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ANNUAL REPORT 2010
CASE - A.P. MOLLER – MAERSK
A.P. MOLLER – MAERSK – PLACING HR AT THE HEART OF THE BUSINESS
Quartz+Co
The A.P. Moller – Maersk Group operates in some 130 countries, has a workforce of more than 110,000 employees and operates in business areas as different as energy, logistics, retail and manufacturing. Common to all A.P. Moller – Maersk’s business areas is that they operate in highly competitive environments. This makes the human factor an important strategic weapon in staying ahead of the competition. Whether relating to the exploration of oil or the ability to get a container from A to B in due time, people are the differentiating factor for A.P. Moller – Maersk. Consequently, fully leveraging the potential of the group’s employees is a core priority for Group HR. In 2008, the continued push for better results and increased agility made it clear to Group HR that the talent management strategies which had worked in the past were not enough to deliver future results. The tradition of making talents attend stand-alone programmes driven by HR did not sufficiently contribute to enabling the organisation to win in the market place. This called for action and led Bill Allen, Head of Group HR, to set a strong priority for the HR agenda: to create an approach that provided the organisational “lifting power” to win in the highly competitive market place by creating a transparent overview of the global talent pool. Creating HR that delivers on the business requirements Instead of inventing new radical strategies and sophisticated HR tools, Group HR decided to strengthen the core disciplines of performance and talent management. The aspiration was to build simple, intuitive and scalable tools, which would enable each management team to bring human capital to the epicentre of the strategic discussion without having elaborate HR insight, and in addition create the needed flexibility to meet the highly diversified needs of the business units across the conglomerate. The pioneering step was the introduction of the People Strategy Session (PSS), scoped as a recurring strategic meeting where the top management goes through the process of: 1. Linking the current positions to the strategic must-win battles to know which position is most critical for achieving the strategy 2. Matching the job content of the positions to the performance of the person holding the job to identify gaps and development needs 3. Deciding on necessary actions for each individual to ensure the capacity to deliver on the strategic requirements Having parallel discussions in the management teams of how to align the human capital with the business strategy
in Canada, Congo or Copenhagen has delivered full transparency of the talent pool across the conglomerate. This provides the ability to have a truly global perspective on how to get the most out of the talents and encourages the management teams to make difficult decisions – both in dealing with the less effective performers and in letting local talents move on to more critical positions. The PSS also led to a new opportunity for HR to demonstrate its value add to the business. Facilitating the PSS requires HR to understand the business context and brings a strong strategic rationale into the decisions on development and training activities. The results ... and the next move Today, the PSS runs once a year in all management teams across the globe, resulting in a stronger outlook and a more solid foundation for tackling the global market place. On group level, the PSS has given A.P. Moller – Maersk a much better overview of the talent pool across the organisation and significantly improved the ability to put the right people in the right positions at the right time. However, this does not mean that the journey has ended for Group HR. The next step is to apply the same principles to the performance management process for A.P. Moller – Maersk to optimise the value creation of all employees, teams and business units.
The rationale behind the new HR strategy and why it has proven to be a success in A.P. Moller – Maersk across the markets: It is truly strategic and links the HR intelligence on human capital to the strategic business needs It is simple and intuitive as it follows the logic of the strategy, making training of business leaders unnecessary It is f lexible as each management team focuses on the human capital issues most urgent to them It is based on training HR to facilitate the process, so the business leaders perceive the process as a strategic human capital session rather than an HR initiative
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