Hi everyone. As part of this week, we have already discussed personnel management. It is now time to introduce the concept of strategic HR management. To do so, I am pleased to welcome Mr. Michael Emery, Director of the Division for Human Resources Management at IOM, the International Organization for Migration. Michael, welcome. Thank you very much Alexander and very good to join all the colleagues joining online today. Michael, international organizations are currently undertaking major transformations. This will for sure affect and depend on the successful transformation of the HR management function from a transactional administrative function to a value-added strategic function that will be enabling the optimization of human capital. In light of your experience as HR Director in organizations as UNFPA and IOM, which are the success factors to accomplish the journey from personnel administration to strategic HR management? Alexander, I think the first thing we have to acknowledge is that not any one organization in the international organizations sector has successfully migrated fully to the strategic HR management. I think if you look at most organizations, we think about a continuum, some organizations are closer to the transactional end of the continuum, and others are closer to the strategic aspects of the continuum. If we look at what the success factors are for moving along that continuum, then there's several. Firstly, there has to be a commitment from senior leadership that they want to get to that strategic side. If you look at the organizations that do strategic HRM well, often the positioning of human resources is much closer to the executive head of the organization than those that are at the more transactional side. I remember when I was at UNDP, this is a long time ago now, there were four layers between me and my executive head in Human Resources. On the other hand, when I was at UNFPA, technically there was one level, but in effect, I had direct access to the principle of the organization. That's the first thing. The positioning of human resources as a function than where it sits close to the center of power. The other important thing is the understanding of what the business is of the organization. I remember a few years ago I was doing a human resources transformation process and we hired The Oryx Group. They said to me, What do you want out of this transformation? I remember saying that I wanted this HR department to be known as the best HR department in the UN system. I wanted it to be the most innovative, the most responsive, the most client-focused etc. These two consultants looked at me and said, That's the wrong answer. This was with UNFPA. I said, What's the right answer? They said, You want a world where every pregnancy is wanted, every childbirth is safe, and every young person's potential is fulfilled. That was a bit of a light bulb moment. Because what they're saying is, you don't exist to be good at HR, you exist to support the business of your organization. I think understanding, having that awareness of human resources that you are there to support the business of the organization is really important. That's one of the key success factors. I think the other elements that we need to look at is the moving away from what we call event processing, our recruitment campaign or something like that, and more looking at the process of business process mapping. Organizations that do HR really well and very strategically, look at their business processes. They talk to their clients, and then they work out what are the optimal ways of doing the business of human resources. Whether that's leveraging artificial intelligence, whether that's designing a new ERP system that supports the HR function, etc. This is one of the critical success factors. Finally, I'll say that the focus of really successful strategic HR functions moves away from the individual to the organization. We don't exist to look after an individual person, we exist to support the business of the organization. I think these are probably the critical success factors. Thanks, Alexander. Thank you very much Michael. When you referred to the shift from individual-based to function-based HR management, How do you think that this will also impact on the classical HR lifecycle, from workforce planning to career development and succession planning? I think you're already seeing that there are profound shifts in the classic HR lifecycle and the drivers behind that lifecycle. If we just recall very quickly that the the classic lifecycle would start with workforce planning, like what do you need to get your job done to achieve the business of your organization? Then, how do you attract the talent in order to ensure that you can achieve this? Once you've got the talent, how do you manage that talent? How do you grow it? How do you manage the performance of that talent? How do you ensure that talent gaps are being addressed? Then towards the end of that lifecycle, how do you ensure that you have the right bench strength or the right succession planning in place to ensure that there's continuity in the workforce? How do you transition talent out that needs to be transitioned out of the organization? If we're moving now towards the most strategic end of Human Resources Management, there's a number of drivers that come into the lifecycle. And the first one, of course, is the fundamental role that technology is now playing in that whole lifecycle. For example, if we are looking at workforce planning, one of the big growth areas at the moment is Human Resources metrics. How do we triangulate all the different sources of data that we have? And we have lots of different data that we can draw on already to determine what we actually need to drive the organization forward? I always use the example of Quantas, which is probably not a good example during a pandemic, but about a year or 18 months before they received the Airbus A380, They had pilots being trained in Toulouse to know how to fly that new aircraft. So they knew already what they needed to do. They identified the pilots that would be in the right age group, that had the right skill set, that had the right aptitude, that would be the new pilots for the A380. So that's one thing. Then the next one is talent acquisition. Now, one of the features, if you like, of international organizations is that they've largely been relying on what I call passive talent acquisition. That is, they have a vacancy, they put a vacancy notice on their website, or in a magazine, or a newspaper, or online, and they hope that the right person happens to be looking at that position at the right time. Now, the good organizations, the strategic organizations, are now getting very aggressive with their talent acquisition. They're actually identifying the talent that they want and they're going after that talent. They're using LinkedIn targeted searches, they're using Facebook, they using all the social media outlets to really target the nationalities, the skill sets, the age groups, and the language assets that they need. The same goes for performance management. Typically, in the non-learning international organization, you have an annual performance cycle where you sit down with the boss and you have a bit of a chat about how things went in the last year. It's very backward looking. Good strategic organizations now are saying, let's go to continuous performance management, where every project that you're working on every event that you're working on is being managed as it happens in real time. The same goes for staff development learning as well. A lot of organizations invested huge amounts of money in these high-cost, University-run management programs and leadership programs, et cetera. They didn't really put the investment into what was the impact of that when those staff members came back into the workplace. Now, there's a lot more targeted stuff, development and learning as well, where we have targeted interventions et cetera. The same use of technology also goes for succession planning and career development as well. I think more strategic organizations are investing in softwares and in processes, and in certain events, if you like, where