Written By: Mahmoud Mansi
Edited by: Giulia Buttery
Photography Credits: Index Team
INTRODUCTION: The Middle East Largest Government HR Event!
The Federal Authority for Government Human Resources (FAHR) in cooperation with INDEX Conferences & Exhibitions, organized the 8th FAHR International Conference, that was held under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum – Crown Prince of Dubai.
Held under the theme: “Tomorrow’s HR Starts Today”. The 2018 conference took place on the 16th and 17th of April, 2018 at Jumeirah Emirates Towers. The FAHR International Conference was empowered by Oakwood International as a Silver Sponsor. It was also empowered by SHRM, CIPD & Dubai Knowledge Park as Knowledge Partners, whilst the FAHR conference was empowered with Media Partners; my UAE Guide & HR Revolution Middle East.
The conference held a noticed diversity in not only the speakers and the topics, but in addressing the same issues, such as: leadership, artificial intelligence & talent development – where each speaker shared an extremely interesting and perhaps contradicting perspective in some cases to the other speakers. This is when innovation, inspiration & philosophy bloom and create an impact!
SPEAKERS DAY 1: The Middle East Largest Government HR Event!
1- FAHR Director General, Dr. Abdulrahman Al Awar started the conference with a welcome remark. He spoke about the strategic partnerships that FAHR establishes and empowers between different governmental institutes. He added that, “Human capital development is a priority for UAE, and investing in it will reflect on the development of the country.”
Dr. Abdulrahman was also showing the special “care” FAHR has for not only the current development of HC, but anticipating the future of work and preparing people for it. He ended his speech by highlighting that, “talent cannot be replaced by a robot, and only the routine jobs will be terminated.”
2- His Excellency Mohammed Benabdelkader, Morocco, shared his inspiring insights and plan regarding management in the public sector; highlighting the importance of continuously “searching for best practices” in human capital as the field is rapidly evolving. H.E also spoke about how the “routine roles” affect the decision-making process and outcome, as when the decision takes its bureaucratic path for final approvals, it might be too late. H.E ends his talk by adding solutions regarding the importance of developing competencies framework and career paths.
3- Perry Timms Started the speech by smartly stating that HR should be eventually connected to the GDP of a country. Having a background in community work where usually projects are lead in a different way, the knowledge he shared with the audience was also interestingly different. He shared case studies of organizations that run “without” HR departments and without even a manager. In these companies, “everybody does HR and all people look after one another”. Moreover, he ended his speech providing a piece of advice to HR people, “These case-studies are somehow a warning sign for HR people. HR now should either find or create a different purpose, and have a different signature.”
4- Dr. Wilson Wong, “Not only that I look at the drives of change, I also look at the past; I look at the road…”
He spoke about Singapore as a development case study and linked it to UAE.
Dr. Wilson smartly provided examples in his speech from his visit to UAE, one of them was about the Louvre, the two tools were created at the same era, and each had a different perspective whether the whole universe revolved around planet Earth or not.
5- Professor Adrian Furnham, who highlighted in the middle of the speech that he is “very grateful” for having poor parents and how this taught him the value of money. He spoke further on how “your biography shapes you”. It is interesting how he linked that to a testing methodology where DNA could be used in job interviews as a selection method, and how it accurately reveals the results according to job, disregarding how ethical this is he added. He shared various effective and ineffective interviewing and testing methods. Another testing method he shared was the “handwriting analysis” which he argued that it doesn’t work although many others would argue otherwise.
Employers should spend a lot of time and money into measuring variable that might not be needed in a job; professor added that employers should focus more on “measuring intelligence and future prediction”.
