HRD: You’ve focused primarily on your mature age worker strategies – for obvious reasons... HO: We have very low turnover here and I knew we had an ageing workforce, but until you actually sit down and analyse it, it can be a bit of a surprise. It was a wake-up call. We have 31% over age 50 and that compares to the financial/insurance industry average of 17%. That prompted me to do some further analysis. I found that this group alone had an average length of service of 11 years and over 1,500 years of corporate knowledge. If they were to all walk out the door within two years, it would be a tremendous loss to the organisation. HRD: What did that deeper analysis reveal? HO: It highlighted three main risks: How do we manage the knowledge transfer from this group? What are we going to do about succession planning? And how do we build our retention strategies? HRD: What steps did you take at that point? HO: The government at that time was giving grants to organisations to enable them to implement programs for mature age workers, provided you partnered with an accredited organisation. We partnered with SageCo and introduced their program called Envisage. That’s a holistic framework. Instead of just talking about retirement from a financial angle, it looks at the six different areas: money, identity, health, career, relationships, and the future. We complemented that program by offering nutrition seminars called Keeping Nifty Over 50. We also partnered with one of the super funds and they ran wealth creation workshops.
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HRD: How have these initiatives been received? HO: Extremely well. A number of our recently appointed mature age workers shared stories of being subjected to overt age discrimination before joining us. I was astounded at how many stories there were out there, and they were so grateful that we valued their experience. They also appreciated that we were still willing to invest in them. Instead of saying ‘you’re 60 so we’ll give you a job but we’re not going to invest any money because there’s a good chance you’ll only be here a couple of years’, we made investment in their skills a priority. The program also gave employees the green light to start a conversation with their managers to discuss what their career and transition to retirement needs were. It was interesting that everyone had different needs: some people were looking to reduce their hours of work and to spend time testing the waters in what they would do in retirement; others had no plan to retire any time soon. I believe it was very positive to be able to offer that flexibility and to encourage them to feel comfortable to start a conversation.
Executive
HRD: Do you find different generations want different things from you as an employer? HO: I don’t think there are significant differences. The reasons behind why they want a benefit might differ but the benefit itself doesn’t. Several years ago flexibility was sought by people who were a bit older, or they had children; now it’s often young workers who want to study or do sport or undertake travel. Even with career development, there are more similarities than differences. For example, we employed one man at age 56 and he’s been with us for seven years. During that time he’s had two promotions and he’s currently studying an MBA. I think many organisations have misconceptions that older workers don’t have ambitions and aren’t willing to learn. That’s a perfect example of how wrong that view is – you must continue to invest in people.
Pension
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2015 FORECASTING / HR PRIORITIES
2015 FORECAST
2015: THE ROAD AHEAD What’s likely to be on HR agendas in 2015? Gary Taylor provides a roadmap from the frontline It is always good to see how HR colleagues in other parts of the world interpret developments in the people management profession. A recent report published by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) in the US reflects what their special interest panelists regard as some of the pervasive and common issues challenging HR professionals in 2015 and beyond. Let’s take a look.
the tactics that have had to change. Only certain categories of workers will be in high demand, and this will require selective treatment to attract and retain them. Can your compensation & benefits practices cope with inequitable shifts in market trends? What will your recommendation be to the possible relocating of operations to cheaper countries?
Continuing impact of the economy. Regardless of the pronouncements by the optimists, global and local economies remain in a relatively stagnant state, with no great prospects around the corner. The impact on HR specifically will be felt in the budget, hiring and HR strategies. The ‘good’ years might have instilled some habits in HR practitioners that must be unlearned in the lean years.
The ongoing influence of developments in information and communication technologies. The recruitment industry has led the way in HR, but our compensation & benefits colleagues are developing exciting apps for a whole range of uses. Are you exploring all possibilities?
Competition for in-demand skilled workers. The war for talent has been around for some while; it is only
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Demographic changes. We all know about the retirement of Baby Boomers and the influx of millennials into the workforce. One of the challenges is perhaps the fact that today’s HR professionals have to deal
HCAMAG.COM
18/12/2014 5:20:20 PM
HUMAN RESOURCES DIRECTOR
2015 FORECAST with the diversity issues of four or five ‘generations’ in the workplace, and that the demands of the younger groups are inversely proportional to their current seniority. The importance of flexible work-life strategies. We know about employees wanting flexibility in the workplace, but employers are also demanding greater flexibility from staff with regard to 24/7 availability, and are leveraging technology to do so. There’s a diversity of practices, with some major employers pulling back from work-at-home policies while others are pushing the boundaries even more. A growing emphasis on measurement. Metrics and the ability to analyse data continue to excite HR practitioners and their business colleagues. Particularly important are the interdisciplinary ratios, which will allow executives to make informed decisions on new business lines, productivity initiatives, acquisitions or organisational design. Collaborative development with your finance colleagues is a great way forward. A rise in uncertainty and volatility of markets. Is it coincidental that we are seeing such political and social unrest in so many regions of the world? To be practical, if there is a large currency fluctuation affecting take-home pay for some of your foreign workers, do you make adjustments? Do you pay greater allowances for staff travelling to hotspots? Do you know what K&R insurance is?* Implications of government legislation. We have become pretty adept at reacting to legislative developments and trying to influence them within our own country. It is worth anticipating the likely direction of legislation in territories within which you operate. Just to test your readiness, what is your HR policy in respect to the smoking of medically prescribed marijuana in the workplace? It’s coming. Perhaps it is also worth noting that these trends are rolling out simultaneously, and are likely to have an impact on each other. There is nothing entirely new on this list. It is the product of some smart HR colleagues identifying what would appear to be some of the hot topics for our future months and years. And the future has already started. *kidnap & ransom insurance
Gary Taylor is an HR director who has worked for Australian, South African and British multinationals on two continents, including in the Middle East. He is registered as a Master HR Practitioner with the South African Board for People Practice, and served as the vice president of the Institute of People Management.
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YOUR 2015 PRIORITIES In September 2014, HRD’s own readers revealed what their priorities for the next 12 months would be. Here are the results: To what degree will you be focusing on the following areas over the next year? (1 being not a focus at all and 5 being a strong focus) Developing your personal leadership management skills Executive education programs for your organisation’s leadership/ management team L&D initiatives across the organisation Change management initiatives Working with law firms on legal compliance Working with external parties on recruitment Working with external parties on strategy-focused projects Incorporating new technology to improve internal processes Implementing new workplace health & safety initiatives Remote workforce management and international recruitment Revamping employee benefits, including pension plans Implementing new engagement/ reward & recognition programs 0
1
2
3
4
5
Common themes revolved around change management – usually tied to downsizing, restructuring and streamlining of operations. There was also concern about cost-cutting and budgeting – primarily convincing other executives and line managers of the importance of elements like L&D in tight economic conditions. ‘Doing more with less’ was a common theme – for the organisation as a whole and the HR function specifically. On the retention front, holding onto older workers emerged as a key concern, and for recruitment, it was finding the right talent quickly. Readers shared their challenges: “Reducing cost in the business, finding and reducing/eliminating activity in the business that is now obsolete or doesn’t add value, and restructuring activities” “Training – having the time and resources to train the managers and staff ” “Guiding the organisation to find, motivate and keep talent via earning ‘employer of choice’ status. Guiding executive leadership to viewing people issues/opportunities through a business case lens” “Engagement in a declining market is my top priority”
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2015 FORECASTING / TECHNOLOGY
2015 FORECAST
LEADER OR LAGGARD? HR TECH IN 2015 Brought to you by
With the unrelenting pace of change in business today, agile strategies are required to capitalise on brief windows of opportunity. Decisions based on yesterday’s trends won’t cut it. Is your HR technology helping or hindering this process?
“In terms of real value, I can’t go past technology that offers a real-time, predictive framework,” says Ari Kopoulos, general manager of sales and marketing at Employment Innovations, when asked about key HR technology trends in 2015. “These tools analyse and unlock data held within the individual HR transactions, offering true insight, forecasting and strategic decision-making support.” There are several trends that are now part of the mainstream business narrative. Nearly every business, no matter the size or industry, is considering how these strategies will improve efficiency, save money or offer competitive advantage. Specifically, this means: • Everything worth delivering will be delivered on mobile • Cloud-based systems are quickly becoming the new standard • There’s a focus on ‘one system to rule them all’ “In essence, every business is now a digital business or is planning on becoming one. Extending this one step further is a true game-changing trend in the way businesses work and employ,” he adds.
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SOCIAL, MOBILE AND WEARABLE Of all the changes happening in business, the rise of the ‘uncollared workforce’ is the most unprecedented – that is, a workforce of freelancers that extends beyond full-time employees into a crowdsourced, connected economy of projectbased professionals. In this regard, the traditional organisational structure is being challenged by a limitless, agile and highly motivated talent pool that, in many ways, is better suited to solving specific challenges, in any time and place, rather than being tethered to a job description. It stands to reason that any technology that provides immediate access to information to make decisions will be embraced. But for all the hype and talk about social and mobile capabilities, have businesses really embraced them? “Social and mobile are definitely making inroads and are the quickly becoming the standard for new and existing applications alike,” says Kopoulos. “These technologies translate into user experience, and if you don’t have a mobile option or social integration, you often don’t get an opportunity to be considered.”
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HUMAN RESOURCES DIRECTOR
2015 FORECAST Wearable tech is the next logical step from mobile devices, but most companies are sitting on the sideline waiting for what this tech trend will do and how it will be used. “In this regard, wearable tech will be slow burner,” Kopoulos says. Those willing to take the plunge might be pleasantly surprised: the promise wearable technology has for the workplace is limitless. These devices merge mobility, connectivity and applications, with increased collaboration and engagement. They offer a whole new way of learning and assessment. “The trick is, the value proposition needs to be win-win,” says Kopoulos. “But with all new and invasive technologies, employee privacy and data security will need to be addressed before any roll out is considered.”
USER EXPERIENCE If there’s one overarching theme to look out for in 2015, it’s user experience. This, according to Kopoulos, is increasingly becoming “the make or break for applications.” In its simplest form, the user experience is about how the application makes you feel when using it. “To truly engage your workforce, an application needs an element of ‘wow’ and visceral simplicity, each time an employee connects with the system,” says Kopoulos. To that end, one hot product is the newly launched Employment Hero by Employment Innovations. Employment Hero is branded as an online ecosystem that enables employers to list job opportunities free of charge and subsequently manage all aspects of employment within a business. It is Australia’s first fully integrated cloud-based employment platform, focused on managing the entire employee life cycle from hire to retire. This includes HR services, live HR support and outsourced payroll services with rostering, award interpretation and timesheets. The Employment Hero platform has already proven popular across the retail and hospitality industries. “Our key take-away from helping so many businesses over the past two decades is that job seekers are looking for the best place to work, offering reward, recognition and a great culture,” says Kopoulos. “Employers are seeking to build the best workplace, offering a deeper level of engagement, compliance and streamlined processes.” As identified by HRD’s own readers in the 2014 global survey, compliance remains a key challenge
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NEXT STEPS This year, Employment Innovations was ranked in the top 10 of BRW’s Most Innovative Companies list for its easily accessible, cloud-based award compliance platform. Yet Kopoulos always has his eye on the future. When asked what he would like to see happen next, if provided with unlimited development funds, he doesn’t hesitate: 1. Get connected with first point, predictive analytics 2. Develop technology that finds and quantifies hidden patterns in data that would normally be invisible “This means an intelligent and heuristic [experience-based] framework of analytics and data visualisation that offers insight, predictions and future-facing recommendations in specific business scenarios,” he says. In summary, this means employers can answer questions like: 1. How long will Chris stay with us? 2. What specific training program will improve Chris’s performance? 3. Who is a flight risk? 4. What hiring criteria is the indicator of retention for a particular position? “Coupled with notifications and reminders delivered on any device, users will have information and recommendations pushed in real time, effectively allowing them to manage the workplace by exception.”
for HR professionals. Australian businesses must comply with a complicated regulatory landscape – including legal documents that detail wages, loadings, allowances, penalties and other conditions that must be paid to employees. Employment Hero can help employers and employees alike find their way through the complex world of awards to remain both compliant and competitive. “Employment Hero is the one system to rule them all,” says Kopoulos. “It’s a clear step toward workforce singularity in a platform that captures every aspect of the employee lifecycle.”
Employment Hero is Australia’s first fully integrated cloud-based employment platform. Employment Hero now includes a complete and free job board and applicant tracking system integrated with core HR services. Employment Innovations was ranked in the top 10 of BRW’s list of Most Innovative Companies 2014 for its easily accessible, cloudbased award compliance platform.
JANUARY 2015 | 15
18/12/2014 5:24:38 PM
2015 FORECASTING / PERSONAL PRODUCTIVITY
2015 FORECAST Welcome to 2015! Hands up if you have created New Year’s resolutions. Keep your hands up if you kept last year’s New Year’s resolutions. Notice how I didn’t say “keep your hands up if you intend to keep your New Year’s resolutions?” Even with the best of intentions, if there’s no plan or action, intentions remain wishful thoughts. As the New Year kicks off, it is timely to think about how you can be more productive and effective across the days, weeks and months ahead to achieve your goals. Being productive isn’t necessarily about downloading applications to your smartphone, nor is it about spending more time completing tasks. First and foremost, being productive is a mindset that is supported by a system applied every day. That ‘system’ could be paper-, web- or app-based. Let’s look at five simple steps you can take.
STEP 1: FOCUS YOUR MINDSET A focus on removing distractions is fundamental to good concentration and time management. This requires commitment to the basics, including exercise, good sleep and a healthy diet to provide energy throughout the day. It also means focusing on tasks when you are at your most productive – for many, that means the morning. Blocking time out in this productive period at least two to three times per week will help in this end. Turn off your internet connection and don’t look at email in that time. At the start of each week, ensure you have your list of things to achieve, and don’t let small emergencies distract you from your goals.