they're very targeted with their succession planning. I know that when I joined IOM, we were at a stage where we were doing very, very passive recruitment for out leadership positions in organizations, and I said, Let's change this on its head. What I did was to say, Let's define what are the skills and the competencies and the attributes that we need for the leadership of the future in IOM. How are we going to manage our responsibility and our global mandate as the stewards of UN migration globally? We came up with a very different model of what we wanted in terms of leadership for the next five years, and one of the key ingredients was actually assessing the competency of humility. We see that humility as a driver, as a leadership attribute, is one of the key criteria for success, and we weren't assessing that before. These are the key areas where I think technology and more intuitive interventions are making such a difference. Thanks, Alexander. Michael, you actually anticipated my third question focusing on the three pillars of a successful and modern HR management function. In particular, the emerging role of HR business partners, the service centers and the centers of expertise. Focusing on the HR business partners, can you share with us how we got into this framework and which are the implications for the future of international organizations? Sure, and I see the really learning UN organizations adopting more of a business partner model. Now, let me talk about business partners. These are the people that really understand in great depth from, A to Z, the strategic HR elements of human resources management. There's two types of business partners: one are what we call the line function business partner, and the other one is what we call geographic business partners. Now, curiously, in UNFPA, we set up geographic business partners. UNICEF in their old model had line function ones, they had one for wash, some for emergency, some for nutrition, etc. In IOM, the UN migration agency, where I am at the moment, we have several, what we called line business partners. We have one for the United States resettlement program for refugees. We have one for global health. I think that both models are quite good. Now, the value of a business partner is that the person who is the business partner can get an intimate knowledge of everything that's required for that particular line of business or that particular geographic area. In the UNFPA model where we have geographic business partners, each partner was in a region, and so if you're in Southern and Eastern Africa, you knew intimately, who were the performance management issues in your region; you knew the sources of talent from that region; you knew the best universities where you could partner with in that region; you knew the best avenues for recruitment in terms of advertising, etc, in that region; you've got an in-depth understanding of that regional context. Now the value of that is that by being inside the business, if you like, you can give a much better service to either your geographic area or your line management area. This is important because one of the things that defines what a successful business partner is, is that they have the trust of their clients, and that's the key area in building a successful business partner, is that your clients trust you and they trust you to deliver on what you promise that you're going to say. If that's the key message to send across during this MOOC is that to be a successful business partner, you have to build trust, you have to build credibility, and you have to follow through on commitments. Thanks, Alexander. Thank you very much, Michael, for this very interesting definition of the role of the HR business partner function, as well as the lessons learned from the first attempts to institutionalize this role in international organizations. By drawing from your professional experience, is there something that is crucial that we have to keep in mind when looking at modern HR management? Yeah, I think one of the crucial elements is that you have to have some science behind what you do in human resources these days. You can't just do it from an intuitive perspective. I remember when we introduced a business partner model in UNFPA, we started by doing what was called a stakeholder analysis, where we actually mapped every single function that human resources didn't know, over 800 functions that we did, including writing letters for agreement for new representatives to personal actions when somebody got a step increase to providing somebody the extension of the contract, but there were over 800. We actually categorized those as either being strategic or foundational, or localized or globalized. Then once you've done that mapping, you get a very clear sense of what your structure should be as a human resources department. I think that's a really important first step for human resources personnel who are looking to do some sort of transformative event in their organization is to get some science behind it. Actually do some mapping about what you do, what you should be doing that you're not, and what you are doing that you shouldn't be doing because there's a lot of what I call, what's the word I should use for this one? A lot of legacy functions that human resources departments are doing because they've always done it. Sometimes when you come in with a fresh set of eyes and new lens in a leadership role, you say, Why do we do this? Nobody can actually tell you the answer. So you say, Well, why are we doing it at all, then? The same goes for business processes as well. You say, Why do we need a third signature on this? Because this person has to second guess that person. No. I mean, there's always a scope to have science behind the processes that you're doing, but also the structures that you have so that you have a structure that is logical to create a strategic HR function. Thank you, Michael, and also, thank you for having established a network of HR professionals that are serving multilateral organizations, the Career Development Roundtable. In my experience, CDR is a valuable opportunity for HR professionals to exchange best practices, learn from others, and drive change at all levels. Michael, before concluding our discussion, I would be really pleased if you could spend few words to discuss this network. Yeah, thank you, Alexander. The CDR network is an interesting one, and it's worth actually going back into the history of that a little bit. About 16 years ago, I was working for the Department of Peacekeeping Operations and I was given $22,000 to organize career development for 20,000 civilian peacekeeping staff, which is not a lot of money. I thought, let's get creative. I wrote to all field-based UN organizations and said, Who wants to get together and talk about career development, and let's share what we're working on. I remember that first event which was actually held in Geneva in 2004, we had about 20 organizations, about 40 people. One of the outcomes of that, apart from sharing a lot of information that we were working on, was that I said, Let's do this every year. Since then it's just grown and grown and grown. I think the last one we held again in Switzerland, but in St. Gallen last year, we had about 300 human resources professionals from about 120 international organizations from the UN, from the EU, and from the international financial institutions, as well as some academia. It's a terrific forum for that informal exchange of information. I firmly believe, in fact, one of my human resources philosophy is that if you're in the system, you have a responsibility to improve the system. That's my responsibility. I organize this so that people have the opportunity to share, to innovate, and to network, and to really try to build a better human resources function in the UN system. Thanks, Alexander. 2019 and 2020 have been very interesting years, and I'm sure we still have a lot of opportunities ahead to further transform HR and support organizations in adapting to emerging needs. Michael, thank you again, and I really look forward to reconnecting soon. Thank you very much, and a very big thank you to Bocconi for organizing this. Thanks.
