Category Archives: Employee Engagement

Two Things That Shaped My Role as an HR Executive

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One of the most common questions I get as an HR executive is how I got to where I am today. It’s a tough one to answer, given that my career path has been a series of twists and turns, successes and setbacks. I owe many important learning moments to managers I had earlier in my career, because without them I wouldn’t have found my way to my role at Workday. Most of them embodied great leadership qualities such as approachability, respect for others, and the ability to inspire interns and CEOs alike. While I strive to be all of those things to my team, there are a couple of specific lessons I’ve learned along the way that have significantly influenced how I view leadership. All Roads Lead to the Customer Early in my career, I worked on the floor at Home Depot. As part of my management training, I rotated into an assistant store manager position, and the team I found myself leading was full of highly experienced master-tradespeople. I quickly realised that my lovely college degree was of zero use when customers wanted to know how to fix their leaky faucets or install new light fixtures. No amount of friendliness could overcome the fact that I simply couldn’t answer those questions. Yet, our experienced associates were helping customers find exactly what they needed. That’s when I realised all that truly matters is how you service your customers. Companies have a lot of smart people doing impressive work, but … Continue reading →

Employee Experience: Preparing for the Workplace of the Future

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Employee engagement has been an HR buzzword for many years, but employee experience is a relatively new field. In this context ‘experience’ refers to the totality of employee experiences within the organisation; how staff feel about colleagues, management, KPIs and company culture.   The evaluation of both engagement and experience in the workplace has recently been disrupted by the emergence of big data and user-friendly tools. HR professionals are running increasingly sophisticated software, no longer dependent on the IT department to gather and process data for them.   In this blog, we look at employee experience and engagement, the impact of cloud-based tools on HR, and how a major Melbourne utility used a new HR platform to align employees’ goals with its own.   Engagement and psychological investment   Engagement is a word that’s used a lot in HR. To an extent, it’s tied in to organisational goals and culture, because engagement is the level of an employee’s psychological investment in the organisation.   It’s easy to assume that people who are happy are engaged, but it’s not always the case. You can be happy, but not engaged. The key is alignment between company and individual goals.   Staff engagement surveys can give an organisation a sense of how it is serving its employees. But organisations need to decide the overall goals they want to achieve before they can engage their staff.   The impact of the cloud on evaluating employee experience  The IT department is no longer solely responsible for providing all the resources and tools used in HR – databases, interfaces, report generation. These tools are how we reach in and find out about employee experience, and thanks to the cloud, they have become much more user-friendly and independent.  When it … Continue reading →

5 Minutes With Josh Bersin – World Thought-Leader in HR

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The one and only Josh Bersin is headlining at this year’s HR Innovation & Tech Fest. He is an undisputed world thought-leader in HR Tech with a unique insight into the ANZ market. We caught up with him and discussed HR trends ahead of his presentations at the event.  You spend your life immersed in major global HR trends. But are there any recent HR trends that have completely taken you by surprise? Yes. By far the biggest trend, and one I may never have predicted, is the fact that “HR applications” are now becoming “productivity applications.” In other words, all the things we did years ago in HR technology to create systems of record, automate transactions, and collect data – are now more or less “base features.” The real shift is toward HR applications that help make work better, help give people value (ie. Make you more productive, give you energy, teach you about people, advance your career). This, coupled with the explosion of new “Intelligent Automation” tools (AI in reverse) to offer you smart recommendations based on AI, is a whole new world of HR technology. Of course mobile enabled is important too, but that too is now a “must have.” What HR innovation and technology challenges do you see as being unique to the Australia market? And are there any particular trends you can see that are headed our way? Some of the most important “gifts” we have been given by the Australia market is the intense … Continue reading →

QBE Takes a Holistic View of Employee Experience to Win the War for Talent

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QBE Insurance is in an industry facing massive disruption. The increase of innovative new entrants to the market and the rapid rise of comparison websites means the war for talent is more real than ever. As a result, QBE has had to re-evaluate their HR strategy, with a key pillar being their employee experience. In this excerpt from HR Tech Fest 2016, Mel Parks from QBE reveals how they have taken a holistic view of employee experience in order to win the war for talent. Transcript Employee experience, what is it? I think someone earlier in one of the earlier sessions said, “Define employee experience for your organisation,” and we started to do that, and I talked before about it’s not about technology. For me it’s really holistic, it’s about the environment, the purpose, our culture, our values, the marketplace and our customers. That is the holistic environment within which employee experience needs to be considered. The work, what is it that needs to get done? For us, how we design work needs to be commensurate with the customer experience and what it is that we’re doing. This traditionally has been full-time, in the office, serving a customer need at the time and place that QBE desires; fundamentally different to what we need in the future. We’re talking about skills now, there’s a lot of discussion about hot, cold, warm bodies. I don’t know how many of you heard that before: hot body, me, I’m an employee; warm body, I … Continue reading →

Myth Busting: An Older Workforce Can’t Use HR Technology

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You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Older people in the workforce are stuck in their ways and won’t embrace new technology. These seem to be some of the attitudes surrounding our ageing workforce that are prevalent today. But are they true? With an increasingly ageing workforce and technology becoming not just an enabler of business but a way of working, there’s an increasing demand for workers of all ages to embrace technology. But does your age have anything to do with how willing or able you are to take up new technologies? During her presentation at HR Tech Fest 2016, Kaleena Jefferson GM People and Culture at Southern Cross Care busted this myth wide open. While they thought they’d have a challenge on their hands getting their mature workforce to embrace HR technology (almost a third of their workforce is aged 55+ with their oldest member in their 80s), they were pleasantly surprised at the results. In this excerpt from her presentation, she reveals some fascinating results from their technology survey that may change your attitude towards older workers and technology use. … Continue reading →