The HR team, champions of imparting knowledge throughout the organisation, is itself often the last in line for learning and development. The autumn HR Magazine Conference served as a keen reminder of the challenges facing HR and the importance of maximising learning and development opportunities for everyone across the organisation. As ever, the speaker line up from diverse industries and backgrounds gave practical input about how they are managing to not only develop their employees, but also further upskill their HR department and C-Suite.
Ingredients for lasting change
Judy Feng, Head of Organisational Development, The Hong Kong Jockey Club (HKJC) shared that HKJC is undergoing an organisational transformation in building a customer-centric and performance-driven culture with the ultimate aim to enhance the organisation’s competitive advantage. To achieve this, a behavioural shift through leadership capability building is essential.
Feng highlighted a leadership development programme—the Leadership in Action programme (LAP)—which was designed and executed to develop executives as the ‘change agents’. It adopted a systematic approach and partnered with world class subject experts. Action-learning is one of the programme components bringing about change.
Feng explained, “Talent must see, think and do to achieve meaningful and lasting behavioural change.” Feng described how the LAP programme has helped foster new behaviours among executives in adapting and thriving in their current work landscape. The programme’s impact has been wide-reaching and Feng highlighted, “Our talents are now demonstrating new behaviours: they have developed a new outside-in way of thinking and the entire process has significantly increased collaboration across different functions and work teams.”
Key success factors include a structured action-learning process design, team coaching with professional methodologies and tools and gaining senior management commitment.
Catalysing transformation
Eric Or, Managing Director, JOS Hong Kong, and Jenny Pong, Group Director, Human Resources, JTH Group, teamed up to share their transformation story. The GFC and the market fluctuations it brought previously meant HR had to step up to the plate with a transformational programme rolled out across the organisation to positively drive business results.
This was no mean feat, and key to overcoming challenges was keeping the company culture up-to-date with the current market. Or used the office fax machine as a metaphor for how inertia is overcome. He explained, “Previously I had a fax machine in my office which had sat unused for months—when I finally questioned why it was there, the answer was ‘just because it has to be there’. I realized, to make change, you need to drive it. Someone has to be brave and take the risk in order to move forward.” He quirked, “I later ditched the fax machine and moved on.”
A common concern among some management is the worry of offering more training to staff only to have them later leave the organisation. To Or, the opposite is true. He explained, “Our staff are our brand and our asset. We need to wow our staff so that they will wow our customers. Having unhappy staff with inadequate skills facing our customers is the last thing you want. I will not cut my L&D budget because it is crucial to maximise practical L&D opportunities across the organization.”
Pong highlighted the key initiatives in the transformation journey. Various focus groups were conducted to solicit feedback from staff. Policies, systems and structures were enhanced. Corporate values were crafted, communicated and reinforced via a gamification app to engage and connect staff. Innovative wellness programs were rolled out, L&D and talent management programmes were revamped and an inaugural employer branding award programme was launched. With HR working hand-in-hand with the business, these have led to increased employee engagement score, reduced staff turnover rate and profitability and business development heading the right direction.
HR as the drivers of change
Understanding that change is managed differently in each organisation and getting HR involved is a great way to successfully manage the change process. Jeff Hackeson, Managing Director, Advanced Prosci® instructor explained, “If your strategy for Change Management is effective, you are six times more likely to meet project objectives.” (Prosci® 2016 Best Practices Research). HR can help to meet these objectives by analysing the impact of change before the project is launched and by contributing their input to the initial change management plan. Once a plan of action is decided upon, HR and the change management team can get the support and involvement of leaders and line managers to ensure that the change realises organisational benefits.
The pair advised that when tackling change, HR should try to be consistent in their approach and one way to do this is use a proven methodology and set of tools. By using a suitable model such as Prosci ADKAR®— Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement—change can be defined for one person, teams and the organisation. HR also should develop techniques to help deal with those who are, inevitably, reluctant to embrace change. What is critical is the need for HR to be consistent and persistent with such actions and conduct periodic reassessments to address deeper pockets of resistance to change. Times of corporate transformation often present some of the biggest challenges for HR and getting all staff to simultaneously change is a tall order. John Prentice, Director, Prosci® instructor, stated “Change puts HR in the driver’s seat—people instinctively don’t like change because of the unknown. HR has a critical role at this time to give talent a clear mapped-out structure for the change and keep them updated on what’s going on throughout the transition.”