THE PRODUCTIVE HR DIRECTOR HR professionals are busier than ever. Peter Szilagyi outlines how you can ensure you’re getting the most from your limited time in 2015
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STEP 2: ORGANISE YOUR EQUIPMENT Notice how athletes, musicians or even great tradesmen are very particular about their equipment? It’s organised, maintained, cleaned and packed neatly after use. HR practitioner tools include email, folder structures, calendars and systems like Excel or SAP. How well are these tools maintained for you? Some actions to consider include: • Organise your desktop and your electronic desktop: Tidy up your folders and create a logical structure for how you access information. Ensure your PC has been optimised for speed (e.g. run a disk cleanup, defrag your hard disk and minimise the programs required to start up your PC).
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18/12/2014 5:21:36 PM
HUMAN RESOURCES DIRECTOR
2015 FORECAST • Organise your mailbox: Clean up your 2014 mail and create auto rules for recurring non important reminders (e.g. auto-receipt notes) to file away this correspondence. Sort your mail from A-Z, and you can quickly work through what is important or can be deleted. Better yet – archive 2014 and start with a new mailbox for 2015. • Organise your calendar: Look at your 2015 calendar with a fresh set of eyes. Delete old appointments. Put in realistic and new placeholders for thinking time, for your family and health and wellness. Create monthly placeholders for items like best practice research, career development and networking. Finally, ensure you have set up a process to catch information and are able to either action it on the spot or file it for action later on. The best way to action something is tackle it immediately if it will take less than five minutes, or to file it for later if not. One of the best ways to do that is to group activities and add them to your calendar.
STEP 3: THINK INSIDE THE BOX Now that you’ve focused your mindset and are starting from a clean baseline, it’s time to focus on the tools available inside your organisation. Commit to really knowing how your internal business solutions work. Some considerations include: • Communication tools: If you use Webex or other communications solutions, take the time to view their training videos. Learning shortcuts is important. In addition, some practical suggestions include creating a speed dial for conference call dial-in details or for key corporate contacts like your office concierge/front desk team or the IT help desk. • Operating tools: You will only be as good as your tools at hand. Look to build a solid understanding of your corporate operating tools (MS Office, Google Docs or Apple iWork) or HR functional tools (Taleo or SuccessFactors). Practically, the easy way to do this is to have a cheat sheet – there are many on shortcuts and tips that you can print out and have by your PC. • Knowledge tools: Do you or your organisation
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have subscriptions with professional publications and organisations like Human Capital/HR Director, HBR, SHRM or Corporate Leadership Council? Make time monthly to read and, where relevant, share this information with your colleagues. Finally, commit to expanding your network this year (something to put on your calendar as a reminder!). There is always someone with more experience in the area you’re working in. Expanding your network is about giving, so next time you are asked to help, take the time to support.
STEP 4: THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX Any search on productivity on Google, Android or the Apple Store will yield hundreds of applications and suggestions. Here are a few to consider: • Task management: There are many great applications that allow you to manage tasks and to-do lists. Task management applications include Google Keep, Microsoft OneNote and many others. • Form building: These tools allow you to quickly build surveys or data capture tools – for example, customer satisfaction surveys, event registration and system testing trackers. Form-building tools include Surveymonkey, Wufoo and Formstack. • Search effectiveness: Yes, Google. Did you know that Google has an advanced search feature that allows you to refine your searches by keywords, phrases, region or time last updated? Next time you’re searching for something, look at Google Search Help or Advanced Search. Finally, before you install any software on your corporate PC or smartphone, don’t forget to check what applications you are allowed or not allowed to install.
STEP 5: PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT As the old saying goes, practice makes perfect. Maintaining focus through the year will be the biggest challenge, but once you have set goals, processes and boundaries, and you have a sophisticated toolset, you are well on your way to a productive year. Good luck with turning your goals into realities in 2015!
Peter Szilagyi, CHHRI, GPHR, HRMP, is an experienced HR leader in talent management, transformation and change management.
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18/12/2014 5:21:37 PM
2015 FORECAST / HR ANALYTICS
2015 FORECAST
CRUNCHING
THE DATA
As a new wave of employee communication monitoring technology kicks off, 2015 might be the year when HR analytics finally comes of age
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HCAMAG.COM
18/12/2014 5:22:57 PM
HUMAN RESOURCES DIRECTOR
2015 FORECAST
The Australian Crime Commission (ACC) is famous for its range of high-tech crime fighting activities. They are at the forefront of data analytics to combat organised crime and its involvement with virtual currencies, illegal drug production and trafficking, and tax avoidance. The same data analytics techniques are now being used to improve operations in another area of the ACC: organisational performance. In addition to the range of surveys that organisations typically run (internally and externally), the ACC has taken the next step – analysing data that workers generate in day-to-day operations. HR analytics is now being bolstered by a niche but growing wave of technology which sits on a company’s server or in the cloud and tracks employee communication – and in some instances employee sentiment – with pre-set metrics. For players in this market, such as Revelian and McGrathNicol, this is a new era in HR analytics. “People are generating vast volumes of data in everything they do at work, but all that data is sitting there untapped,” says Peter O’Hanlon, chief marketing officer at Revelian. “What we’ve learned from other domains like marketing and logistics is that by tapping into the data that’s being generated, you can learn a lot.” Indeed, many organisations know more about their customers than their employees because they’re investing in big data and are leveraging those data assets to drive their business strategy. This imbalance is now being addressed.
THE RCAP The Revelian Communications Analysis Platform (RCAP) looks at communication patterns (but not the specific content of emails) to offer insights into employees’ productivity, tone and engagement levels. O’Hanlon says that it’s not uncommon for organisations today to already have scanners looking for inappropriate keyword content being sent throughout the workplace – the RCAP steers clear of that. “We don’t look at content at all,” he says. “We’re just looking at the patterns of communication. We’re connected to the data sources and we then apply a range of algorithms and analytics to that high level information, which
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WHAT CAN THE RCAP MEASURE? 1. THE ‘INFORMATION BURDEN’ ON INDIVIDUALS AND TEAMS. “Certain people act as a lightning rod and everyone goes to them for all sorts of information. There’s potential for those people to get burnt out,” says O’Hanlon. 2. COMMUNICATION SPREAD. “We can look at whether people work with a tight group or whether they spread out across the organisation by spanning different functions. This could link to their role type and the communication style that’s suitable for that role.” 3. TEAM ALIGNMENT. “Typically, the culture of a team is made up of the way in which people interact. And the way in which people interact is shaped by the culture – it’s like the chicken and the egg. By looking at the actual communications that go on, we obtain a quantifiable lens on culture. For example, are there individuals who are communicating in a totally different way to the rest of the people in their team?” 4. WORKPLACE STRUCTURE. “Some organisations have workers who start and end their working day at the same time, all the time. There are peaks and troughs through the day that are very structured. Other offices are more chaotic. In addition, certain people have a work pattern that’s much less structured, so they work after hours or on weekends. They might have a lull through the work day itself. Being able to see that relative to others in the organisation can help to explain productivity levels and the way that people are working together.” 5. COMMUNICATION STYLES. “We’ve analysed millions of interactions and it’s clear that people have characteristic styles of communicating. It’s interesting to see shifts in that style. For example, someone has become less autonomous and is providing a lot of visibility to their manager in what they’re doing. That can be a sign that they are unsure of what they need to do; they might need some additional development.”
simplifies and consolidates it down to useful measures of the way people interact in the workplace.” There are countless possibilities for how this information can be utilised at individual, team and organisational levels. For example, at the end of the probation period, managers can see how well integrated a new recruit is with the business and what their relationships look like. It can be used to support performance reviews. It can be used in retention plans, especially as communication
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2015 FORECAST / HR ANALYTICS
2015 FORECAST
patterns can potentially be predictive of attrition. “You can see whether people are being proactive, how responsive they are, whether their communication style is very hierarchical or more egalitarian,” says O’Hanlon. “That in turn allows you to identify the future leaders, the people who are thinking of leaving and provide that kind of insight to better manage the workforce.”
DIVING DEEPER McGrathNicol, a company that specialises in using and analysing large volumes of data to solve business problems, has recently broadened its focus from the fraud, risk and compliance-heavy financial services sector to the HR space. Kieran Earnshaw, a director at the company, says there is strong demand from HR professionals for more sophisticated use of data analytics. “While the original demand came from the risk and compliance perspective, what we’re seeing is a demand from the HR community as well,” he says. The McGrathNicol analytics tool – in contrast to the Revelian tool – does look at specific word usage. It applies text analytics in order to track: 1. The ‘colour’ of an individual’s language and how it changes over time. This provides an indication of emotional feeling, state of stress and other indicators of emotional wellbeing. 2. Interpersonal relations: By looking at some of the patterns between individuals, interpersonal issues can be identified. 3. Signs of churn: Text analytics can look for indicators around possible employee churn where people are talking about interviewing and looking for other jobs. “It breaks a stream of text, a chat or a message down into what’s called a bagof-words, from which we can run sophisticated algorithms to look at the
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meaning of each of the words in that bag and then look at it within the context of the conversation,” says Earnshaw. Clients receive a visual dashboard which sits across the apps and models: this allows users to visualise and explore the communication networks and patterns within their organisations – essentially who’s communicating with who – overlaid with the key characteristics of the communication. For example, positive or negative emotion, indicators of unhappiness, or indicators of potential churn. In this sense, it’s similar to measuring customer sentiment via social media channels. “You can click on an individual and look at how their content and patterns have changed over time. Looking at changes longitudinally is interesting,” says Earnshaw. “An individual may have a particular style of communication that is slightly different to other people – that in itself is not all that insightful. However, it may be that their communication style changes and becomes, for example, more aggressive over time. You can start being proactive and preemptive in how you address that.” In addition, interpersonal issues within a team can be identified, as well as employee/manager relationships which have become slightly toxic and worthy of intervention. However, McGrathNicol is not a full-service HR consulting firm; they do not make recommendations on action to be taken once data results are collated.
PRIVACY Some employers will approach such monitoring exercises with caution, wary of claims of being branded as Orwell’s Big Brother. Is that justified? Many organisations are already scanning email and other forms of communication for inappropriate content and comment, and they have a clearly stated communications policy in place. Transparency is critical. A written policy needs to outline what’s appropriate and not appropriate in electronic communications. This policy needs to be disseminated to employees and the employer must be confident they have read and understood it. Nonetheless, Revelian’s O’Hanlon says there are some misconceptions to clear up. “Most people automatically assume that others are reading their emails. However, because we don’t look at content, the type of information we’re
HCAMAG.COM
18/12/2014 5:23:07 PM
HUMAN RESOURCES DIRECTOR
2015 FORECAST
looking at is much more aggregate. Fears about looking into individual correspondence – while a company might have the right to do that – it’s not something our tools do. It’s really at that pattern level.” It’s also important to note that consent must be obtained from employees. “From the privacy point of view, it’s consent-driven,” O’Hanlon adds. “Staff will know what’s going on. They will provide the consent for analysis.” There are key pieces of legislation that employers must adhere to with any monitoring of employee communications: the Privacy Act; and state-specific workplace surveillance legislation. Each state has workplace surveillance legislation. The rules are slightly different but some general principles apply. In most states, there is legislation which deals with different forms of surveillance: traditional camera or CCTV; tracking surveillance, such as GPS for vehicles; and computer surveillance. NSW, for instance, has the Workplace Surveillance Act 2005. That legislation states that, in order to conduct computer surveillance, certain requirements must be met relating to notification to employees that this surveillance is occurring. It’s important to note that employee records are exempt from the Privacy Act. But what is and isn’t an employee record is a grey area. Employers must be conscious of what they’re collecting and whether in fact the Privacy Act applies. They also need to be aware that they may be capturing non-employee information – for instance, if an employee emails their wife. In those instances, the Privacy Act would likely apply. McGrathNicol’s Earnshaw has also encountered privacy concerns from clients. He says two words are critical: intent and access. Employers must be transparent about this monitoring; they must communicate to employees that there is reasonable intent behind gathering this information. “It’s got to be for the good of the employees and the organisation. It’s not Big Brother spying on everybody,” he says. As for access, this must be for a particular purpose only, and only by certain groups or individuals within the organisation – for example, the HR manager. Regardless, Earnshaw is constantly surprised
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“People are generating vast volumes of data in everything they do at work, but all that data is sitting there untapped” Peter O’Hanlon that, despite repeated reminders and warnings, employees still do the wrong thing. “They’ve used a word being tracked by an internal filter and they’ve been prompted that they are being monitored and should be careful. And they carry on. It’s an interesting phenomenon that people are made aware, yet they continue. “I’m not a psychologist but I think people assume that the organisation doesn’t really have the capability or resources to truly monitor what’s happening. And in a way, historically people would be right in that regard. In extreme cases, some people actually want to be found out. I see that in the white collar fraud space – people become careless and a lot of times it’s intentional. They want to be caught.”
ONLY THE START HR is at the start of this journey, and most organisations are not yet leveraging this level of data analytics just yet. “In most organisations the first thing they’d know is an issue is raised with HR. Then retrospectively they might go back and look at retrieving specific emails that may be presented to them by an employee as evidence of an issue in the workplace, such as workplace bullying. This is looking into the future and getting more proactive,” says Earnshaw. O’Hanlon agrees and suggests that one misconception remains: “This is much simpler to implement than employers might think,” he says. “There is an appetite for doing analytics in most companies but also a sense that big data equals big cost and big complexity. By taking on something like this, which is easy to use, you can get some of the benefits of world’s best big data analytics very simply.”
