HR Magazine’s summer conference

HR Magazine’s summer conference focused on innovation in HR and how it can lead to better performance in the organisation and a more focused workforce.

For those of you who didn’t get the opportunity to attend the event at Clifton’s, we’ve captured the words of wisdom by our speakers from both the morning and afternoon sessions.

David Rossiter, Head of Human Resources, Hospital Authority (HA)
Rossiter kicked off the morning session with his experiences of innovations in leadership development in his organisation.

His observation upon joining HA was that leaders are not created, they are found. He was also alerted to the importance of having leaders in the pipeline after the CEO decided not to renew his contract in 2002, following SARS. The board’s executive committee concluded that it needed to take a long hard look at succession planning.

Rossiter quickly realised there was no clear definition of a leader because of conflicting ideas. In order to identify leaders in the organisation, HA developed a set of 12 core competencies. (see slide) When conducting peer reviews of leaders they found these competencies to be lacking. Rossiter noted that in order to identify potential leaders you need leaders who can find them, who must be excellent leaders themselves. Rossiter warned, “When hiring, don’t rely on management intuition.” It should be a discussion between cluster general managers, human resources and the CEO.

Management 101
Rossiter said when developing leaders it is essential to ensure you provide the environment and opportunities for them to develop and these must be shown clearly and succinctly. Management101 has achieved this for HA.

It is a simple programme focusing on the fundamentals of Management such as effective writing and performance reviews and will soon be mandatory for new managers. The next step is Management 202, which concentrates on technical management skills.

At the highest level HA has The Executive Leadership Programme, which includes coaching, overseas attachments and structured executive education. To be accepted candidates must attend interviews with the CEO and two board managers and complete psychometric testing.
HA has the added difficulty of being subject to public scrutiny and are often criticised for fat-top, thin-bottom spending. They must therefore be careful how they spend taxpayers’ money. A recent investment is development centres where employees complete training and emerge with individualised and group development plans.

Seven-year rotations
Rossiter quipped that some people are literally born in the hospital and then work there for their whole life—creating a challenge to broaden their thinking. To this end HA is developing people outside Hong Kong and provide overseas attachments. However, many senior executives have children and therefore cannot consider this, which may adversely affect their career prospects.
Development posts and job rotations create a challenge because turnover at the authority is very low. While the job rotation programme has met with some resistance, they are compulsory if an individual has been with HA for more than seven years. To make these postings more palatable, jobs are listed that employees could apply for. Six out of seven HA staffers have made significant changes in their own career and the organisation, following a job rotation.

Kerry Rooks, Human Resources Director, The Prudential Assurance Co. Ltd.
Rooks believes that in order to be innovative and help the organisation grow it is necessary to get back to basics and your foundations. Rooks said, “Unless our fundamentals are solid, unless we are good at what we do, if we try to launch any innovative initiatives …they will be seen as just fads.”
Her research showed that innovations in HR require proactive involvement in addressing today’s business needs and alignment of HR strategy with overall business strategy to drive value and improve performance. HR professionals must be proactive at all levels of the organisation, strategic and tactical and they must have influence within the corporate leadership team.

HR as gatekeeper
Rooks pointed out that HR—as gatekeeper to the organisation—must ensure the right and the best people are selected. Prudential canvas a wide talent pool and during the recruitment process try to remain objective. All senior and critical-hire candidates must attend a full or half-day assessment, including biographical assessments that identify patterns of behaviour. This helps identify risks that me be associated with someone coming on board. Rooks said, “ If you know the risk, you can better handle it. Or if you think it’s too great, you can make the decision that that person is not worthy.”
Resourcing is done directly, proactively and reactively explained Rooks. In the insurance industry, experience is a must and therefore they maintain a good network and database so they always have a readily available external talent pool.

On the issue of retention, Rooks advised, “Pay for performance and differentiate for high performance by paying above the market rate.” As people get more senior there is a greater component of variable in comparison to fixed said Rooks, adding, “You must get that mix right.”

Talent pipeline
Prudential has a robust identification processes and validation frameworks at all levels of the organisation and conducts individual development planning discussions with all identified talent. Some have the ambition but not the capability, or vice versa and this poses a challenge.
Rooks then elaborated on the importance of developing credible successors in the organisation. Succession planning requires strong collaboration between the successor, their manager, HR and the executive team. Rooks explained that at Prudential they have ten leadership positions and as a metric each role must have a certain percentage of successors—either long or short-term. If targets are not reached there is no bonus. In functions that they cannot find talent, they grow their own, targeting fresh graduates. Development programmes targeting young talent at Prudential feature action learning business simulation and mentoring. It is a responsibility of the management team and they are involved at every level.