Hackeson and Prentice concluded by providing further insight on successfully enabling change and driving positive business results by enabling leaders to drive change and coaching line managers to lead their people through the change. The bottom line being that employees will support and embrace change with the right process, leadership and management.
Business targets meets HR targets
Antonio Ramirez, Senior Vice President of Human Resources, Sands China Ltd described how correct training was perceived by his staff as the most important development objective. Ramirez believes that development must focus on the business and talent within—with a mind-set to embrace change. Ramirez commented, “Development plans must not just have HR targets, but also business targets in mind.” Each day will bring different challenges and an ongoing process of change is necessary to cultivate the mind-sets of employees and develop the HR team.
The importance of maximising talent to maintain a happy team and happy customers was stressed, Ramirez acknowledged, “Everyone needs to love their job.” He suggested that staff should have a purpose to change the way they think with a shift from control to empowerment. He remarked, “HR teams need to focus on the potential, think and raise the right questions regarding how the organisation can function better and to provoke thoughtful answers from the team.”
Ramirez revealed how a visual management system at Sands has significantly helped his HR teams focus on solutions rather than problems. In this way, employees start to regard failure positively—as an opportunity to build and learn. Ramirez also believes traditional training sessions are still relevant, however a culture of utilising new knowledge and methods should be nurtured to use a dual approach: utilising the traditional as well as contemporary learning techniques.
Guiding your own learning
Debbie Mannas, Head of HR, WallemGroup, opened with the statement, “Whose life is it anyway?” A rallying cry for all HR folk to take control of their own L&D and steer their own ship.
Mannas discussed the trials and tribulations of sussing out a development roadmap for the HR function. She mentioned how MNCs only occasionally have clear development roadmaps in place, meanwhile medium and small organisations almost never do. She highlighted, “Most of the big organisations have them, but are they always followed consistently. Smaller organisations almost never have them, and this really leaves a hole in the development for the HR function.” She added, “With no roadmap in place, an effective plan of action cannot be followed and there is no way to measure success. Who is going to teach the teachers?”
Mannas discussed how her previous leaders really sculpted her development as a HR leader today. A testimony to all of today’s leaders that even the smallest things may leave a mark on their people. So HR leaders should acknowledge that every action and choice made is being observed and absorbed. She advised, “Lead by example, and act like a disciple yourself—being willing to soak up every lesson and learning opportunity possible, whether positive or negative. This is key to building up a varied and broad development experience for yourself—and it should also include situations you may not initially like or feel comfortable in.”
To keep developing yourself as a leader Mannas made some key recommendations:
- Imagine who you will be years from now
- Ask yourself what legacy would you like to leave
- Explore how you can add meaning to what you are currently doing
- Examine new skills you will need to stay relevant in the future
- Expect more from yourself
- Pinpoint what gives you joy in certain roles, what does not, and what can you do about it
Mannas stated triumphantly, “However you see yourself in a number of years, start working on it now. Developing skills should be addressed sooner rather than later.” She highlighted that establishing a map for development is a major motivator as it sets out goals, milestones and a clearer plan of action. She concluded, “on the way you may change course and priorities, which you may have never realised if you hadn't started that journey. Keeping an open mind enables you to spot opportunities that can be used as skill building tasks and this can sometimes mean going out of one’s way to look for them.”
Panel discussion
Facilitated by Paul Arkwright, Editor-in-Chief, HR Magazine, the panel included Carmen Chan, Senior Manager, Employee Engagement & Internal Communications, Group Human Resources, JTH Group, Bernard Coulaty, International VP HR, Author and Speaker, Martina Li, HR Partner, IBM Hong Kong, Eva Lo, Director of Knowledge Management, Cordis Hotel and MaryAnn Vale, Vice President, Human Resources, Global Supply Chain, PVH Far East Limited who all shared their insights
Addressing skill gaps in HR
The panel acknowledged that although HR has come a long way, there is still scope for further enhancing in-depth strategic business acumen among the HR community. Vale commented how HR supports business strategy by moving towards a partnering role with stakeholders and that business knowledge plays a large part in this. Coulaty described it as problems from managers above and people below and explained that there is a lack of a strategic vision and a shortage of simple and quick decision-making processes. He also highlighted that a gap exists between technology and engagement.