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HR STRATEGY / INNOVATION
INNOVATION BY STEALTH Having worked with GE, Samsung, Philips and PďŹ zer, Paddy Miller knows a thing or two about innovation. He chats to Iain Hopkins about innovation blockers and why stealth innovation may be the answer
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HCAMAG.COM
18/12/2014 5:25:29 PM
HUMAN RESOURCES DIRECTOR
Kodak’s story could act as the ultimate cautionary tale for any multinational corporation. In 2015, the company has unfortunately become something of a byword for failing to move with the times, failing to innovate, and failing to listen to employees. This need not have been the case. Prior to the digital revolution which rendered anything non-digital almost redundant, Kodak invented the digital camera. It even had it patented. Yet it failed to get off the ground due to a significant chasm between senior management and the people on the ground, and all this occurred even when those same senior leaders knew something was seriously wrong with the company. “It’s the ultimate in flawed thinking: we know something is wrong but we can’t or won’t do anything about it. We can’t turn the Titanic around,” says Professor Paddy Miller (IESE Business School, Barcelona), published co-author of Innovation as Usual (with Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg). Fortunately, the story is not over. Kodak has been turned around – but only just. Antonio Perez took over as chairman and CEO in 2005. He pushed the company into Chapter 11 and ended up laying off 50,000 people. The Australian employee base shrank from 5,000 people down to around 100. The company has since reinvented itself and today it has transformed into a profitable high-end imaging business. Kodak showed its first profit in many years in the first quarter of 2014. A burning question remains: why did senior leaders not listen to their workers? “People at the top hadn’t done their job, and that includes the HR people. Kodak had the potential to be a great business but they didn’t do what they had to do, which was close that disconnect between the people who invented the digital camera and had a view of where the world was going, and the people at the top,” says Miller. For Miller, this disconnect is central to why innovation is stifled in so many organisations, but it’s not the sole reason. There are some fundamentals that quash innovation.
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1
THE WRONG APPROACH
First and foremost, organisations take the wrong action in relation to innovation: they are top-down instead of bottom-up. The statements from CEOs in their annual reports will invariably state: “We’re into innovation”. Then it’s left to the HR department to facilitate that process. “My philosophy is quite different. HR people need to be thinking about driving this from the bottom up. How do you build nodules, groups and teams of excellence in innovation? This runs counter to the culture of many organisations where it’s topdown,” says Miller.
2
Boston Consulting Group produces an annual list of the world’s most innovative companies. Here’s who made the grade in 2014 (2005 rank in brackets)
Apple (1)
ENTREPRENEURSHIP IS NOT INNOVATION
Another key problem is the obsession many HR teams have with competency lists: in order to make it within an organisation, the people need to demonstrate at least a few key competencies. Innovation might exist on that list, but it’s usually a subset of entrepreneurship. It’s the wrong connection, says Miller. “I know a lot of people who are amazingly innovative but who are not entrepreneurs. They think wildly, they come up with wild ideas but they don’t know how to package it up – it’s not a subset of entrepreneurial behaviour.” This confusion can also be seen in the ‘threshold for failure’. The cliché ‘we learn from our mistakes’ is simply not true in large organisations, Miller says. Instead, mistakes are punished.
3
INNOVATION LEADERS
SHEER SIZE
Samsung employs 425,000 people. IBM employs 400,000. These monster organisations used to only exist in government or the military. These organisations, by their sheer size and complex organisational structures, are not conducive to innovative thinking. “What these organisations are searching for is stability. What they want to do is stabilise, control behaviour, and not have any outliers,” says Miller.
Google (8)
Samsung (11)
Microsoft (4)
IBM (7) Amazon (17)
Tesla Motors (n.a.)
Toyota (14)
Facebook (n.a.) Sony (5)
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HR STRATEGY / INNOVATION
TURNING IDEAS INTO ACTION For too long, discussions around innovation have focused on ideas generation. Ideation and brain storming is easy; turning those ideas into viable business solutions is more challenging. Here are Miller’s tips: 1. Teach people political skills. You need to understand the politics of your organisation. Who are the stakeholders in your project? Who are the people who can block you? What buttons do you need to press to get it through? These political skills can and should be taught. 2. Don’t over-regulate. You’ve run the innovation course; you’ve provided the case studies; you’ve educated employees on how to be politically astute. Now it’s time to ‘scaffold innovation’. Let people come up with their own terminology, their own solutions. Don’t even mention ‘innovation’. Reframe it by first presenting the problem that needs to be resolved. (See below.) REFRAMING A PROBLEM Problem: In the pharmaceutical industry it’s critical for sales reps to get ‘face time’ with physicians. Being time-poor and exposed to countless sales reps, all with similar products, means that getting cut-through with these physicians is a constant battle. Solution: Rethink what you are offering to the physician. Instead of concentrating solely on the physician, become patient-focused. Talk about how your product can help the patient and how we (the pharmaceutical company) and the sales rep (via your products) can help to do that. HR can help outline the problem, but the sales team themselves have come up with a solution. HR then helps create a whole new sales behaviour through appropriate support and training, if required.
3. Don’t dismiss incremental innovation. Big organisations do not want their boat to be rocked. Remember, Kodak had a solution, but it was so disruptive it was dismissed as being untenable. At the same time, organisations
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like Apple and Google got to where they are by being hugely disruptive. Is there a middle ground? Yes, and it may lie in permeating the organisation with the concept of innovation; the continuous improvement program might in fact masquerade as an innovation program. “We’ve got the wrong message: it should be disruptive and it should be incremental,” says Miller. 4. Don’t reinvent the wheel every time. “We’ve passed over and haven’t fully developed all the existing technologies, systems and knowhow that already exists in organisations,” says Miller. “So we keep moving to the next best thing instead of looking around and saying ‘here’s something we can easily build on’.” (See example below.) UTILISE WHAT ALREADY EXISTS Globally, the issuing of passports is fairly standardised. One government department handles it, the citizen fills out forms and submits a photo, and the citizen then waits for anywhere up to three weeks for that passport to be delivered to them. The Spanish passport-issuing agency asked itself a series of simple questions: Why do we do it this way? What do we do with all these forms? Where are the photographs? Has anyone ever looked at the form after it’s filled out? With people taking selfies all the time, why do we require them to have a professional photograph taken? “The Spaniards quickly realised they could do it all much faster,” says Miller. “By making simple changes they realised they could cut waiting times back from two weeks to one week. Then from one week to two days. And then two days to one day. Now in Spain you get your passport in 15 minutes. By taking a look at their operations with fresh eyes they came up with a better solution.”
STEALTH INNOVATION Given the above challenges, it’s not surprising that ‘stealth storming’ has blossomed. Miller points to 3M’s ‘Post-it’ note creation and Pfizer’s Viagra creation as classic examples of stealth storming.
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18/12/2014 5:25:36 PM
HUMAN RESOURCES DIRECTOR
“What you see is people stealthily moving to get their innovation into an organisation,” he says. “The best thing to do in many organisations is to fly below the radar, see if you have traction, and when you have traction, reveal your innovation. Then you say, ‘I need $1m to help this fly’. Nobody says to you ‘where did you get the $20,000 to get the trial up and running?’ People manage to hide it in the budget. They’ve done it by stealth. You get a lot of counterintuitive behaviour. You also get a fair amount of corporate obedience – but it’s usually with good intentions.” The size of an organisation can also be bypassed, but this requires re-examining and potentially restructuring the systems in place. “Global organisations which have very strong decentralised country management, perhaps along product lines, with local CEOs and GMs, are often better at innovation. These local leaders are able to convey the values and the principles of the business, and if those values include innovation, you will start to see innovation occurring. So it’s country level, bottom-up innovation.” However, the more systems and structures that are in place, and the more matrix models that are entrenched, the harder this becomes. “Matrix structures take away my personal responsibility, my team’s responsibility, for innovative thinking. You feel less of a commitment to making something happen.” That’s not to say a large organisation cannot innovate – far from it. But there tend to be pockets of innovation rather than widespread innovation. Even at innovation leaders such as Samsung, it’s not the whole organisation, all 28 divisions, being innovative. Rather it’s smaller pockets, such as the Galaxy phone division. “All research shows that when you’re small you tend to be agile. You improvise and you’re able to say ‘I made a mistake but let’s build on that’. The disconnect isn’t there, because the CEO and management team are much closer to the people at the bottom. Global businesses that have managed to create small organisations in countries are far more successful at eliminating the matrix and are so much better at innovation.”
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“How do you build nodules, groups and teams of excellence in innovation? This runs counter to the culture of many organisations where it’s top-down” Paddy Miller
KEY TAKEAWAYS Trying to get your own innovative idea off the ground, or attempting to kick-start a culture of innovation? Here are four tips from Paddy Miller: STEALTH SPONSORS – Appeal to managers one or two levels below the C-suite. They have enough power to get you started, and they’re easier to connect with. STEALTH TESTING – Create proof of concept to gather incontestable evidence of the value of your idea before presenting it to a jury of executives. STEALTH RESOURCING – Securing cash or man hours for a stealth project is tricky but can be done. In large companies, many projects have more resources than they need. Operational budgets also often have spare capacity. It can sometimes be easier to attract investment from partners outside the organisation. And don’t forget to barter: you might not have cash, but you probably have resources or capacity you don’t need that others do. STEALTH BRANDING – A credible cover story allows you to spend time on a project without having to field awkward questions from higher-ups. Source: First published in Harvard Business Review’s March 2013 issue: “The Case for Stealth Innovation” by Paddy Miller and Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg
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BEST PRACTICE / CREATIVITY
“Creativity has no place in business”. If you think that, you have no chance at fostering an innovative culture, writes Matt Jackson Innovation, growth and competitiveness are the focus of many organisations’ strategic plans for 2015. But, for many, these words remain catchcries for objectives they have no meaningful strategies for achieving. This is largely because the precursor of innovation, creativity, is a rare commodity in business. Rather than bringing in another round of MBAqualified consultants to address the problem downstream, mature businesses are turning to artists, the subject matter experts in upstream creativity, to teach staff to unleash their thinking. Though late to the concept by the standards of PARC Xerox or Apple, Australian companies are beginning to discover that the skills of artists can bring fresh thinking into any organisation. The start of a new year is a great time for HR to help their organisations let go of bad habits and clear the way for generative, lateral thought. To that end, here are six ways organisations kill creativity – and what you can do to avoid this occurring in your organisation.
1
THEY IDEATE AROUND A TABLE OR EXPECT IDEAS TO EMERGE FROM A CUBICLE
Creative people know that inspiration is fickle. The most productive creative people know that they can’t just sit around waiting for the muse.
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They develop rituals that trigger their creativity so they can be ‘creative on cue’. These rituals vary widely between different types of artists and creative people in all industries, but common rituals seem to be biased towards an active state in which the mind is relaxed or even distracted after the problem has been fully understood. Many of history’s greatest artists (musicians, authors and painters, among others) habitually took a long daily walk and found that wide horizons could lead to bigger ideas. People often report having a Eureka! moment in the shower. The lesson for businesses is that the office environ ment is not always ideal for triggering creativity, and that the structured work day can prevent staff from accessing the problem-solving centres of the brain. The solution may be as simple as encouraging people to go for a walk around the block after being briefed on an issue or, in a sneaky bid to secure the company some free overtime, scheduling presentations on a particular thorny matter for the end of the day. Engaged employees may well find their subconscious does the hard yards on the problem in their sleep.
2
THEY ASK FOR BLUE-SKY THINKING AND WONDER WHY THEY END UP WITH AIR
Great art movements often suffer from a lack of resources. Instead of killing creativity, having to
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HUMAN RESOURCES DIRECTOR
make do with little or nothing seems to act like creative rocket fuel. A great example is the film noir genre, which had none of the technology we now rely on (not even colour), very limited access to sets, and nothing that we would now call special effects. As a result, cinematographers experimented with light and shadow to create rich visuals that underscored and enhanced the plot – a technique that is still used and referenced to this day. Creating this effect in business means being very strict with boundaries and budgets, something that will surely come as music to the ears of any CFO.
3
THEY ARE MEAN WITH TIME
Creative people will work on a problem for as long – or as little time – as it takes. We’ve all heard the story of a song that was written in a single session, because it “just came” to the artist at that time. You wouldn’t ask that artist to go back and worry about it until they ruined it. But sometimes it doesn’t come so easy. Sometimes a great idea takes longer than you’ve allowed it to come to fruition. When they have faith that an idea is great, artists don’t give up on it. For businesses and employees this means understanding the give and take of time around outcomes. In a good relationship, there is flexibility on both sides.
4
THEY RECRUIT AND PROMOTE IN A LINEAR FASHION
Creative people are gluttons for experience. Often their non-linear lives provide the fodder for ideas. Increasing specialisation and rigid career paths are a limitation on the creative potential within an organisation, as key people are more likely than ever to only know one profession. Artists have often worked in a number of roles to support their creative pursuits, or have come to the game late, after a previous career. In the advertising industry, copywriters used to come from a wide range of experiences. Bryce Courtenay was a successful author before he started writing ads, Phillip Adams was a film director (and is now the host of a popular radio show), and even David Ogilvy started off in the mailroom of an agency, very far from the university-to-work path the industry has embraced more recently. It’s interesting to note here that start-ups, the businesses that are doing the most creative work in the modern economy, are once again breaking down these rigid silos.
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Australian companies are beginning to discover that the skills of artists can bring fresh thinking into any organisation
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THEY ALLOW THE MANAGEMENT TEAM TO CULTIVATE AN AIR OF INFALLIBILITY
As well as empathy, creativity requires vulner ability. A sense that we are not infallible opens us up to ideas from all quarters. Senior leaders in particular tend to worry that they have to cultivate an unflappable exterior or their staff will lose confidence in them. But in creating a force field around themselves, they shut out ideas and prevent themselves from taking creative risks. A CEO of an HR firm I worked with had created such a persona. But his perfectionism led him to a point where, if he couldn’t be sure he would succeed at something, he wouldn’t try. To help him create a chink in his armour and open him up to possibility, I asked him to deliberately forget to take his pen to meetings for a week and ask the person at each meeting who he found most intimidating if he could borrow a pen from them. He didn’t do it at the first meeting, but when he did, he felt an enormous sense of relief. He also found that the act of asking for a pen – and in the process admitting a minor failing – started a conversation and formed a connection. That connection opened the way for collaboration by breaking down his fear of how others perceived him and offering them an opportunity to see him as an accessible human being.
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Matt Jackson is an entrepreneur, poet and principal of The Affectors Academy, a company that teaches businesses to unlock their creativity. Visit affectorsacademy. edu.au.
