HR Roundtable at International SOS in Singapore

ChapmanCG co-hosted an HR roundtable session on 9 April at the offices of International SOS in Singapore. The gathering saw an excellent turnout of HR Leaders from diverse industries including IT&T, oil & gas, healthcare, financial services and commodities/ agricultural industries.

Each HR Leader gave a quick snapshot of the challenges that their organisation was currently facing, and detailed what they hoped to get out of the session. Although a variety of industries were represented, the HR Leaders faced similar issues involving staff engagement and development, motivating and retaining diverse and multi-generational workforces, attracting and retaining talent in a competitive and cost-conscious landscape, developing leaders for the future, developing and using predictive analytics for decision-making, getting the best out of a joint venture, surviving M&A and how to make HR an agent of change. Due to limited time, the group was not able to tackle all of these issues, but it was an engaging discussion on some interesting topics, which is summarised below.

Journey of Talent Management

Our host, Dawn Shanta, the Regional HR Director of ISOS, kicked off the meeting by introducing the company which was celebrating its 30th anniversary. She shared how Talent Management in ISOS has come a long way since she joined the organisation. She and her team faced many challenges including engaging a diverse, multigenerational, multicultural workforce; retaining new hires beyond two years; and developing leaders and getting those leaders to set aside time to come together and discuss talent. Today, Dawn and her team are proud of the Talent Management processes and programmes that have been put in place, and they look forward to the continuing impact these will have on the business.

Leadership Development

The discussion around leadership development focussed on the ongoing challenges associated with ensuring current leaders stay relevant, as well as the problems with current leaders not always being able to drive the business transformation. The group also touched on how to identify and develop the leaders of the future, who will no doubt look very different from the leaders of today.

Recruitment Capabilities and Hiring the Right Talent

Hiring the right talent and building recruitment capabilities are always top concerns, and Lindsay Rae-McIntyre of IBM shared how the company built an executive search capability in-house. She had to re-engineer the recruitment process, delegate the necessary authority for faster decision-making and influence the need for quality of process and candidates. Hiring the right talent was no longer solely the recruitment team’s responsibility, rather the management team was trained on how to hire the right people by understanding and identifying the skills needed to hire for success in different markets, as well as the importance of hiring a diverse workforce. IBM also had to build stronger analytics around talent to drive decision making.

HR as Business Partner

The group then discussed the general need for HR to become more business-oriented. Jeffrey Howard of Alcon spoke about starting HR meetings by getting his team to talk about business performance/numbers. Alison Peck of Goldman Sachs shared that she gets the business to present to the HR team, in an effort to develop better relationships and an increased understanding of one another. Lindsay Rae-McIntyre spoke about encouraging HR at IBM to develop their business acumen, as this is a skill that cannot be outsourced.

Performance Review and Feedback

Allison of Goldman Sachs shared her experience of simplifying the performance review process. She reduced the questions, instead placing the emphasis on the quality of conversations, transparency of the process and feedback. This started a lively discussion about whether the traditional annual performance review is still fulfilling its purpose of ranking performance, measuring and rewarding talent. Are managers giving regular and honest feedback, and which is more effective? The conversation then turned to scrapping the yearly performance ranking exercise and replacing it with regular feedback and performance conversations, as well as training employees to ask for feedback, as coaching/mentoring should be a two-way process.

More Questions Than Answers

It was an interesting and interactive session, which generated more questions than answers as the HR Leaders present agreed that they must continue to explore and learn about innovative ways to solve business and people challenges in an increasingly demanding and competitive landscape. We would like to thank Dawn Shanta and her team at ISOS for hosting such a successful roundtable, and we look forward to reconvening with the group later this year.