As a sample, interview questions can revolve around the following:
– What do they want to do? (to measure their personality)
– How they should do it? (to measure their managerial & leadership skills)
Prof. Adrian also added that interviews “are only good if they are structured”. Moving forward the professor spoke about assessment centers and how intelligence tests have a percentage of discrimination towards either gender, race, age, etc…
As the researcher and thinker that he is, Prof. Adrian does not limit himself to one source of knowledge. He spoke about how “selection” was applied through history. He said that the Holy Quran and The Bible contained many examples. The example he spoke about was about Gideon as a military leader, and how he applied the selection method when his army was marching and they came across a river, the majority threw aside their spears and shields to drink water, and a small group of soldiers were holding spear and shield in the right hand and merely caught up a handful of the water, in case the enemy should suddenly appear. The professor said that this was the “first selection test” that we know about.
Moving forward with the speech, the professor highlighted that he is interested in researching “why leaders fail” rather than knowing the success stories behind leaders. He linked this interesting approach to selection and job interviews once again. Recruiters always search for “what they want”, while the professor suggests to also search for “what are the things you don’t want in the candidate”.
At the end, the Prof. Adrian shared a thought-provoking case study where an experiment was conducted to investigate the degree of biased methods in job interviews, where women were asked to go to interviews wearing a smart perfume, same women go to another interview wearing a bad quality perfume, and lastly going to an interview without wearing any perfume. The interviews where the women were wearing the high quality perfume were accepted, while the same women were likely unaccepted in the other two scenarios.
6- Andrew Bryant started his talk viewing birth from another perspective, on how people are “framed” in the moment of birth where we are suddenly given a name, a nationality, a religion, and which football team to cheer for. He then linked this metaphor to the birth of a “nation” and how this nation could be “framed” as well, and whether this nation should be stuck with this frame or not.
He used a lot of metaphors to deliver his ideas, and they were mostly inspired by “airports”. The first one was about us as “passengers” who want to reach a destination, and for that we have to walk in lines as “sheep”, wait for our turns, take off our shoes, and follow all instructions, and we have to do all that in order to get on the “plane”. He linked this scenario to employees whose main purpose are “paychecks” and how in that case they would be easy to “manage”. “But what if they want something different than a paycheck?” asked Andrew, this is what HR people should be thinking of.
Another metaphor is if an emergency occurred on a plane, first you would put on your oxygen mask and then help others to do the same. “You have to lead yourself in order to be able to lead others, and same goes to the HR.”
Andrew then discussed the triggers of innovation, and then he shared a curious point of view, is that innovation is triggered by “anger”. He took UBER as a case study, he said that UBER “didn’t start by people who are passionate about taxis, but it started by two people who are angry they couldn’t get a taxi!” After a second thought, this actually makes a lot of sense; this is how HR Revolution Middle East started as well, we were angry because things should be done in a different way…
Andrew ended his talk by asking the audience about today’s meaning of leadership, until one of them answered: “Leadership is the act of growing new leaders” where Andrew gave him a copy of his new book as a reward.
7- Tariq Qureishy started his presentation by a thought-provoking picture when was about a person using a microscope with one eye, and a telescope with the other, and he highlighted that this is what we should be doing as professional business people as going through the new era of technology. However, quoting from Tariq, “We focus so much on technology, while what we need to actually do is put humanity in our lives…”
After the introduction, Tariq started sharing many case studies and examples of technological and non-technological transformation in the human race. He started by sharing pictures of New York and Dubai many years back, reflecting the urbanization impact, and then he spoke about future predictions on climate change and how this will impact global unemployment and the percentage of refugees.
He then spoke about the Tricorder – that was first introduced in Star Trek movie as a device that is used for “sensor scanning, data analysis, and recording data” – and that now modern science has developed the “real” version of it that was tested against 16 doctors.
Another example was about scientists finding a way for human beings to live longer and healthier! However, Tariq’s question was about, “What will happen to our current grading & pay structures, and career paths if we will have a retirement age at 90 instead of 60?”
Speaking about future careers, Tariq shared his astonishments with professions like astronomers, and how our corporate world needs to hire people whom with this unlikely education and experience. Tariq elaborates, “Can you imagine a billion galaxies? Astronomers can. You need one aboard!”