THEY LET THEMSELVES BECOME SLAVES TO BEST PRACTICE
We’re all familiar with the saying that “the great is the enemy of the good”, but how many of us have considered, when faced with the absolutist ‘best practice’, that there might be a better way? Artists know that locking themselves into a single way of doing things means they’ll never find that better way, so they experiment with new routines and approaches. Over the following pages, HRD looks at how four market leaders are encouraging innovation in their organisations
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HR SUMMIT / EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
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‘Glocalising’ change strategies HRD chats to Bronwyn Carman, head of human resources at Imperial Tobacco Australia, about change initiatives on a local, regional and global level, and how innovation is helping to position HR at the heart of the business DID YOU KNOW? »Who should be responsible for culture change? 43%
42%
say the CEO and other top leaders
say all employees
» Who is in charge of culture change? 59%
59%
claim the CEO and other top leaders
say all employees are currently responsible
Source: 2013 Culture and Change Management Survey, Strategy& (formerly Booz & Company) Of 2,200 respondents, 53% were management level or above
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5 TOP TIPS: CHANGE MANAGEMENT IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT Globally, Imperial Tobacco has around 38,000 employees in 150 countries. For the past three years, the company has been redesigning the infrastructure of how people work. Growth via M&As had resulted in ‘bolt-ons’; there had been some attempt to assimilate and merge operations internally. The goal now is to have ‘one HR business’ across all countries and divisions within the company. For HR, this means consolidating operations on a local, regional and global level. Carman shares her five tips for successful global change initiatives. 1. Get involved. “If you’re in a global company and you only think locally, you can get very lonely as you get left behind. Creating one HR business will take some tough decisions. But I’ve got to put my global hat on – we have 600 employees locally across sales and manufacturing, which is not a lot compared with 36,000 in other parts of the world. If I’m involved, I can influence.”
TOP TIPS: INNOVATION The introduction of plain packaging in December 2012, coupled with operating in a restrictive and heavily regulated industry, meant that Imperial Tobacco had to get creative to maintain profitability and market share. “I believe we’re very good at generating ideas from all levels of the business, and funnelling them to either being end products or improving how we operate,” Carman says. Here are two ways HR has helped the company ‘think outside the square’. 1. Recruitment. “If we’re looking to recruit, for instance, a brand manager, we can’t put an ad on SEEK and say, ‘tobacco company looking for brand manager’ – because a lot of people would say, ‘How do you market your brands?’” says Carman. In addition, Imperial has conducted research that revealed that typically, 10% of people will ‘opt out’ of applying for a role once they know the profession or industry, due to personal choice. In tobacco, the ‘opt out’ rate is 75%. “Our biggest challenge is talent attraction,” says Carman. “We’ve got to be innovative in attracting talent and especially onboarding.” The company has focused on its EVP, which is ‘Bring it On’. “We focus on the inside,” says Carman, “and our EVP means literally that: bring it on. It’s a very Aussie way of doing things.” The EVP is shared at interview stage, and candidates are also asked which of the company’s six values resonates with them. “There’s no right or wrong answer, but it’s about us finding out about you as a person. We can
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2. Don’t forget the local. “You’ve got to listen to the needs of your own market – perhaps understand where the emotion ends and the context starts. At the end of the day, I’ve got targets I need to achieve. I need to find some middle ground so I can achieve both local and global.” 3. Share with humility. “We’re recognised for best practice in Australia and we’re highly regarded, but we aim to share that without arrogance. Don’t fall into saying, ‘Let me tell you how brilliant we are’.” 4. Welcome plagiarism. “Encourage others to take what has worked for you and adopt it in their local market. There’s no sense in reinventing the wheel every single time. Similarly, don’t miss the opportunity to borrow from others.” 5. Be realistic. “It’s a balance of ‘you win some, you lose some’. When you’re in a local business, your decision goes, and there aren’t as many stakeholders. In a global company, you have to be realistic in what you ask for and also appreciate there are many priorities being juggled at once.”
tell from a resume or reference check about technical ability, but this is about fit. We’re good at finding the fit.” Probation is six months, and at three months, Imperial uses an online assessment tool called the Employee Attachment Index. By picking up problems at this early stage, issues can be resolved more readily. “We put a lot of effort into onboarding correctly – the simple but important things like ensuring computers are ready, that new recruits know where everything is – and this EAI acts almost like a fuel gauge to tell us where someone is.” 2. Retailer engagement. The company has concentrated on upskilling its 135 field sales reps who visit tobacconists and effectively sell Imperial’s products. Anecdotal feedback revealed that although retailers preferred dealing with Imperial’s sales reps, they were not as commercial as the competition; they weren’t adding enough business value to customers. To improve this, the company partnered with an RTO and rolled out a customised Cert 4 qualification in retail sales. “It’s a good example of identifying a specific problem and working cross-functionally to bring about a solution,” Carman says.
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Get more tips from Bronwyn Carman on driving organisational change at a national, regional and global level at HR Summit Sydney, 10-11 March, sydney.hrsummit.com.au
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HR SUMMIT / EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
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Leading with purpose HRD chats to Simon Willshire, general manager of human resources at Caltex Australia, about why HR is in a unique position to guide organisational success, and how the company is taking an innovative approach to performance management 30 | JANUARY 2015
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DID YOU KNOW? Many organisations continue to conduct annual performance reviews simply out of convention.
1% of US businesses have scrapped them, yet 60% of US HR managers rated their employer’s performance management protocols as ‘C or below’. 75% of appraisals were found to have zero or even negative effects on employee performance after the feedback was given. Source: WorldatWork, 2010
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5 INNOVATION AND LEADERSHIP: A CASE STUDY One of Caltex’s six core values is ‘trailblaze’. This is evident in a reinvigorated performance management strategy. “Performance management is a good example of a personnel system that was created in the middle of last century and has received very little questioning from our own function, despite it being universally disliked and widely considered to be of questionable value,” says Willshire. Starting in January, Caltex will: • Give as much emphasis to the performance preview (the upfront conversation about the year ahead) as they give to the review. “It occurred to me one day that we put most of our focus on the year-end review, but by then it’s too late to influence outcomes,” he says. • Dispense with the mid-year review and move to more fluid one-on-one check-ins, where all staff will have real, supportive conversations about performance and learning. Those on the road will be able to do it on their iPhones. • Dispense with performance ratings, instead emphasising a clear, honest and actionable narrative that inspires people to do their personal best. “Rather than placing people in ‘boxes’, our goal is to ‘raise all boats’ through quality conversations that solve problems, inspire and
HR LEADERSHIP – TOP TIPS At the start of another new year, take a moment to pause and reflect on your impact on your business. It’s bigger than you may think. Just about every aspect of HR work influences culture: who is hired, what gets rewarded, who gets selected for promotion, who gets to lead, how performance is talked about and, in particular, how people lead all inform the substance of an organisation’s culture. Then consider how people act when on autopilot, what they care about and how they work together. These all have an incredible impact on the success of any business. To top it all off, HR gets to design the systems and promote the behaviours that steer all of those activities. Simon Willshire outlines how you can maximise your impact: 1. Be clear on ‘manager’ vs ‘leader’: “Managing is all about controlling things: budgets, schedules, resources, inventories, etc., whereas leading is about bringing people together to give of themselves in a discretionary way. That involves building trust, inspiring others, helping people to grow and helping people to find courage. Interestingly, these are things that are not and probably cannot be taught in school or uni. We learn that stuff from our parents and other positive role models in our lives.” 2. Engender trust: “Without trust, there cannot be effective leadership. I will much more readily place my trust in a leader who has clarity about their own values, and who is
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coach,” says Willshire. • Broaden the organisational view of performance so the way people work (how they lead, how they live the Caltex values, how they learn and adapt) is included in every discussion. • Leaders will allocate pay review budgets according to their own judgment based on each employee’s overall performance and the relative competitiveness of their current pay. “We ask our leaders to make multi-milliondollar decisions, but for base pay they have to follow a matrix provided by the Rewards team,” Willshire says. Willshire is under no illusion that this is one the most difficult cultural changes an organisation can undertake, adding that most people have done performance management the same way their whole working lives. However, he feels the size of the prize is potentially huge. “If we can shift performance management from being an unproductive, stress- and anxiety-laden bureaucratic activity that just about everyone dislikes to being about conversations where a leader and employee talk openly and honestly about how they can achieve their personal best, then the impact on the business could be huge.”
consistent in adhering to those values. Honesty is also critical, as are authenticity, courage and humility. Over the course of my career, I’ve known some incredibly talented people who failed as leaders because they lacked some of those things. Conversely, I’ve known some people with relatively modest levels of talent whom people would climb mountains for.” 3. As a leader, don’t be selfish: “Helping and guiding the development of others is an essential part of being a leader. It’s also quite possibly the most satisfying thing about being a leader. Seeing people grow and do well in their careers and in life generally is one of things that I most enjoy about leadership. That said, I’m not a huge fan of structured mentoring arrangements, mainly because I think a degree of chemistry is required in the mentor-mentee relationship to provide the spark for open exchange and learning. If the relationship comes about through some sort of ‘arranged marriage’ within a corporation, I wonder about the mindset of the participants going in.”
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See Simon Willshire debate whether HR leadership is the greatest burden (or greatest gift) at HR Summit Sydney, 10-11 March, sydney.hrsummit.com.au
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HR SUMMIT / EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
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Changes ahead ...again HRD chats to Bob Barbour, people & culture director at beverage giant Lion, about how to take people on a change journey, and why the company has taken a fresh approach to engagement Magnitude of change
HIGH
DID YOU KNOW? As the scale of change increases, individuals’ responses to change become more negative. Likewise, the greater the sensitivity of a change, where employees perceive it to threaten personally important goals, the more time they will require to constructively cope with changes.
Personal sensitivity to change
LOW
Time to assimilate change Figure 1: Personal Sensitivity and Assimilation of Change (Johnson, In Press)
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5 INNOVATION AND LEADERSHIP: A CASE STUDY At first glance, engagement hardly seems like a hotbed of innovation. Although it can be a difficult task to fully engage all employees all the time, the fundamentals in ‘engagement science’ don’t change. Lion has taken a different approach – an outside-in approach. “We’ve expanded the work we’ve done inside the business over the last few years and taken it outside the business,” says Barbour. “We now organise engagement surveys for a range of external stakeholders: customers, consumers, suppliers and the general community. In those surveys are questions seeking opinions on the experiences they’ve had with us.” While Barbour concedes that 360 degree feedback is not unusual, often this feedback is not actioned in any way. Not so at Lion. This feedback is helping to form personal development plans and is feeding into reward & recognition programs. It’s also providing the impetus to constantly re-imagine ‘how things are done’ at Lion. “It’s innovative because we know at the end of the
day our business success relies on the strong relationships we hold with all stakeholders. Sometimes a fresh set of eyes or a fresh perspective can make all the difference. It also reminds us why we’re successful in the marketplace: it comes down to adaptability, agility, and of course, the behaviours we exhibit.” Lion has only been able to take this step because they’ve been able to embed culture and engagement strategy as a core part of the company’s business strategy. “We’ve been consistent on this for the last 18 years,” says Barbour. “That’s consistency in terms of feedback, desired behaviours, culture, coaching and support. Taking this beyond the bounds of the company has forced us to recognise how we connect with and impact on the outside world.”
TOP TIPS: HOW TO BECOME A CHANGE AGENT
type of financial security am I going to get?’” 2. Reframe the change. “Change is all about letting go of something and that always involves a period of uncertainty as you work your way through to the new state. When you get news that is shocking you need to go through that grief process: shock, anger, rejection, acceptance, help. Our job as HR leaders is to help people navigate their way through that process. But it might not all be bad news; there might be positives to come out of change, and a simple reframing exercise might help. Reframing can also make someone appreciate everything that’s going well and where this bad news sits in this broader context.” 3. Normalise the feedback. “Related to reframing, you can help people deal with ambiguity and uncertainty. You can help them recognise that it’s ok to be in a period of uncertainty for a while. Help them set new goals and pathways to lead to those goals. Sometimes just talking to someone can help put the news in a new perspective.” 4. Label the emotions. “Be mindful of what you’re feeling; know when you’re feeling frustrated or angry. When you label it, instantly you start saying, ‘ok, what does that mean? Is that the right way to feel about it?’ Taking the time to step back and review the problem from a slight distance can be very helpful and can help defuse the emotion.”
