An upward trajectory

How are HR leaders ensuring that their team members become more strategic in focus in the new year? Three HR practitioners share with Lee Xieli and Lisa Cheong their plans for the upcoming year.

■ Janice Yan

Human resources manager

UPS Singapore

As a strategic partner of the organisation, an integrated understanding of the organisation’s strategic direction is needed and to ensure that clear priorities are set.

In UPS, employees’ goals are set to make sure that it is aligned with the Balanced Scorecard which supports our organisation’s strategic goals. Thus, employees are not only clear of what to do but also how to act in a given situation. This ensures that UPS staff at all levels make decisions that are consistent with the company’s vision.

Our key HR priorities are:

• Performance management: We need to have a good understanding of how the performance elements are defined and collectively aligned to organisational goals and objectives. HR will conduct a 100% audit of all KPIs selected for individual performance review/management, along with the goal-setting and weighting methodology used on each KPI. HR will also continue to provide training and manage employees’ development process in accordance to well-defined plans.

• Safety awareness: The safety of our people and of the general public is of utmost importance to us. We always strive to meet, or even exceed, our own high safety standards. At UPS, we ensure that our Service Providers are well trained in Space & Visibility (S&V). S&V is an annually certifiable UPS Defensive Driving program for all UPS drivers. For our in-house operations, employees are trained on UPS’s Safe Work Methods (SWM) to avoid work-related injuries.

• Staff attraction and retention: UPS always reviews its compensation and benefits to ensure its competitiveness to attract and retain key talents. We also ensure that effective and efficient recruitment and selection process is in place to fill positions with qualified candidates in timely manner.

■ Ivy Oh

Vice president of corporate HR

Certis CISCO Security

As we are essentially a manpower-based company with more than 8,000 employees in Singapore alone, it is important for me and my function heads to understand employees’ aspirations, where people want to be, their strengths and developmental areas.

There are about 30 people in my HR team where we are responsible for overall HR delivery in Singapore, as well as, regional assignees in the Asia Pacific and Middle East regions, where Certis has business presence in. I hope to help them become more strategic-focused through people development, on-the-job exposure and upscale the competencies - both technical and soft skills - of my team members. Aligned with my working style, I would like to develop a collaborative, team-spirited and confident HR team to meet the challenges of the security business. My ultimate aim is to build a high-performing and credible HR team.

I see the need to challenge the “status quo” and current process for continuous improvement so we can achieve desired outcomes in an even more effective, efficient and cost productive manner. As such, we will need to re-engineer HR operations and streamline HR processes for the team to “free” up time for strategic initiatives. We will also continue to invest in HR IT infrastructure, e-platform digitalisation and tap on the optimisation of data management centre (DMC) as the “experts” to manage high volume and transactional activities.

Leveraging on the strengths of DMC by re-channeling and migrating routine administration will derive mutual synergy and allow the corporate HR team to focus on core HR activities, thereby unleashing the full potential of the HR team. I also hope to foster a platform and environment to enable my staff to be empowered, so they can work in closer partnership with our business units to deliver their business strategy and results.

■ Butch Clas

Human resources director

Dow Chemical Pacific SE Asia and ANZ

When I look at the organisation I’m running at the moment, people are really more concerned with their day-to-day HR operations. I have a team of 30 [across the regions]. I expect people who are operating at a HR manager or specialist level, to stretch themselves out because I think it’s a good way to develop professionally and it makes them more valuable in the long run too.

The way we try to do this is by giving them very interesting projects or business issues like an M&A or a new payroll system. Right now, we are working on a divestment of one of our businesses. This is challenging for some people because they have to start thinking strategically about moving people into the new company, given the applicable labour laws.

For example, one of our businesses in Indonesia is going to be divested and I have an HR manager who is based there. He knows the labour laws and people very well but because it is going to be a bit more complex so we have to help them think about – What’s the impact? How are you adjusting? How do you plan to talk to the employees? How do you plan to engage the leadership? What’s your communication plan?

So we end up challenging them to think out of the box and out of their comfort zone. It forces them to think about what they know and how they can work strategically with the leadership to help people accept that change is going to happen.