8- Dennis O’Donnell started his superb talk by defining the role of HR in the past, which was “head counting”, and then he asked, “Where is the leadership in that?” And from here Dennis “lead” a very interesting presentation where his slides contained different definitions of leadership, whereas his talk positively “criticized” each one of them. It would have been very tricky if someone has only relied on the slides!
Dennis making it simpler, he said “leadership is a bit of care and structure”, explaining through the pyramid that reflects the hierarchy, and calling it a “horrible structure”. Dennis said that this pyramid should be “reversed”, and he explained how, we thought it would be nice if we illustrate what he explained in the following:
Where the CEOs support the line-managers, to support the employees, to support the customers.
Dennis ended his talk by saying that “HR people are the keepers of culture, not only the keepers of administration”.
9- Dr. Michael Burchell spoke about the extensive research that they have made at Great Place to Work, around 100,000,000 surveys from different continents and jobs, investigating what makes people happy with their organizations and jobs. The results revealed that the comfort of employees depends on three main aspects, the relationship between the employee and his/her: manager, work & colleagues.
Michael then spoke about the role of “trust” in sustaining these three relationships, and the role of HR in building a culture of trust, “Do you have policies and practices that sustain trust?”
SPEAKERS DAY 2: The Middle East Largest Government HR Event!
1- Sushant Upadhyay, Korn Ferry, speaking from a strategic perspective, he highlighted that “competition” should not be the only motive that moves organizations towards development, “Even if there is no competition, organizations should keep on developing their services.” Speaking from a human capital perspective Sushant said that each HR director or corporate leader should ask him/herself this questions, “Is everyone in the organization is working towards the same cause?”
Spoke about the future of work, and introduced the “fluid workforce” where a lot of people don’t want to be “permanent employees”, and that HR systems have to evolve to attract short-term workforce, where “work depends on projects”.
Sushant also shared his own interesting perception of leadership, stating that “leadership is about connecting people” and today’s HR director should be the kind that has a “humble style of a leader, as a learner”, with a mission driven towards the “people” of the organization, and part of this mission is to “secure the future jobs of my employees”.
2- Jeremie Brecheisen, Gallup, started his talk by triggering curious questions like, “How long would it take you to know if you did a wrong hire?” and a follow-up question, “How long would it take you to deal with it?”
For the answer to the first question, it takes from three to six months to know if it was a wrong hire, as for the second it takes up to three years in order to deal with it, or fix it. Imagine the amount of resources wasted, Jermie proceeded.
He then spoke about the workforce that is divided into 15% engaged, 67% not engaged, and 18% actively disengaged, and he linked this statistics to recruitment. Jermie argued that selection should be based on talent, because “talent predicts success at work”, and this does not show in the resume.
Most organizations fall into a mistake, is that they try to develop the weaknesses of their employees from their “performance appraisals”, because they aim to “benchmark” and unify the talents in the organization, whereas Jermie’s technique states that one should focus on the strengths and trigger them. Once again, Jermie linked all of this to effective recruitment, “The only chance to add talent to your organization is through hiring. You can transfer knowledge and experience to your employees and not talent.”
Jermie moved forward into speaking about false perception of measuring performance, he provided the example of the “hot hand” basketball player who once had a great shot, where everyone in the team become dependent by always passing him/her the ball, whereas this hot handed player might be “missing the next ten shots”. This too happens as work, in sales as an example, Jermie explains.
He also emphasized his point of view by stating that promoting an employee to a managerial position shouldn’t be a “reward”, “it is a responsibility that one should have the talent for”.
3- Hussain Shaikh, started his talk by sharing that AI is “not going to change the role of HR” but it will help HR “optimize financial and business performance”. He spoke about the human error and people being biased, and how AI will be more efficient, and will help leaders become “more strategic” and “less operative”.