Barbour is a firm believer that the success of any change initiative hinges on the personality and patterns of behaviour of the person leading the change. While we might not consciously think about it, the way we go about our business – particularly if our actions are observed by others – has a major impact on change outcomes. Do you overtly dwell on the negatives? Do you constantly turn good news into bad by looking only for the downside? Do you ‘catastrophise’? “You miss the bus to work. Really, on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being world hunger, how bad is missing the bus?” asks Barbour. Importantly, all these behaviour traits can be neutralised and new, more helpful traits introduced. Lion has built a cognitive reframing framework into its leadership development programs to do just that. “We’re aiming to help people to raise their level of consciousness, so they become aware that the way they think and act may not be helpful,” Barbour says. “Our goal is to help people handle change more effectively.” Here are Barbour’s tips for more effective change: 1. Personalise the change. “When we don’t personalise things, when we think it’s universal and applicable to everyone else but us, we struggle with change. When you’re about to make redundancies, for example, it’s best not to spend the first 10 minutes of a conversation explaining why it’s happening; go straight to the impact on the individual. We often spend too much time on the why. You can’t not do the why, but people sitting in a room are always thinking, ‘what does it mean for me? When is it going to happen, and if it does happen, what
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5
See Bob talk about how to become a change leader at HR Summit
Sydney, 10-11 March. sydney.hrsummit.com.au
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HR SUMMIT / EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
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STRENGTH FROM WITHIN HRD chats to Peter Hartnett, Sanitarium’s HR director, about the critical role middle managers play in business success, and how innovative thinking has helped usher in a fresh approach to leadership development – and has even helped launch new product lines
DID YOU KNOW? 89% of senior managers believe middle managers are the linchpin for effective communication within an organisation, yet 40% of middle managers don’t believe they have effective lines of communication with senior managers
93% of senior managers value middle
management’s ability to improvise, but 42% of middle managers don’t believe senior managers value their ability to do this. Source: Australian Institute of Management discussion paper, “Engaging Middle Managers for Positive Organisational Change”
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HUMAN RESOURCES DIRECTOR
5 INNOVATION AND LEADERSHIP: A CASE STUDY Peter Hartnett believes that innovation can come in many different forms and doesn’t need to be revolutionary; it can be evolutionary. “To some people innovation might imply a tech company or a start-up where they shoot nerf guns around. That’s not us. We try to get the basics right. For us it’s about continuing to refine what we do really well. I’d call our leadership program innovative. We’re proud of the results of what we’ve been able to achieve in the business through helping managers and leaders change the way they behave, think and act.” In addition, the company as a whole has achieved some milestones in terms of product innovation. “Innovation these days can come from customers,” says Hartnett. “They could say, ‘We want to see this product’. Or it can come from looking at global trends. Or it can come from a scientist who’s working on products.” In 2014, Sanitarium launched a brand-new product, glutenfree Weet-Bix, from concept to shelf, in record time – six months. It is the first time product development at this scale
TOP TIPS: ENGAGING MIDDLE MANAGERS Middle managers are absolutely critical to execution of HR strategy, particularly when undertaking culture change initiatives. They provide a critical link between senior management and staff on the front line, as Hartnett explains: “Culture is ultimately set by senior leaders, and it cascades down to middle managers – but if it stops there, if you don’t engage those middle managers, you might as well throw it all away.” Hartnett provides his top tips for engaging and developing future leaders. 1. Promote and recruit the right people: “We’ve made the mistake previously of rewarding people who were technically very good by placing them into roles that required leadership. We don’t do that now; we recruit for leadership skills. Over the last four years we’ve made a deliberate decision to roll out a leadership program for middle managers that has a lot of foundational management and leadership skills in it. The CEO and front-line supervisors have gone through the same program – it’s been tweaked a bit, but essentially the program is the same. That’s one of the smartest things we’ve done because it’s given us a common platform.” 2. Develop the right skills mix: “It’s a combination of leadership behaviours and management skills. Things like problem-solving, dealing with performance, and having difficult conversations. Those are foundational skills that any manager or leader needs. There’s also an element of strategic thinking because even at our front line we want
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has taken less than two years. “It’s a world first – we’re first in the world to produce a glutenfree breakfast biscuit. From the time the recipe was developed, to completely refitting what had previously been a wheat factory, to piloting it and getting it onto shelves, in just under six months, was quite something.” This speed-to-market, Hartnett believes, was only possible because of the company’s investment in leadership and culture. “We were serious about culture change and altering our status quo,” he says. “We worked with Human Synergistics to alter the way people speak to each other, develop skill sets and work in teams. Over time we’ve become a more constructive, adaptive, risk-comfortable, motivated and generous workforce. We’ve learned how important it is to keep measuring and improving our culture; it’s ongoing work but the rewards are huge.”
them to have a vision for what their job can be.” 3. Keep things fresh: “We have less than 1% staff turnover. It’s amazing, but it’s a blessing and something of a curse. It means we might not have the ability to move people through to senior roles as quickly as they might have hoped. So we do other things. We focus on extending their leadership development by having them work in different divisions. Or we get them involved in cross-business projects to try to develop their skills and put leadership skills into practice. It might be a new product project. They get exposure to senior management, they build their skills, and it keeps their working life interesting.” 4. Earn their trust: “Five years ago, before I came into the role, the perception of HR within the company was one of transactional gatekeepers: ‘Thou shalt not do’. I can now say with high certainty that middle managers view HR as critical to how they do the job. For me it’s about earning trust and respect. To do that you need to get the little things right; you overdeliver on what you say you’re going to do, and you make them look great. It’s almost a sequence: make them look great, make their job easier, help them resolve any issues or problems. It’s almost like you help them help themselves.”
See Peter talk about driving HR strategy through middle
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managers at HR Summit Sydney, 10-11 March, Sydney. hrsummit.com.au
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HR SUMMIT / INNOVATION
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PEOPLESTREME Peoplestreme provides the largest Human Capital software Technology Roadmap globally. PeopleStreme’s mission is to unlock the full potential of our customers’ workforce through providing the best Human Capital Management software and deployment services in the world. Recognised by Gartner Research as a “Cool Vendor” in Human Capital Management, PeopleStreme must be doing something right. Daniel Spinello, Sales Excellence P: 03 9869 8880 E: daniel.spinello@peoplestreme.com.au W: www.peoplestreme.com
COFFEE ZONE SPONSOR
ADECCO Adecco is the world’s leading provider of HR solutions, delivering recruitment and career services to organisations and individuals across the employment lifecycle. Globally, Adecco helps over 650,000 people find work with over 100,000 clients each day. We have an extensive network of over 5,100 offices in more than 60 countries and territories staffed by over 31,000 full-time employees. Matthew De Zilva, Head of Sales & Strategic Accounts P: 0478 309 340 E: matthew.dezilva@adecco.com.au W: www.adecco.com.au
People + Culture Strategies (PCS) is a thought-leading law firm that provides advice, strategies and solutions to Australian employers in all facets of workplace relations and people management issues. PCS offers a range of pricing models (reflecting a value-based approach to billing) that are tailored to the needs of its clients, including the option of all-inclusive retainer arrangements. PCS also assists clients with workplace investigations, mediations and conflict resolutions. Joydeep Hor, Managing Principal P: 02 8094 31010 E: joydeep.hor@peopleculture.com.au W: www.peopleculture.com.au
36 | JANUARY 2015 www.hrsummit.com.au
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EXPO PPASSPORT 2015
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AUSTRALIA’S NUMBER-ONE INDEPENDENT HR EVENT SINCE 2002 WORKSHOP SPONSORS
COGNOLOGY
SYNCHRO
Cognology is an Australian company making Talent Management software for the future of work. Over 250 businesses use Cognology to empower cutting-edge talent strategy. We build technology to help our clients with performance, engagement, retention and learning for their entire employment lifecycle. Our research and development efforts are continually looking for ways to make it easier for our customers to execute business strategy, develop their people and do great things together.
Since 1994, Synchro has worked with blue-chip organisations across Australia and New Zealand, optimising the way their workforce takes their products and services to market. Synchro achieves this by designing and managing Incentive Marketing and Enterprise Engagement Programs. We use Sales Force Incentives, Channel Development Campaigns, Recognition & Reward and Customer Loyalty Programs – to drive the desired workforce behaviours, ROI and business profitability.
Aaron Greeno, Business Development Manager P: 03 9001 0848 W: www.cognology.com.au
CPP ASIA PACIFIC CPP, The MBTI® Company, is the distributor and certification provider of leading psychometric instruments including the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®, the world’s best known and most trusted personality assessment tool. We offer psychological insight, with solutions designed for: • HR/L&D/OD Practitioners • Executive Coaches • Consultants • Career Counsellors P: 03 9342 1300 E: enquiries@cppasiapacific.com W: www.cppasiapacific.com
ELMO ELMO sets the benchmark as a leading provider of Learning Management Systems, Performance Management Systems and Pre-Built eLearning. In operation since 2002, we have experienced consistent growth and rapid expansion of our client base becoming the supplier of choice for over 500 organisations across Australia. Gordon Starkey, General Manager P: 1300 884 510 E: contactus@elmotalent.com.au W: www.elmotalent.com.au
HEALTH@WORK Health@Work is a wholly Australian-owned company, operating nationally providing innovative and effective Corporate Health and Wellbeing Services. We provide a unique suite of corporate health and wellbeing services that can be delivered as a standalone offering or packaged to form a bespoke wellbeing program for any organisation. Kristina Dalgleish, Director P: 1300 245 203 E: kristina@healthatwork.net.au W: www.healthatwork.net.au
STIRLING HENRY
Trevor Barkway, Managing Director P: 02 9957 1299 E: tbarkway@synchro.com.au W: www.synchro.com.au
GET HEALTHY AT WORK Get Healthy at Work is a free NSW Government initiative that offers businesses all the tools, resources and support they need to address risk factors for chronic disease in the workplace. Importantly it also includes a confidential Brief Health Check to help workers better understand their risk of developing heart disease and Type 2 Diabetes. Visit gethealthyatwork.com.au for more information. Amanda Gorvin, Business Engagement Manager P:02 4321 4434 E: amanda.gorvin@workcover.nsw.gov.au W: www.workcover.nsw.gov.au
FREE WORKSHOPS IN THE EXPO HALL
Register now for a selection of free interactive workshops led by expert facilitators. DAY ONE 10 MARCH 2014 Key considerations when implementing a talent management system in your organisation ELMO
Developing talent for a stronger future Cameron Nott, Managing Director, CPP Asia Pacific
10 tips for hiring employees from overseas Simon De Vere, Director of Migration Services, Stirling Henry Global Migration
Change will do you good: Strategies for leading and managing change in your organisation James Lafever, Director, HR2BE Pty Ltd DAY TWO 11 MARCH 2014 What can technology companies teach us about the future of performance management? Michelle Ridsdale, People Director, Readify sponsored by Cognology
Stirling Henry is a specialist migration firm that for over 20 years has been helping companies and individuals navigate the complex and ever -changing Australian immigration laws. Our primary area of work is the support of subclass 457 visa applications and employer-sponsored permanent residence visas.
Workplace Wellness – What is it? What’s happening? Why bother? Kristina Dalgleish, Director, Health@Work
Lisa Williams P: 02 9233 1805 E: lisa.williams@stirlinghenry.com W: www.stirlinghenry.com
Good for workers, good for business:
SUCCESSFACTORS SuccessFactors, an SAP Company, is the global provider of cloud-based human capital management (HCM) software. Our suite integrates onboarding, social business and collaboration tools, a learning management system (LMS), performance management, recruiting software, applicant tracking software, succession planning, talent management, and HR analytics to deliver maximum people performance to organisations of all sizes across more than 60 industries. John Speed, Regional Vice President P: 61 2 9935 4500 E: jspeed@successfactors.com W: www.successfactors.com
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Introducing Get Healthy At Work A NSW Government Initiative People create your competitive advantage – Why does motivation make the difference? Trevor J Barkway, Managing Director, Synchro High potential engagement through learning & development - Michelle Cooper, National HR Manager, PeopleBank and Natalie Goldman, Head of Learning & Development, PeopleBank Hurry, only limited places available! Register online at www.hrsummit.com.au.
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5
HR SUMMIT / INNOVATION
EXHIBITORS AFFINITY
DENTAL CARE NETWORK
At Affinity, our single-minded goal is to organise employee information – making it both useful and accessible. Affinity is the gateway to capturing all employee-related data – delivering it to you in a comprehensive, single-pane view. This includes information from other business systems (e.g. Finance, Project, CRM etc); eliminating the need for multiple system data entry and retrieval.
Dental Care Network™ brings leading dentists from across the country together in one place. It’s easy to find dentists you can trust for your employees.
Dennis Pivac, Director P: 03 9550 6201/1800 778 326 E. info@affinityteam.com W: www.affinityteam.com.au
Our Corporate Dental Program is an employee benefit scheme for organisations to offer to their employees. No cost, no admin, easy to use. Bikram Singh P: 02 9420 6807 E: contact@dentalcorp.com.au W: www.dentalcarenetwork.com.au
DRAKE INTERNATIONAL
ALSCO MANAGED TRAINING SERVICES Fully maintained and serviced First Aid Kits: Injury-specific modules, no capital outlay, service and supply defibrillators. Managed First Aid and Fire Evacuation Training: Ensures customers maintain a high level of legislative compliance, national visibility and immediate time reporting, workplace incident recording and analysis
Drake International is focused on developing the people, productivity and performance of businesses with our suite of recruitment and talent management solutions. Drake provides recruiting, assessing, training and development, as well as engagement and retention solutions to assist your business throughout any stage in the employee lifecycle, making us so much more than just a recruitment company. P: 13 14 48 E: drakemarketing@au.drakeintl.com W: www.drakeintl.com
MANAGING YOUR TRAINING, RECORDS, AND COSTS Michael Massih P: 02 9851 4616 E: mmassih@cleanroom.com.au W: www.alscofirstaid.com.au
EMPLOYEECONNECT
ASPEN CORPORATE HEALTH Part of the award winning Aspen Medical Group, Aspen Corporate Health is an expert and innovative provider of workplace health solutions and services including pre-employment medicals, injury management, well-being programs, occupational vaccinations, travel medicine, skin cancer screening, health assessments and injury prevention. Healthpoint, a leading provider of accurate health information and screening tools, is now being utilised in workplace health in conjunction with Aspen Corporate Health. Amanda Mundy, Business Development Manager – NSW P: 0413056109 E: amanda.mundy@aspencorporatehealth.com.au W: www.aspencorporatehealth.com.au
At EmployeeConnect our focus is to provide you with a high-performance web-based HR solution that can integrate with any payroll engine. Together with our experience and extensive research, we thoroughly understand all areas of HR and know how to help you transform paper-based HR processes that deliver strategic, financial and competitive benefits. Kate Larkin, Marketing Manager P: 02 8288 8800 E: kate.larkin@employeeconnect.com W: www.employeeconnect.com
FRONTIER SOFTWARE Founded in Melbourne, Australia in 1983, Frontier Software is a global leader in Human Resource, Talent Management and Payroll Solutions. Their flagship solution chris21 sets the benchmark functionality and useability. With support offices in Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide, Perth and key global locations, Frontier Software is well placed to service their 1,600 clients.
CONNX Your workforce is your biggest cost and most valuable asset. ConnX can assist you to maximise and leverage that investment through effective workforce planning, process automation and engagement. ConnX minimises the administration burden for personnel allowing you more time to focus on the strategic functions of your job.
