People Matters EX Round-up!

People Matters EX Virtual Conference 2020

At the People Matters EX Virtual Conference 2020, we witnessed a torrent of ideas, information, statistics, interpretations and visions throughout the day and I bring to you my favourite moments from all the insightful sessions.

Jason Averbook, CEO and Co-founder at Leapgen highlighted the importance of enterprise collaboration tools that are now going to be leveraged as Employee Experience tools. The talent community needs to own this and ask the most important question in the NOW of Work: How do we take the World of Work and bring it to life in the next normal.

The C- Suite power panel chaired by Philippa Penfold, CEO and Co-Founder, People Collider, saw views, experience, and focus areas shared by Christopher Wehner, MD, BMW Group Asia, Dr. Santrupt B Misra, CEO, Birla Carbon; Director, Chemicals & Director, Group HR, Aditya Birla, Nitin Chugh, MD & CEO, Ujjivan Small Finance Bank, and Shreyasi Singh, Founder & CEO, Harappa Education. The panelists addressed the shifts brought by the pandemic and discussed the role of leadership in relooking at the purpose of the organization during the crisis and how they can openly communicate this to staff to ensure that actions and decisions are aligned with the company priorities.

Marc Havercroft, Global Chief Customer Officer, SAP SuccessFactors spoke about how “we can’t put old processes on new technology and expect a new outcome”. Marc noted that the global pandemic has acted as a catalyst to the companies relooking employee experience and culture. And the current business realities give companies a real opportunity to break from the past.

Sheebu David, CHRO, GE Asia highlighted ways to manage the career & growth for our virtual workforce and provided a useful framework for today’s landscape of work, workplaces & workforces. Her three mantras are Democratization of work, Diversification of workforce and Distribution of the workplace.

Temitope Sadiku, Global Head of Digital Employee Experience at one of the leading FMCG giants, Kraft Heinz, discussed how they are speeding up digital transformation & automation to deliver an enhanced employee experience. She shared that knowledge will always be generated at the human level even in the time of AI, Machine learning and automation. We need to capture that knowledge and store it for the corporate evolution.

Casey Swails, Director, Executive Services, NASA, shared how NASA had to think of moving 90% of its workforce to a virtual environment practically overnight and also look at launching the first human commercial space flight in partnership with SpaceX. She shared as we go through this pandemic, organizations need to recognize that human connection is critical and focus on more creative ways to encourage collaboration.

Joydeep Bose, President and the Global Head of Human Resources, Olam International shared how this pandemic has made us experts in navigating uncertainty. He emphasised on the need to learn from the current crisis and build an agile organization resilient to future outlier events and said that the organizations that will be the next set of leading & winning companies would be the ones that will use this crisis to completely transform the way they operate.

Greg McKeown, Author of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller "Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less", spoke about why less is more and why it’s essential to distinguish the noise from what’s truly essential.In the closing keynote address, Greg discusses at length about the concept of essentialism and why it matters more than ever today as humans crave for more in a restricted existence. Capturing the current circumstances perfectly, he says this feels like we have all been sent to our rooms, to think about life and figure out what truly matters.

Dr Eugene Fidelis Soh, CEO at Tan Tock Seng Hospital shared some of the learnings from outbreak management and how at the TTSH, the Hospital’s collective leadership approach to care for one another in order to care for the patients and Leadership lessons stacked with every outbreak go beyond Hospitals to other organisations as the new normal is also to be better prepared for the next crisis. “It's one thing to have a plan, another thing to be prepared" is one of my personal important takeaways from his session.

Farid Basir, Chief Human Capital Officer at Telekom Malaysia discussed about identifying different personas for their workforce and creating customised strategies for navigating through the crisis challenges and explained various pragmatic steps that Telekom Malaysia has taken during the pandemic to ensure great employee experience.

Attila Emam, Head of Talent, Learning & Culture, AirAsia shared the three key things that are the core strategy for AirAsia during this crisis. These are pivoting, skilling & scaling. He emphasized on the importance of learning and why upgrading skills on a regular interval will always be important.

Pandit Dasa, Former Monk, Founder & CEO for Work Mindful discussed the imminent need to relook at leadership to help lower employee stress and anxiety in these times of rapid disruption and change and its importance, especially in today’s changing times. He emphasized on the fact that no one saw this coming and the level of stress and anxiety, on an emotional, mental, and financial level, this is causing globally, seems to be unprecedented. 

There is, indeed, plenty to reflect upon and, if this in any way enhances our individual and collective contributions to meeting the unprecedented workplace challenges all of us have been presented with, then this specially curated conference on Employee Experience can truly be judged a success.

I would like to thank all our speakers and partners for their exemplary support in making People Matters EX Virtual Conference a success. Gratitude to everyone who attended and made it so interactive with their valuable contributions and active participation throughout the conference!