Hussain spoke further about the impact of AI on “recruitment”, quoting from him, “Jobs will be searching for candidates and not the other way around, based on data available on social media and other sources…” He then finalized his talk by providing a very smart piece of advice to HR people, “HR needs to get ahead of AI and put policies and regulations, HR needs to adopt AI same as IT needs to adopt it.”
4- Stephen Anderson PwC, “If I would have asked you three years ago where was the Arab world going, would you have predicted where we are today?” That’s how Stephen started his presentation. He then spoke about how the world is moving towards being democratic, capitalistic and global today, and then asked, “How can AI impact the GDP?”
– AI will increase productivity, quality, efficiency, and reduce time and cost.
– AI will introduce new services that will change the market demand.
He provided examples of industries that will be strongly impacted by AI, like healthcare, automotive and financial. And that AI will add “14% to global GDP, 15.7 trillion dollars by 2030”.
5- Kelaitham Al Shamsi, Director of the Department of Strategic and Future of FAHR, comprehensively shared the objectives of FAHR towards developing the government entities, the community and the people, emphasizing how much FAHR’s strategy is bounded to investing in the human capital development for building a better future.
6- Joe Chalouhi of GE, spoke about the particular focus and direction they had taken at GE and how they had broken down and categorized the working environment into the following areas Culture, Workspace, Purpose, Development, People Leaders, Digital. This framework is designed to enhance the “Employee Experience” and is helping to create the important “Moments that Matter” for the workforce. These ‘moments’ range from celebrating life events to having meaningful conversations with managers and team that are creating learning and increasing productivity. Data analytics plays a big part in developing the talent and capability gaps too. GE have also taken the steps to remove the traditional annual performance ratings in favor of a system of continuous feedback.
7- Abdalla Saleh, enoc, shared a graph which included different generations, to show how both the HR and the employee is transformed from one generation to the other. In his presentation, he referred to generation Z as generation “C” stating that they can be a confused generation according to the very rapidly changing environment and decisions. Abdalla then shared a possible “threat” that is coming towards HR people by stating that IT is already taking over some of the functions of HR through technology, and that maybe in the future the IT will be taking full charge!
Speaking about the “future” working environment, Abdalla suggests that the market will demand more electrical engineers rather than mechanical engineers for example. He strongly believe that there should be a “manpower plan” to synchronize between education and the market demand, “Who is managing the manpower behind?”
8- Dr. Rabei Wazzeh, drew a futuristic scenario that with a sudden increase of AI, jobs will decrease, therefore incomes will decrease, and this will lead to the decrease of sales and factories will shut down. He highlighted that HR impacts the “employees” of the organization, and these employees are active “people” who interact with the environment and have an impact on society.
He then linked this cycle to getting prepared for the future talents through learning, “We talk about how learning is important, but we don’t talk about how learning is difficult.” From here Dr. Rabei spoke about the learning methods that have an impact, “If the training program is not tailored, it will have no reflection and there will be no learning.”
Dr. Rabei provided a very realistic example, if you are a smoker and you have decided to quit, yet your environment is surrounded by smokers and they are not used to the “new you”, there is a percentage you will become a smoker again. He linked this example to an enthusiastic employee who had just attained a training and returns back to the organization, willing to make positive changes and reflect what he/she have learnt in the course. It is natural to be “rejected” at first.
9- Khaled Fathi started by sharing several definitions for employee engagement, from an academic perspective and from a corporate perspective, and then he set a comparison between both. He then shared his own definition, “the psychological connection and professional integration between an employee and their role, their team, their organization and its wider objectives and values. It is their perception of, and degree of satisfaction with their individual purpose, their role, their work environment and their organization as a whole.”
Speaking about the impact of having a strongly engaged work community, Khaled provided several examples of its return on investment. One of the examples was about how engaged employees become “brand ambassadors” and they provide a positive word of mouth.