Nick Southcombe, General Manager P: 03 9639 0777 E: sales@frontiersoftware.com.au W: www.frontiersoftware.com
Zane Knight P: 1300 CONNX HR E: sales@connx.com.au W: www.connx.com.au
HALOGEN SOFTWARE
CONSTRUCTIVE Established in 2003, Constructive is a specialist consultancy whose primary focus is sourcing talent for the Built Environment, Infrastructure and Resources industries. Our recruitment specialists listen, learn about and analyse your business first. Whether you have a skills gap that needs a quick fix, a high-level opportunity requiring particular care or you’re struggling with your current recruitment processes, Constructive can help. W: www.constructive.net.au
38 | JANUARY 2015 www.hrsummit.com.au
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Halogen Software offers an organically built cloud-based talent management suite that reinforces and drives higher employee performance across all talent programs - whether it is recruiting, performance management, learning and development, succession planning or remuneration. Endorsed by thousands of HR professionals worldwide, Halogen has been recognised as a market leader by major business analysts and has garnered the highest customer satisfaction ratings in the industry. The company’s powerful, yet simple-to-use solutions, which also include industry-vertical offerings, are used by organisations that want to build world-class workforces that are aligned, inspired and focused on delivering exceptional results. Lorna Daly, Regional Sales Manager P: 1800 048 060 W: www.halogensoftware.com.au
EXHIBITORS
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AUSTRALIA’S NUMBER-ONE INDEPENDENT HR EVENT SINCE 2002
ITC LEARNING ITC Learning is a recognised leader in providing leading-edge eLearning technology and services. By collaborating with our clients we enable them to implement customised solutions that respond to business objectives. We have the tools to assist your enterprise implement a complete eLearning solution – Lectora Authoring Software, Lectora Mobile, CourseMill Learning Management System, Business Skills Courseware Libraries, Content Development Services. Drop by our booth to see how we can help you with your eLearning endeavours. Keely Jones, Business Development Manager P: 02 9438 2500 E: keely.jones@itclearning.com.au W: www.itclearning.com.au
ORGANISEIT
Developers of Australia’s Premier Paper Reduction & Document Management Software - organiseit is a software application custom designed to provide an easy-to-use solution for the management of your office data and information flow making it the secure, private and central location for all your business information. For security, compliancy, and affordability, organiseit is the best way to manage data in your organisation. Jane Davies, Administration Manager P: 02 9262 7357 E: jane@organiseit.com.au W: www.organiseit.com.au
SG FLEET With over 25 years’ experience in the Fleet Management and Leasing industry, sgfleet is a leading provider of vehicle Salary Packaging solutions in the Australian marketplace. With operations in Australia, New Zealand and United Kingdom, sgfleet’s Novated Leases and Salary Packaging make it easy for organisations to provide a great workplace benefit for employees. Phil Clump, National Manager - novated sales P: 1300 138 235 or 1300 138 235 E: newbusiness@sgfleet.com W: www.sgfleet.com
WINDSOR INCOME PROTECTION Windsor Income Protection is: • A leader in the provision of group and corporate wage protection programs • A provider of tailored products that are solutions based, innovative and suit the needs of clients • A provider of Staff and Member Engagement Programs • 100% Australian owned Aaron Stokeld, General Manager Sales & Operations P: 02 9191 1962 E: aarons@windsorip.com.au W: www.windsorip.com.au
WORKFORCE SOFTWARE WorkForce Software offers two workforce management software suites in Australia: EmpCenter and EmpLive (previously known as RosterLive). EmpCenter is designed to accommodate the complex requirements and stringent regulatory demands of large employers, and is WorkForce Software’s flagship enterprise suite. In May 2013, WorkForce Software acquired RosterLive to strengthen its enterprise product portfolio with a complementary small and medium-sized business product.
Register today at sydney.hrsummit.com.au
Elysia Hill P: 02 8399 1688 E: elysia.hill@rosterlive.com W: www.workforcesoftware.com
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CORPORATE CULTURE / GLOBAL M&AS
BUSINESS WITHOUT
BORDERS 2014 was branded the year of ‘merger mania’, with M&A deals surpassing $3trn for the first time since the GFC. Without an effective cultural integration plan, however, many of these will result in expensive and avoidable collapse. Jill Gregorie outlines how HR can smooth the process
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It appeared to be such a perfect coupling, analysts nicknamed it a “marriage made in heaven”. Daimler-Benz was a market leader in luxury vehicles. Chrysler Corporation had influence and an exemplary reputation in North America, where Daimler wanted to expand. Together, they were supposed to be invincible. But as it turned out, their management styles contrasted wildly. Germans favoured a formal, authoritative approach, whereas Americans appreciated leaders with dynamism and ‘cowboy bravado’. In addition, the two companies had different values in the engineering and design process. Daimler emphasised precision and impeccability, while Chrysler prioritised innovation and risk-taking.
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HUMAN RESOURCES DIRECTOR
These differences eventually deteriorated their union, and delivered a cautionary tale to business leaders worldwide: no matter how good a merger or acquisition looks on paper, without a carefully designed plan for cultural integration, there’s a high probability that the entire exercise will fail. In fact, 30–70% of mergers are unsuccessful predominately as the result of culture and labourrelated misalignment, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. These failures can cost organisations billions of dollars, not to mention tarnished reputations from the ensuing negative press coverage. Fortunately, HR executives can guide a company through precautionary measures that dramatically increase the likelihood of M&A success. Experts weigh in on evidence-driven practices to ensure integrative success for even the most polarised of organisations.
FIRST THINGS FIRST As soon as one company decides to acquire another, considerations ranging from financial decisions to legal requirements need to be examined from the get-go. It is during this time that forward-looking organisations will also begin the process of cultural assessment and evaluation, in order to assimilate the two entities later. Companies often assume that the target organisation’s culture will naturally incorporate with the buyer organisation’s larger or stronger culture, causing management to forego any explicit cultural integration planning. This approach is highly likely to fail, as culture drives business processes and alignment is needed to secure results. “What I’ve seen work most effectively is companies taking the time to complete exercises to formally understand what are the differences between the cultures, what are the similarities, and taking the time to define what the new culture will be,” says Laura Croucher, national lead partner, advisory services, people and change practice, KPMG Canada. To accomplish this, companies should begin with a diagnostics phase that thoroughly assesses each organisation’s formal and informal culture. This can include such activities as exploring company websites, interviewing management and leadership groups, and conducting surveys. “The second step after research and analysis is to conduct a gap analysis,” says Chuck Moritt, North American corporate M&A consulting leader,
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Mercer. “Develop a risk profile that outlines where culture risks may exist between two organisations, from both the tangible side – such as business processes – and the intangible side, such as how leaders communicate and how work gets done.”
EMPOWERING CHANGE Once this gap is identified, an important next step is educating the workforce on what changes will occur, and equipping managers with the knowledge and tools to bring them about with minimal resistance. “The organisations that have not done this well, in my perspective, didn’t spend time thinking about what’s going to be required from a change management perspective or equipping managers and leaders to help people manage change,” says Croucher. Employees often look to their direct reports for answers during times of uncertainty, and it is HR’s job to ensure that these supervisors are trained to lead them through any periods of upheaval. Even if managers can’t answer questions immediately, they can still provide security by reassuring workers that management is aware of their concerns and will supply a response shortly. In addition to leadership training, this is an excellent opportunity for managers to be coached
WHEN INTEGRATION FAILS: HISTORICAL M&A FLOPS yy Daimler and Chrysler – Once dubbed a “merger of equals”, the two world-renowned automakers were expected to thrive after a $38bn deal. However, due to differences in management styles and conflicting engineering practices, the merger ended up costing Daimler $650m. yy HP and Compaq – Although Hewlett-Packard remains in control of the brand it bought for $25bn in 2002, the two technology manufacturers struggled for years to align HP’s focus on engineering precision with Compaq’s emphasis on sales and customer service. yy New York Central and Pennsylvania Railroad – The largest merger in history at the time, these two railroads thought they could join forces and expand their market. It turns out that longstanding rivalries between the two prevented any collaborative efforts to be undertaken, and the thensixth largest corporation in the US was forced to declare bankruptcy. yy Coca-Cola and Huiyuan Juice – While this bid was never finalised, critics argue that the time and money Coca-Cola spent trying to acquire the Chinese juice producer would have been better spent focusing on its own organic growth strategy for the region. yy Bank of America and Merrill Lynch – These two financial institutions were incompatible at their core. Merrill Lynch enjoyed being fast paced and Wall Street-driven, whereas Bank of America was more commercial and customer-focused. Several Merrill Lynch executives fled, earning this merger the title of “a deal from hell”. Source: Globoforce Limited, Forbes.com
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CORPORATE CULTURE / GLOBAL M&AS
in cross-cultural awareness and what to expect from divergent social norms. When Morritt worked on two complex cases, one involving a South Korean business expanding to the West, and the other bringing a US company into a joint venture with France, he took actions to ensure these preparations were a priority. “What both of those organisations did was basically put their management teams under cultural assimilation programs to understand what the operating styles were in the country they were looking to go to, from the standpoint of various cultural dimensions,” he says. These include: • Time orientation • Whether the firm emphasised short or longterm results • Business process orientation • Whether the goal is to generate an outcome or be process-driven • The hierarchy of decision-making • Length of employee work days
STEPS TO A SUCCESSFUL CULTURAL TRANSITION yy Before any official announcement is made, articulate a vision for the merger that outlines how the deal will benefit both companies. Create a communication plan that demonstrates this value to internal and external stakeholders yy Determine what the shared cultural values for the merged organisation will be, and formulate a road map that will help individuals understand how business will be conducted under the new entity yy Since change can be disruptive, encourage employees to maintain focus and strive to reach shared objectives. Provide adequate resources and training to employees who may fear potential obstacles more than the change itself yy Empower the transition team to be visible agents of collaboration, which influences others to follow suit yy Celebrate integrative accomplishments with employees, clients, and when appropriate, the media Source: Lee Hecht Harrison
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WINNING OVER WORKERS The last component for any successful merger or acquisition is ensuring that each employee base is willing to accept the new organisational culture. One employer that is especially renowned in this practice is HUB International, a top global insurance brokerage with more than 300 successful acquisitions since 1998. As a starting point, HUB International provides acquiring employees with the same onboarding process as it does its conventional new hires. This orientation provides a thorough introduction to company leadership, the employee experience, and benefits offered. In addition, the brokerage has found that communicating to its workers how the merger will make their jobs easier is essential to gaining support and encouraging assimilation. “We make sure to create dialogue across offices and share with employees what additional resources HUB brings to the table,” says CHRO Deborah Deters. “We typically find that what employees care most about is what they can do for the customer. If they see that our resources will help them and their clients, we find that the transition goes very, very well.” HUB has found that a key way to cascade this message down to individuals is by targeting “internal champions” and leveraging their social influence to persuade other employees. “These are the on-site communicators; the ones everyone goes to for information,” says Deters. “If you can identify and tap into those people, get them buying in and believing in it, that goes a long way in championing the change management piece of it.”
ALL ABOUT CULTURE One of the greatest misconceptions that Morritt encounters among business executives is the idea that a corporate culture is an untouchable phenomenon that cannot be influenced or managed in any way. “Doing a cultural analysis is just as important as doing a financial analysis, operational analysis, or critical talent and skills analysis,” he says. “If there’s a huge gap between what made a target company successful in how they operate and what makes the buyer successful along the same dimensions, it may look good independently, but it’ll probably be a train wreck when put together.”
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TECHNOLOGY / PAYROLL
To integrate or not to integrate... that is the question! Brought to you by
Integrated or best-ofbreed? When deciding on the right business management system and software for your organisation, there is no more vexing question… One integrated management system or multiple best-of-breed applications? This continues to be a hotly debated topic amongst business tech enthusiasts, because both options present a wide range of pros and cons.
BEST-OF-BREED Often a best-of-breed solution is a single product that is widely acknowledged as being a market leader in addressing whatever it has been designed to do. A best-of-breed application can come into its own 5 REASONS WHY A BEST-OF-BREED APPROACH MIGHT SUIT 1. You should ideally get the best solution for each business function 2. Individual systems should implement quicker and be deployed faster
in a highly complicated area, such as payroll. It’s widely accepted that Australia has one of the most complex taxation systems in the world; best-of-breed can potentially be a smart choice to navigate this landscape. Payroll is an excellent example where a system/ solution needs to ‘talk’ to both upstream (time & attendance/award interpreter/rostering systems) and downstream (financial/accounting systems) functions. On the downside, it can be problematic requiring users to switch gears and learn multiple operating systems. However, many best-of-breed suppliers know they’re going to be asked to integrate with other products so they develop functions like Web Services to allow electronic access to their data and perform updates through the ‘back door’ of the other applications. As an example, you might use Big Red Sky for recruiting. You want the successful applicant(s) loaded into your payroll and/or HRMS. You could manually enter the details or, with Web Services, you can have both databases electronically updated when the record is saved in Big Red Sky. Workflows and alerts in the target applications alert their users that an entry has been made and that additional data may be required in order to finalise the take-on of that data.
3. System support should be faster and more accurate 4. Upgrades/failures should only affect each individual system so any downtime will be restricted 5. You can change an individual system without having to affect all the other business functions
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INTEGRATED SYSTEMS Fully integrated solutions and systems are normally a single product with multiple modules designed to address similar work requirements, eg HRMS, payroll, financials, WHS, ERP etc.