Jacqueline Moyse, Head of Organisational Development, Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group (MOHG)
Moyse talked about developing a talent pipeline to support global growth. She advised, “Align what you’re doing in HR with the business and particularly the senior management. Goals should be linked into the vision of the organisation and the business strategy.”
Her first task was to resource global growth. She said, “To achieve this we need the right people in the right jobs, with the right skills at the right time.” This is done in six steps:

• All colleagues design their success profiles. This helps get buy-in of colleagues and understanding of competencies.
• Training materials are customised with industry-relevant manuals, videos, reference guides and an online test site. Hyperlinks are built into the system, which takes employees to training materials.
• Regional coaches are trained in performance management and the new online system.
• Every senior manager attends a two-day training programme on managing people development and performance. It concentrats on soft skills and how to coach people and give feedback and gave lots of opportunity to practice techniques and conversations.
• Train the trainer for learning and development.
• Process is cascaded throughout the organisation.

Training as a change agent
According to Moyse, MOHG approached the project as change agents and marketers rather than just trainers. She believes that there is so much to be learnt from marketing and the way that it approaches consumers, PR, and branding. The programme is heavily branded, with a new name, logo and advertising collateral that is distributed among employees.
Stakeholders must be involved throughout the process and it is helpful to identify difficult general managers and pockets of resistance. Moyse pointed out that it is important to communicate throughout to ensure everyone knows what’s happening and has input.

Succession Management
Last 12 months moved to succession management.
At MOHG they have created the talent pipeline and are able to pull information from the dashboard, such as who has completed their review. They are about to launch an e-learning module on how succession management can be done better. Moyse recommended keeping a record of competencies for every employee. Through Profile—the hotel group’s online employee database—managers look at different colleagues and gauge their competency rating. If they have a vacancy they can look at core competencies and pull up the data to see who fits the criteria.

Moyse advised that it is important to get competencies right in the first place because they will feed into other things such as development plans and personal profiles. If you want to develop people and their careers well, don’t start from a rocky foundation.

The number of transfers between hotels has gone up significantly. MOHG transferred 29 senior managers from other properties around the world to the newly opened hotel in Macau. If that trend continues they will save a huge amount in head hunting fees, observed Moyse.

Clare Allum, Asia-Pacific Leader, tax, Ernst & Young
Allum talked about the framework for learning and development and the challenges and the successes in a diverse business.

Ernst & Young and You, EYU is how the company develops its people—a framework that extends beyond learning and development and formal learning. It is implemented through stakeholder engagement, learning, experiences and coaching. Allum said that their innovation is encouraging people to learn more effectively from on the job experiences.

She explained that Ernst & Young is a very rank-based organisation. People join as graduates, spending a couple of years at staff level and work their way up, ultimately being promoted to executive director or partner. From a learning and development perspective they have a big chunk of intelligent and bright people they need to keep entertained. The business is quite diverse with a lot of different skill sets to deal with different clients. This requires specialised learning alongside a common curriculum.

Implementation: building stakeholder engagement
Allum advised, “You must build engagement with stakeholders and you need to act as marketers.” She added that it is important to spend time talking to people and showing them why things need to be done. Get people to focus on what they want to achieve from a business perspective and how that can be done.

In order for Ernst & Young to be a leading tax practice, it is necessary to build and drive specialisation, deepen skills, increase productivity and retain and develop the best people. This can be done by providing development and a clear career path within the organisation.

Delivering the right experience
To ensure people get learning experience on the job is down to resource managers and the tools for resource management. In the tax industry, the typical situation is that someone becomes a specialist at an early stage, which gives a very narrow skill set. This leads to boredom, especially with Gen-Y, therefore it is crucial to offer employees a wide range of experiences. They’ve tried to get people to think about delivering experiences more systematically and implemented tools for managing people, such as Retain–a people management tool.

Experience maps and rotations
Experience maps are similar to learning maps and competency frameworks, but they detail not only the skills, but also the work and the technical learning needed to become a rounded professional. Experience maps are increasingly consistent and regulated and are embedded into performance management. Technical experience is also defined and employees may have to proactively demand some of these experiences.

Regarding job rotations Ernst & Young faces similar challenges to HA. They have rejigged the model so rotations for Greater China will be far more systematic so people know they will move around the department. The downside is making people do something outside their comfort zone . On the upside, for young people it will set up stepping stones for progression and change.

