When Your Business is Your People: 
Insights from the Employer of Choice

The constantly changing business environment is making new demands on Human Resource (HR) directors worldwide. Lynne Barry, a speaker at the marcus evans HR Summit 2010, addresses some of the challenges faced by HR executives in Australia and New Zealand today. Interview with: Lynne Barry, HR Director- South East Asia, Australia and Korea, Accenture

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Human Resources is often considered the heart of an organisation, the key to performance and growth. Yet not all HR directors have mastered the art of recognising and nurturing the talent within their organisation. Lynne Barry, HR Director South East Asia, Australia and Korea for Accenture, a speaker at the marcus evans HR Summit 2010 taking place in Australia, 10 – 12 March, has won the HR Leader magazine’s Employer of Choice award for her department’s achievements. Here she shares her thoughts on identifying leaders, inspiring employees to go that extra mile, and the criticality of understanding the business goals before implementing an effective HR strategy.

What led up to your HR Leader magazine’s Employer of Choice award? What were the winning HR strategies within your department?

Lynne Barry: I think the reason why we were successful in getting that recognition was a combination of many things. The way we assessed the needs of our company through our people’s strategy, how we aligned that very tightly with our business strategy, the steps we went through to really diagnose what our current landscape was and be really rigorous from a talent perspective, and really understanding the implications of our performance management and compensation systems.

What are some of the challenges facing HR executives in Australia and New Zealand at the moment, and how can they overcome these issues?

Lynne Barry: I think the global economic crisis has thrown up very different challenges for everyone. Some organisations have had to look at the size of their HR teams and employee population, and have been very badly hit by the crisis. Those who had been planning for the longer term were not as affected. Workforce size has been a problem I have heard my peers talk about, and that was certainly a great concern to me. The other thing that people are dealing with now is really the shorter term versus the longer term needs of their business, and how to cope with what they need to do to their business and the market environment today and yet be very well positioned from a talent and leadership perspective to have the business they want to have tomorrow.

What long-term strategies would you recommend to HR directors?

Lynne Barry: For us, everything starts with our understanding of our business plans; we can only implement long-term plans once we understand our long-term business plans, and we can only start to execute on that when we understand how those plans align with the current market in each country.

Understanding the movements of the talent within the marketplace that you are working in not just on a yearly basis, but how that market is moving on a quarterly basis is one of the most critical things that you have to get right in a professional services organisation such as ours. When your business is your people, you really have to have your finger on the pulse of what type of talent is available in the market, where the shortages and skills gaps are and what type of work has become very hot in the marketplace. You have to employ a number of strategies to get the best long-term outlook that you can get at. Also, you need to be planning long-term with the other executives in your company; I would say that is my starting point. I cannot do anything until I understand what they need really well. Once I do, I need to see what is out there and think of how I am going to attract that talent pool and how I am going to retain them and do everything else to give them the best career experience that they can have.

What is the leading force which drives employees to success? How can they be inspired to go that extra mile?

Lynne Barry: One of the things we have done at Accenture is to ask our people why they work here and what makes them successful here, and gathered a few things that they considered important to them; within Accenture, it evolves around the people that they work for, the type of work that they do, the opportunities that they have to learn and grow, the rewards that they get, the environment that they work in and our core values, our brand and reputation. It is a ‘symphony’ of programmes, and everything that we do has to touch at least one of those.

In our company, one of the things we excel at is the training and development that we give to our people, and we make sure that we never take our eye off that ball. Investing in our trainings, in our people, is one of the things that is absolutely sacred to us; it does not move when the market moves. We try to give our employees every opportunity to build their best career in our organisation.

How do you recognise leaders within your company? 

Lynne Barry: We do that in a few ways; at a very tangible level, we have a leadership survey and a global employee survey, both an opportunity for our people to recognise the people that inspire them as leaders and recognise the people that we call are very good ‘people developers’. From the data point, we recognise people publicly, also evaluating and rewarding people on how they perform in the leadership survey.

We also have succession planning in place, from the global level right down to the local level. We try to recognise the up and coming leaders, and make sure that we are looking out for their next career move. We ran a pilot programme in Australia, where we looked at our next layer down from what we call our country counsel to our next generation of leaders, then had a year long programme looking at how we wanted to develop them. We gave them some extra learning programmes, some very specific mentoring relationships and opportunities, and also got them together face-to-face on a number of occasions to really network with each other and work through a number of business problems.