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There are several suppliers in the marketplace that can provide a ‘one-stop’ fully integrated solution for any business. The downside for most businesses is the stratospheric costs that are normally associated with implementing these systems. 5 REASONS WHY AN INTEGRATED SYSTEM MIGHT SUIT Unsurprisingly, some of the reasons why ‘best-ofbreed’ is best can also be used in reverse to justify integrated... 1. It is a single system; therefore it should mean your entire business is dealing with a single supplier 2. From an IT point of view, there is a single database to maintain 3. Reporting should allow the user to report across functions that generate corporate reporting 4. The developer should have designed a single user interface for all functions 5. Upgrading should be quicker as it affects a single system
It’s also worthwhile keeping in mind that most integrated systems probably started life in one particular speciality area – for example recruitment – so while it remains strong in that area, the other functions are less satisfactory. “It’s a trend we’re see more and more of in the marketplace,” says Frank Rizzeri, general manager of HR3. “Some of this ‘we have it all’ design is driven by the customer and some is driven by the solution developer themselves.” An excellent example was a widely used Australian accounting package that included an integrated payroll module. The payroll module was very basic and many users put up with it because they thought that its integration with finance was essential. Truth be told, it was just clever marketing. “Most payroll systems have a General Ledger Interface to this accounting package anyway and we’re only talking about a few journal entries normally. In today’s marketplace, there are not many Accounting/ERP/Financial systems that force you to use their payroll module – if they have one. Most offer links with the popular payroll applications,” Rizzeri says. On the positive side, at the core of most integrated solutions is ease of use. Whether they are an employee, a contractor, a volunteer or even a student, integrated solutions offer ‘single storage multiple
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access’ functionality. As an example, employers may keep employee information in multiple systems within an organisation – in the HRMS, the payroll system, the financial/ERP system, the WHS system, the security system, the time management system, and so on. The enormous multiple entry/updating requirements of each system inevitably leads to missed information, data loss and inaccurate reporting. Having the ability to add/edit employee information in a single entry and making that information available to all other systems not only makes sense but also helps with data integrity and streamlines work processes.
MAKING THE CHOICE Rizzeri suggests the answer isn’t necessarily finding one supplier who has a panacea product, but to find products that offer strong integration with best-ofbreed solutions. It’s also very important to determine and prioritise what your business needs are, where to start and who owns what data in the end solution. When you analyse your business processes and procedures you may find that many are disengaged from each other because they address individual requirements. When using an integrated solution one would expect the recruitment or onboarding process to capture all relevant details in a single database and any work processes that are then required would access this information and then add their own specific details to it. When a person leaves an organisation, having a single database means they can be disconnected from each function area without fear of anything being missed. If they’re an employee, payroll can terminate them and produce a termination pay, HR can (exit) interview them, IT can recover company property, WHS can remove them from OHS roles/duties etc. Each business area can do its own thing, but it’s all in one system. Using a best-of-breed scenario can also work so long as each individual product is integrated with the other. “This means ‘sharing’ information electronically in real time and not using files to push data from one application to the other(s),” Rizzeri says. Clearly, each company is different. Rizzeri suggests that part of the project scope should involve responses to three key questions: “what are we doing?”, “how are we doing it?” and “why are we doing it this way?” New systems often require changes to processes and operating procedures, so it’s best to sort this out before going down a set-in-stone path.
HR3 is a leading Australian supplier of employee management solutions and software for specific business functions like payroll, human resources and workplace health & safety.
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STRATEGY / INTERNATIONAL HR
A universal approach for HR – could it ever work?
Could there ever be a global best practice for HR managers? Would a global HR certification or a global HR conference ever be viable? Stefanie Hornung outlines the opportunities and difficulties of international initiatives In October 2014, the HRM Expo (Zukunft Personal) again lived up to its reputation as Europe’s largest HR exhibition. More than 14,212 HR managers came to Cologne, Germany, to network and exchange experiences – from all over Germany and abroad. As one of the rare international initiatives, it showed perfectly how difficult a global approach still is in the HR space, despite our increasingly globalised working world.
THE WORLD IS STILL VAST Language differences aside, the disparity of HR practices around the world is huge, even from a European perspective. This became clear in Cologne when listening to a discussion group with HR journalists from all over Europe. The specialist editors agreed that recruiting, retention and attractive, flexible working conditions are currently amongst the most important challenges. Nevertheless, each country has its specific differences. In the UK, new legislation on more flexible working enables each employee to demand more flexible working hours. In Switzerland, there is a lively debate on the shortage of skilled labour due to the referendum on limiting
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immigration. The Austrian government has reacted to the rising number of employees suffering from psychological problems and burnout by introducing a new law calling for psychologically stressful factors in the workplace to be measured. Apart from different work legislation and labour market conditions in each country, the “maturity” of HR varies widely. After the staff reduction phase, Spanish HR managers are now looking for strategic positioning with subjects such as diversity, flexible working or new leadership. But due to the economic crisis, they have naturally lost ground compared to countries such as Sweden where the bar has been raised significantly higher. In Swedish companies with more than 200 employees, 90% of HR managers are on the board. Additionally, as in other Scandinavian countries, Sweden is quite wellknown for its innovative methods such as experimenting with leaderless environments, ultraflat and completely transparent organisational structures. Cultural differences are often mentioned as an argument against an international approach in HR. There are different policies for religious holidays,
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working days and hours, female and male disparity and team building activities all around the world.
INTERNATIONAL INITIATIVES: ARE THEY WORTH IT? International HR initiatives are important as they enable learning experiences to be shared. They motivate HR to innovate and try something new. Professionals would certainly benefit from sharing knowledge on issues, such as best practices in technology, thought leadership and recruitment. Many best practice methods could be adopted even if the tools used for implementation and the precise details of the services are different, in line with the well-known slogan “Act global, think local”. For example, Monster launched various recruitment technologies at the HRM Expo. TalentBin is part of the career portal’s new look and is an online search engine for highly specialised professionals with job profiles in the technology and IT areas, for example. In the search query, Monster accesses the relevant sources and communities that the potential candidates use themselves. In addition to the industry-relevant resources, Github, StackOverflow, Meetup or Working with Rails, social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook are also included. This service has already been in use in the US and has been transferred to Germany, focusing on the resources used by specialist employees in this country. It would probably not have worked for a German recruiter to simply use the US version because the database is different.
GLOBAL CERTIFICATIONS AND STANDARDS Another issue relating to HR globalisation is the development of certifications and common standards. As already mentioned, there are many difficulties to be overcome but this approach
Closer to home In December 2014, The Australian Human Resources Institute (AHRI) signed a tripartite Memorandum of Understanding with the Human Resources Institute of New Zealand (HRINZ) and the Human Resources Professionals Association (HRPA) in Canada. It is anticipated this will bring benefits for each organisation such as programs, product and resource sharing across geographies, exchanges and international study tours, joint research and the mutual recognition of professional designations.
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International HR initiatives are important as they enable learning experiences to be shared. They motivate HR to innovate and try something new would provide a long-term basis for comparable information on HR management to a company’s internal and external stakeholders and consequently add value with respect to internal control and investor assessment. Certification would provide HR practitioners with an instrument to measure competency specific to their regions and would make experience and expertise comparable. The international Society for Human Resource Management SHRM began developing global HR Standards as early as 2011. There are currently 23 countries working on this subject in a technical committee (TC260) at the ISO and 18 countries are participating as guests. At the HRM Expo, Harald Ackerschott, president of the German Mirror Committee at DIN, shed some light on the problems they are experiencing. The committee is currently concentrating on selecting which issues should be addressed. This largely depends on the interests of the individual participants. There is a colleague from Australia working on workforce management and planning. Other topics include recruiting standards, human governance, cost per hire and sustainable employability. It took some time for HR professionals to approach this initiative in Germany because the Confederation of German Employers (BDA) was against it. And this is not an exception. Some national associations tend to resist global standards. Visitors to the exhibition in Cologne mentioned that this could be because they fear that standards might be too prescriptive and based more on rules than on principles. But years have passed since SHRM first started this initiative and companies around the world have seen that it will happen without them. They now have the choice of either staying away and avoiding the worst or providing their own serious contributions to the initiative. The same is true for all events with an international perspective on HR.
Stefanie Hornung works as press officer for Europe’s largest HR exhibition, the HRM Expo (Zukunft Personal). The former editor in chief of HRM. de, a German social network for HR practitioners, Stefanie now writes articles for various HR publications. Visit hrm-expo.com for details on the 2015 expo.
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BUSINESS STRATEGY / HIGH PERFORMANCE
LIFTING THE PERFORMANCE BAR
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HUMAN RESOURCES DIRECTOR
Want to lift the performance bar in 2015? Nicholas S Barnett provides his top tips on the seven indispensable and inter-related habits that drive high performance companies The New Year is a great time to think about what we’ve done well and not so well in the past. In terms of things we resolve to change we’d like them to be sustained by becoming new ongoing habits. So, what are the business habits we can adopt to increase company performance for the coming year? What business habits do we need to embed so deeply in the culture and DNA of our companies that they become a new way of life? Those habits were revealed in a groundbreaking study conducted by my employee and customer engagement firm, Insync Surveys, involving the views of over 100,000 employees from around 200 organisations who identified the seven habits that most differentiate high performance from low performance organisations. Those seven habits are: 1: Live an inspiring vision 2: Communicate clear strategies and goals 3: Develop your people 4: Go out of your way to recognise your people 5: Genuinely care for your people 6: Listen and adapt to your customers’ needs 7: Continually improve your systems These habits are the subject of my latest book, 7 Business Habits That Drive High Performance. My daughter, Elizabeth, illustrated a metaphor for each of the 7 habits in my book and they’re set out below.
HABIT 1: LIVE AN INSPIRING VISION A compass is a good metaphor for habit 1. A compass makes the direction clear; it points the way. But an inspiring vision is something more than a clear direction. It not only points the way, it energises you
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and gets you out of bed in the morning. It draws you to it. This is why a large magnet strategically placed in the distance is the chosen metaphor for living an inspiring vision. As the picture is painted of a compelling future in the year ahead; and as it is discussed, upheld, referenced and lived, your employees will be increasingly energised and attracted to it. The New Year is a great time to re-visit your vision and make sure it is still inspiring and capable of creating momentum for a great future. Is your company’s vision embedded and has it become a way of life? HR can help individual employees relate to the vision in their day-to-day jobs with a simple narrative.
HABIT 2: COMMUNICATE CLEAR STRATEGIES AND GOALS Employees should be crystal clear about the organisation’s main strategies and goals so they can hit the ground running in the New Year. A set of goal posts is the metaphor for habit 2. The objectives of the game are clear and well known by all players and spectators. Imagine if someone took away the goal posts. There would be a riot. Without the goal posts the players would not know what to do or where to aim. Too many organisations have not communicated clear strategies and goals to their employees. The New Year is a good time to make sure everything is communicated again. Twenty-four per cent of employees of low performance organisations say they can’t easily refer to a list of their organisation’s goals. The figure is 54% for the high performers. Organisations need to put back the goal posts. HR directors play an important role here in ensuring strategies and goals are filtered down to all employees.
HABIT 3: DEVELOP YOUR PEOPLE The organisation’s leaders need to take responsibility and be passionate about developing their people. That is why an orchestra conductor has been chosen as a metaphor for habit 3. The famous conductor of the Boston Philharmonic
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Orchestra, Benjamin Zander, once said, “I set as a goal the maximum capacity that people have. I settle for no less. I make myself the relentless architect of the possibility of human beings.” Zander practised habit 3 every day of his life. It was part of who he was. High performance organisations understand the importance of people development and build it into their culture and DNA. People development can occur in many ways. High performance organisations take multiple initiatives in developing their people, including giving emerging leaders special and challenging projects, secondment to other areas of the business, and external development programs. While there needs to be a certain homogeneity in an organisation’s training and development programs, one size rarely fits all. Specific programs, including the use of external resources, should focus on the development of different segments of employees. High performance organisations identify the ‘Benjamin Zanders’ who can champion the cause. What are your company’s people development plans for the year ahead? Does your CEO need some coaching or constructive feedback from you on how he or she can inspire and bring out the best in your workforce?
HABIT 4: GO OUT OF YOUR WAY TO RECOGNISE YOUR PEOPLE Numerous achievement awards of all shapes and sizes have been chosen as the metaphor for habit 4. Leaders should imagine they receive a new daily batch of these awards and it is their responsibility to give out as many as they can every day. We can all remember coming home from school with a trophy, ribbon or certificate and showing it to our parents. As parents we have experienced how proud our children have been when showing us their awards and explaining what they were for. This created a real spring in the step of our children. Many managers have lost the art of recognising their people and sharing the pride and joy that it can bring to their employees. Those managers could benefit from learning afresh from kindergarten teachers and how they regularly recognise their students.
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HABIT 5: GENUINELY CARE FOR YOUR PEOPLE A statue under fire has been chosen as a metaphor for genuinely caring for your people. Why? Back in Roman times many sculptors would carefully fill the indents, chips or other mistakes they made with wax as they carved images in marble. Those images looked fine until the wax started to weep out of the cracks and indents in hot weather. Buyers of expensive marble sculptures soon learnt to require their sculpture to be put under fire to determine whether it was the genuine article without wax or whether it was a fake. Employees can easily assess whether their employer’s senior leaders genuinely care for them or whether they are a fake. The year ahead represents an opportunity for a fresh start. Spend more time understanding the views and concerns of employees and ensure you act appropriately on them. And be authentic.
HABIT 6: LISTEN AND ADAPT TO YOUR CUSTOMER NEEDS Lots of ears have been chosen as the metaphor for habit 6. Too many companies are excessively focused internally and do not spend sufficient time considering and gaining feedback in relation to the external environment, competitors and from their customers or potential customers. Many CEOs and senior executives do not know what their customers really think of their products and services. High performance organisations, however, are acutely aware of the needs and desires of all the main segments of their customers, and design their business processes to meet those needs. They also use customer input and feedback to help them improve productivity and to innovate. Encourage employees at all levels to get involved in customer improvement projects, particularly your HR staff. The New Year is a great time to demonstrate how HR can drive employee engagement to improve strategy execution and ultimately customer advocacy.
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HABIT 7: CONTINUALLY IMPROVE YOUR SYSTEMS A top performance of Cirque Du Soleil, a worldfamous Canadian contemporary circus and street performance troupe, has been chosen as a metaphor for habit 7 as it is such a good example of systems and people working well together. Many costly systems fail to work well because employees were not engaged and did not buy in to the need for the new system, or the lack of postimplementation training and support meant that the system never reached the level of efficiency planned. Further, other systems, processes and workflows were not adjusted to properly integrate with the new system. Doing a great job at continually improving systems is akin to Cirque du Soleil refining and improving acts to delight and amaze their customers even more than before. It will involve being tuned in to customer needs and desires and engaging your employees in the process of innovation and improvement.