Professor Ardeshir Geranpayeh, Department of Applied Linguistics, Cambridge ESOL
Topic: Innovation in staff benchmarking and measuring training effectiveness.
The afternoon’s first speaker, Professor Ardeshir Geranpayeh, Department of Applied Linguistics, Cambridge ESOL spoke of innovations in staff benchmarking and how to measure programmes to ensure training effectiveness. He stated that increases in corporate globalisation pose problems for communications, in terms of language proficiency, as well as cultural awareness. Solutions to these problems need to be built into any benchmarking programme.

Geranpayeh went on to say that industries have established the need for language policies and practices, but they are not standardised, and this is important. He suggested the logical way to do this is to set benchmarks for different job levels. In addition to the job description, the language proficiency required should also be determined. “The practical problems including a lack of resources, expertise in language and proficiency can make this process expensive,” he explained
Geranpayeh provided working examples of Cambridge ESOL’s benchmarking experience with international companies in multiple locations. They had been tasked with creating training programmes and assessments in a common language to enable communication at a technical level. Using existing constructs, tests were tailored to the needs to the companies.

He continued by referencing a study by The International Research Foundation for English Language Education that reinforced the importance of “English as a second language in the global economy is important”. This research found that language proficiency has an ultimate impact on business performance and emphasised greater language needs of corporates. He highlighted the importance of having a corporate language strategy with a global standard.

After briefly defining the different benchmark levels—A is a basic, functional language level; B is an efficient, functional language level and C is an academic language level—he stated that the categories are important as “some jobs require higher language proficiency than others. Geranpayeh added, “The good thing about benchmarking is that it provides a reality check—defining where you are at the moment and where you want to go.”

To assist, a benchmarking tool kit has been developed. Cambridge ESOL work with the business to identify their objectives, decide on the language levels for each job and provide testing. After designing the programme, they then look at the GAP analysis and make further recommendations.
“Benchmarking is to define what is needed for the future, and should also state where employees are today to determine the type of training needed to go where you want to be in the future. Standardisation is important to determine the effectiveness of training programs.,” Geranpayeh concluded.

Panel Debate: Innovation that demonstrates ROI from staff development programmes
The conference was rounded off with a lively debate on finding new and unconventional ways to measure financial return on employee training. Participating in this panel debate was Alvin Miyasato, Regional programme Manager—Leadership Development for Asia Finance, Intel; Professor Ardeshir Geranpayeh, Dept of Applied Linguistics, University of Edinburgh; Mark Knight, Regional Manager (Asia) for Cambridge ESOL and Professor Florence Ho, Senior Lecturer, School of Professional Education & Executive Development, HKPU.

A member from the floor kicked off with a question concerning how important benchmarking is to Intel in terms of language capability in the region. Miyasato reflected that benchmarking was very important to the organisation—both internally and externally to see any patterns of English capability, and different levels across emerging markets. He added that aside from the language capability they also looking at the acumen related to their industry and looking at what other companies are doing to develop their own acumen and how it spreads throughout the pipeline.

The discussion then turned to how it was possible to guarantee that assessment and benchmarking and programmes was fair and that subjectivity did not creep in when the programmes were rolled out in an organisation.

Ho picked up on this topic: “When we talk about doing tests, these are only useful up to a point. Within an organisation there are also technical and operational needs and a general test may only serve a generic purpose.” She then referred back to an earlier point from Geranpayeh that the context in which the benchmarking is undertaken as a key factor.

Geranpayeh elaborated on the fairness aspect, adding that is about describing your population and setting the standards. Fairness comes into play when you try to make decisions–based partly on the type of test that you provide.

Miyasato spoke about the need to develop English capability. He recounted an experience he had recently in Vietnam where senior level employees where being trained up to enable them to give a competent presentation in English. He concluded when making an English assessment it is important to consider different data points.

Knight had a blunt assessment of how the fairness aspect often plays out in the real world. “This issue of fairness is an important one. For example, if a HR manager thinks a test is fair that does not mean that the staff agree and the perception of the staff can make or break a benchmarking project.” He recounted that it is common that when HR announces to an employee that they will be given an English assessment, their response is ‘Why?’—they may be suspicious and even be fearful of losing their job. In light of these very genuine concerns of staff, it is important to confidential research interviews with staff and find out what’s going on prior to setting the benchmarking test. Knight concluded by returning to the issue of fairness, pointing out that how the benchmarking project is delivered is essential to achieving a fair outcome.