I wouldn’t say that this is an unfortunate situation but rather a business challenge as it relates to managing a workforce that supports a large business.

At HP, you are growing at twice the market size and hiring aggressively across the region. You can easily get involved in the basics of bringing those employees on board and making them productive. However, we need to go one step further and ensure that we support business priorities while being operationally ready.

We also manage a very large team of people in HR to support the thousands of employees in the region. Everyone has individual career goals, skills and development desires and we have to constantly raise the performance bar to ensure skills are optimised and leveraged on so that there are equal opportunities for all. HP is not a “one business model” company. To be more specific, here’s an illustration that puts what I’ve just covered into perspective: how you support the printing business that is selling millions of products to the consumer base versus implementing a technological solution for a Fortune 500 company and the required skill set and HR priorities that come from supporting those two business models are vastly different.

We have distinct markets and landscapes to consider in the region and the challenge is to reconcile that with the company’s business and HR priorities. There is no one solution for this. The way to manage this is to look for consistency where possible but also be prepared to tailor some solutions appropriately. This combination has always worked to our advantage.

Michael Vavakis

Vice president of human resources global operations

HP Asia-Pacific & Japan