ALL 7 HABITS ARE INTER-RELATED AND INDISPENSABLE The seven habits are not a smorgasbord where you choose the ones you like. Nor can you just adopt them for a season. Your ultimate aim is to embed them so deeply into your company’s culture and DNA that they become its way of life. All seven habits are interrelated. Being poor at one habit undermines the good work you do in relation to the other habits. The research shows that all the habits are indispensable to the achievement of high performance. Making the seven habits a way of life in your organisation in the year ahead will be a win-win for employees and the organisation alike. It will mean your company will become a better place to work, employee turnover will be reduced, employee engagement and productivity will be increased as will customer engagement, loyalty and advocacy. This will all lead to improved performance and profitability as well as building increased resilience and change capability. Each of these factors are also inter-related and will build on each other to increase performance even further.
Nicholas S Barnett is a director, business leader and strategist with over 35 years’ experience. He is CEO of Insync Surveys and is also the author of the new book, 7 Business Habits That Drive High Performance (Major Street Publishing, $29.99). For more information visit insyncsurveys.com.au or email nbarnett@ insyncsurveys.com.au
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PROFILE / MICHAEL BRADLEY
DOING THINGS
DIFFERENTLY
When Michael Bradley and his fellow partners established Marque Lawyers in 2008, they agreed that in every decision they would make in terms of how the business was run, they would ignore conventional wisdom and work the best approach for themselves. Managing partner Michael Bradley speaks with Kathryn Crossley about life inside the firm that’s shaking up the legal industry
HR Director: The firm’s job ads are quite different to other legal recruitment advertisements. What’s the rationale there? Michael Bradley: We have a very particular house tone which cuts across all of our communication: the website, job ads, legal updates. What underpins it is what we see as authenticity. It’s an authentic reflection of how we relate to each other, which is with pretty heavy lashings of humour and irreverence… it’s informal, and everything we say or write is designed to be approachable. We find it effective on a number of levels and one is that it’s much more effective at dislodging people who are not necessarily looking. They’re often the best applicants, the ones who aren’t on the market but who read something or who get sent something and they say, ‘actually, that would be exciting’. HRD: Marque has had law students submit clerkship applications in creative art forms, as YouTube videos, and via witty tweets. Why has the firm adopted this alternative approach? MB: With those campaigns we always look to make the students work hard. Essentially it’s about forcing them to put some conscious thought into the decision to apply for us, so we’re not just another box they tick… It has the practical consequence of cutting the numbers down, which is good, but it forces them to have a think about it and decide whether it is a place they would like to work at, and they have to show us
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something of themselves, whether that’s in a creative art form or making a YouTube clip or whatever. We’re not that focused on artistic merit; we’re interested in the degree of imagination and bravery that’s gone into it, and it provides us with a lot more entertainment than we would be getting from a bunch of CVs. A large part of what we’re interested in is giving people that opportunity to be themselves, to express their personality and their interests and if that connects with us then that’s a lot stronger platform to start a relationship. HRD: What are some of the best applications you’ve ever received? MB: We get a lot of food – we are very well fed by job applicants. We’ve received two fish in bowls, we’ve had a job application delivered by puppy, a job application delivered by a boyfriend dressed in a onesie; certainly the students tend to go pretty crazy. Last year one of them jumped out of a plane wearing a t-shirt containing their job application and filmed it and sent it to us. It’s a massive compliment that people go to so much trouble to get our attention. We always feel bad when we can’t hire them. The year students had to send in applications as a creative artwork was great. We got some fascinating stuff and some really avant-garde, post-modern attempts at art. Someone sent us a toilet seat in an ode to [Duchamp’s] urinal. People did paintings and sculptures… The most popular form was poetry and not a single one of them got through, because the poetry was just dreadful. Limericks don’t work. HRD: What are some things that you do internally to keep staff engaged? MB: We place an extremely high value on fun. We treat social engagement with at least equal value as work-related conversation, knowledge-sharing and so forth. It’s fundamental to us that success means that each of us looks forward to coming to work each day… we do prioritise ensuring that every day is a good day. We do a lot of socialising, we have a lot of events and we try to keep that fresh. One of the most important things that we do is sit in open plan. We don’t sit in our teams and every six months we rotate randomly, and that’s an incredibly positive, cohesive force. It avoids tribalism, it forces all of us to engage in quite some depth with a moving population of people and that forms very strong relationships.
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HRD: What is the story behind show-and-tell? MB: I think it’s actually the best thing we do. It’s on rotation so everyone has to do it pretty regularly, probably a couple of times a year. Partly it’s really good presentation practice, not just for the lawyers but for everyone… From the point of view of us as a community of people, every single time someone presents a show-and-tell we learn something about them. The topics can be as random as bizarre beauty contests in South America or teleporting. Because people always present on something that they’re interested in, that they’re passionate about, that they find amusing, it gives you a little window into them because they’re sharing something of themselves. HRD: What is the firm’s staff retention like? MB: It’s high. I wouldn’t say that we don’t have turnover, because we do. People leave for lots of different reasons. We’ve only lost people to other firms a couple of times… the most common reason is to go overseas. This is a very, very open and very interactive, engaged environment, which means there’s nowhere to hide and it’s very obvious when something isn’t working, and part of our bargain with each other is that we will be very open with each other and we will deal very directly and very quickly with any issues, whether it’s performance-related or behaviour or relationships. If it’s going wrong, then we will intervene and fix it, and as soon as we come to a view that it isn’t going to work, then we exit people much faster than is the norm, but we think that’s in everyone’s interests. HRD: When you were managing partner at Gadens, you gave staff a $400 bonus to buy a pair of shoes. Have you done anything similar at Marque? MB: A couple of years ago we were going on a retreat in February, and in December we gave them a Christmas bonus and said you have to spend it on something that you are going to wear at the retreat… That created quite a lot of entertainment. If all you ever do is shove cash into people’s hands it can start to lose meaning, I think. What we aim to do with things like bonuses is to see them as an extension of the celebration of mutual success… financial success is a consequence of us as a group of people doing constantly what we said we would do and focusing on the things that are really important to us. Profit will flow as a consequence of that, and when it does we should all share equally.
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IN PERSON / KELLY MCKENZIE
Based in WA, CBH Group is owned and controlled by more than 4,500 grain growers and is the largest cooperative in Australia. Kelly McKenzie, group HR manager, talks to HRD about managing a large casual workforce, rolling out new technology, and why employer branding is a priority in 2015 HR Director: How did you first enter the HR profession, and what drew you to it initially? Kelly McKenzie: I fell into it by accident. I was
IN PERSON:
KELLY MCKENZIE
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working for a large hotel chain in Broome and decided to relocate to Perth, where my family live. I asked if there were any opportunities to transfer within the company. The only opportunity was an HR administration role. I got the role but I didn’t really know anything about HR. I was very fortunate that the regional manager I worked for was passionate about HR and introduced me to areas like training and development, payroll and general advisory services. I realised that what HR does is help people achieve their goals. It’s what got me hooked, and it’s why I’m still here today.
HRD: You spent time as HR manager on a cruise ship – how was that? KM: It was a great experience. There were 70 different nationalities, 100 crew changes every week, and 1,500 crew members living and working together 24/7 in tiny little cabins under the waterline. The challenge from the HR point of view was dealing with strategic planning right down to ‘my boyfriend won’t give me back my CDs’. It was the full range of people management – even organising things like crew entertainment and crew activities and handling migration in all the different ports.
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HRD: Can you outline CBH Group’s casual worker needs? KM: Harvest comes in from just over 4,000 growers all over Western Australia – they grow grain, harvest it, and bring it into our sites once it’s harvested. The amount of grain each season varies widely – last year was a record harvest with over 15 million tonnes; sometimes it’s as low as six million tonnes. Every year we never know how many people we’ll need. It could be 700 up to 1,800. In recent years we’ve had over 5,000 applicants every year. Those applicants are not managed by our HR team but rather they are managed regionally, depending on where candidates have applied to work.
HRD: How do you manage such a large cohort of workers? KM: When you have nine administration teams around the state managing harvest recruitment, consistency across the state is a challenge. Then there’s the gathering of information that’s required when somebody starts: collection of medical information; pre-employment drug and alcohol testing; all the administrative information; the training they need before they start. In 2011 we were already using an ATS to give us part of the information, and that had eased some of the administrative burden. After undertaking a stakeholder analysis with everyone who interacted with candidates – our regional managers and administrators, our safety team, our medical providers, the team who develop our training materials – we ended up selecting an onboarding system. It took us around nine months to get it set up based on the feedback we received from those stakeholders, and we implemented it in the first half of 2012. In 2013 we refined it. Now we use it for onboarding our permanent staff and also for employment transitions such as parental leave.
HRD: Any tips for HR professionals looking to roll out HR tech or HRIS? KM: Always remember the system is only there as a tool to facilitate the process. Firstly, you must be clear on the process and what you’re trying to do. If the process is flawed in the first instance, you’ll have problems. Secondly, you can’t invest enough time in the planning and development phase – get it right first instead of rushing to get it out and then having to fix things when it’s live.
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HRD: What’s the biggest HR-related challenge you are facing at CBH Group? KM: Being in Perth, we’re competing with large international companies, especially in the mining industry. When the labour market is tight we’re often not thought of as an employer, so we must focus on our employer brand. There is a higher level of recognition of CBH in rural communities, but we’re often only viewed as a place to work at harvest time. We need to present to the market all the opportunities we offer. We have 1,200 employees in Australia, we have three international offices, and we offer roles in areas including HR, IT, project management, engineering, commodity trading, taxation, treasury, and finance. We’ll be enhancing our career site, making better use of our social media channels. We’ll also be improving our graduate program, increasing our presence at universities, and looking for opportunities for staff to present at industry conferences.
HRD: What I like most about HR is ... KM: Every day there’s an opportunity to help
KELLY MCKENZIE CAREER TIMELINE Qualifications 2011–2014
Curtin Graduate School of Business Master’s, Business Leadership
someone grow and learn.
HRD: What I dislike most about HR is ... KM: While we know we can really be a strategic enabler for the organisation, we’re often viewed by the organisation as only being effective in the transactional service space; there’s a disconnect between their expectations versus what we know we can deliver.
HRD: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given? KM: It was something said at a Stephen Covey-esque training session relating to his Seven Habits principles. It has stayed with me for more than 20 years: seek first to understand before you seek to be understood. We operate in a fast-paced environment. We’re often reactive to that environment and want to help people quickly, but sometimes we don’t fully understand what the problem is. That can result in a response that either doesn’t resolve the problem or we focus effort on the wrong activity. It’s much better to step back, understand the problem, and then take action.
Work summary Sept 1999–Jan 2002 Accor Hotels Training and development manager Apr 2002–Mar 2004 Accor Hotels – Sofitel Melbourne HR manager Apr 2004–Dec 2007 Royal Caribbean International HR manager Jan 2008–Dec 2008 Elders HR adviser June 2009 – May 2010 CBH Group HR adviser May 2010–Present CBH Group Group HR manager
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DRUG AND ALCOHOL TESTING: HEAD TO HEAD
Q:
Views from the frontline Behind closed doors, is sexism still alive and well in boardrooms and executive teams in 2015?
AMANDA CHEW
VP of global talent and culture G ADVENTURES
PHIL DUTHIE
General manager, Australia, and chair, diversity & inclusion group
CORINE TAP
ANZ managing director DANONE NUTRICIA
GHD
While sexism still exists, it’s not as prevalent in the travel industry. The travel industry is a strong employer of women; however, previously this has been for entry-level or middle management positions, and not in senior management roles. At G Adventures, we believe the best way to encourage women to fulfill their potential is by having strong female role models in our core team, as well as having programs in place to help women achieve their goals. G Adventures’ Women’s Leadership program, which has been running for three years, has been instrumental in helping female employees flourish through workshops, mentoring and networking. We’ve seen some remarkable results from individuals, as well as a shift within the company culture. This is something that I believe is starting to be reflected in the travel sector as a whole.
While overt sexism has hopefully diminished, many organisations face the less tangible but highly topical issue of unconscious bias. Having a broad gender equality and diversity strategy helps address unconscious bias by embedding diversity and inclusion as part of an organisation’s culture. It establishes a framework for succession planning and leadership development that enables both women and men to be valued equally in executive and board positions. According to figures from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, only 7.1% of organisations have a standalone gender equality strategy. Moreover, for the strategy to be successful, active commitment at a senior level is needed to drive change. The executive team and board can play critical roles in championing the strategy and creating environments where everyone has an opportunity to succeed.
Having worked in Europe, China and Indonesia, I think Australia still has a ways to go when it comes to gender equality. There are still not enough women leading busineses in Australia, and women are still paid, on average, 15% less than men, with this gap growing in recent years. Sexism in Australia is more subtle, and requires a different approach. Mentoring programs, like the one I developed at Danone Nutricia (Women with Wings), give women support and confidence to step up and shape their own career path. Investment in facilities that allow women to flourish is practically and symbolically important. A Danone Nutricia example is our dedicated breastfeeding rooms. Employees need to see that management is 100% behind gender equality both in words, and the chequebook.
Got an opinion that counts? Email hrd_editor@keymedia.com.au or join the debate at hcamag.com
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Are you out of step with your employees? Effectively managing valued talent may well be the competitive ‘tipping point’ for organisations in an increasingly competitive global economy. Today, the workforce is made up of four generations; however half of organisations do not have generationspecific talent management strategies in place. Chandler Macleod’s recent white paper Talent Management: the next wave found that while employers think they know which strategies will keep their employees engaged and productive, employees have a different view. Key considerations for employers to attract and retain talent include: Demand for flexible work arrangements The importance of purpose and meaning Use of big data to inform talent management decisions Communication, culture and OHS considerations for offsite employees Strategies to attract and provide for a diverse workforce. For your complimentary copy of Chandler Macleod’s white paper Talent Management: the next wave, visit chandlermacleod.com.
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