In order to deal with the lack of business acumen in HR, Lo said she addressed this through training and by taking staff out of the normal workplace setting and educating them in unfamiliar surroundings. She elaborated, “Lots of HR graduates are very eager so we encourage them to take a broad variety of courses—such as labour law—and we also do a lot of coaching. To increase their business guile they are encouraged to read business journals and at least once or twice a month we hold a casual lunch to discuss what they have read.” HR has to retain a broad wealth of knowledge to function effectively and this can only be maintained by engaging with other departments around themselves.
Having a team of HR professionals who are well-read with a good understanding of business is not only useful but it can help achieve a business edge. She stated, “Coaching plays a big part in boosting skills and it’s a huge role for senior HR leaders to undertake, but they’re the ones who have the experience and understand business.”
Mapping out value change
Everyone agreed that in terms of increasing value, the senior management team needs to be very open-minded and accepting of the way HR works. Li explained how they achieved this at IBM: “We enable global initiatives and programmes to encourage our teams to come up with fresh and unconventional ideas. We then choose the most innovative proposals and fund the team generously to make their ideas come to life.” She expanded on this by emphasising how HR needs to be forward thinking to address skill gaps. Chan discussed a recent imitative: “Students had a chance to flex their innovation muscle by competing for an innovation award—from 42 submissions we had eight finalists who all came up with a viable business blueprint.” Offering staff the chance to do something wildly different and perhaps even affect the way the business is run is not only affirming but provides opportunities for them to create their personal visions. Such an initiative could not be achieved had senior management kept HR on a short leash.
Coaching, training or mentoring?
Coulaty argued that mentoring is the most beneficial learning method. He suggested that training is seen as helping with the transactional side of things whilst coaching is good for inertia or pockets of people who resist change. “Conducting mentoring, such as spending one day a month within a department—whether it is marketing, IT or sales—creates engagement within all levels of a company.” When asked about the HR mindset of business people, Coulaty said that matching the right mentors with staff was the answer: “We have a training programme for mentors, but we also partner younger staff with the older generation which creates a dynamic not previously seen.” Mentoring becomes a two-way street rather than just a trickle down from one to another. Vale explained, “This is an untapped resource in most organisations that should be utilised more often as it offers a more varied method of learning.” Leaders are not just leaders, they are also teachers and at same time, students.
Building HR networks
Having a personal HR network can be not only your means to helping a fellow HR manager in distress, but also your own safety net in times of need. HR has to keep on top of a lot of information and changes within its own function. MaryAnn Vale, Vice President, Human Resources, Global Supply Chain, PVH Far East Limited cautioned, “Within a short period your knowledge and data will be outdated. At this point functioning optimally becomes difficult, sitting on what you thought you knew just will not do.”
Vale offered her wisdom regarding how she has utilised her own HR network in the past to help achieve her business and personal career goals. She cited a recent event when faced with the challenging task of recruiting in Africa, owing to her keen networking she had managed to get in touch with a HR manager who had recently been very busy within that locale. She noted, “Because of my established networks, I was able to unlock a trove of invaluable local knowledge and intelligence that you could only get from someone else’s firsthand experiences.” She went on to detail that networking should be viewed as a culture of ‘giving’. She explained, “Build a relationship with your key motive being ‘to give’.
I am a firm believer in getting back what you give.” Vale went through some important points for being a star HR networker: honing your elevator pitch, determining the best places to network (HR Magazine’s Conferences naturally!), having relevant questions in mind to break the ice and help overcome your shyness. She reminded those in HR that networking is all about quality, not quantity. As a sign off, Vale reminded the audience to maintain their networks and not let them stagnate. Introduce members of your network to each other to strengthen it and maintain the manner of giving. Being generous is a long-term investment.
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
