Written By: Mahmoud Mansi
Over 100 HR Professionals from different fields attended the HR Leaders Conference & Expo. There were HR managers from schools, universities, governmental organizations, real estate, banks, factories, NGOs, communication, clothing, medical, oil industry…etc.
“informa” – an organization that works on organizing several annual conferences mainly in Dubai – has collaborate with JOBMASTER Human Capital Solution in Egypt in order to launch the HR Leaders event in Egypt.
The event was empowered by The HR Observer, and media sponsors were Jobzella, bayt, The Employer Magazine, El Borsa, Daily News Egypt, HR Revolution Middle-East Magazine & AHRA.
The organizers have carefully chosen a very unique person to lead the conference, this person was Sandrine Bardot – an international HR consultant, trainer, speaker and a blogger with over 200 published articles.
The first speech was entitled: Translating the Business Plan (The Bottom Line) into the People Plan (The Enabler), and it was led by the Vice President Human Resources Middle East & North Africa, DHL – Henry Fares.
The speaker tackled his ideas through a very innovative approach. He used “ants” and their behavior as a case-study, and linked it to his points.
Henry explained further the “philosophy of ants” and how it is related to organization team work. He said that you should start by having a clear team of which its members agree on the same objectives with achievable standards. Then you should allocate your adequate resources and link them all together with action plans. This is simply the work process that ants follow.
Since some ants have wings, Henry Fares ended his speech by narrating a personal story and a piece of advice that was given to him, “Respect & results are the left and right wings that will make you fly.”
After the first speech there was an “HR Leaders Panel” but this time it was about “Creating the Best Place to Work in your Industry”. The panel consisted of an interesting blend of members: Rania Salah, Mai Abouzahra, Maisa Galal and Nibal El Tantawy. The panel discussed how employees are considered as the customers of HR, and they spoke about the different stages of performance appraisal in Egypt, and some organizations now create their own appraisals on a mobile application because it is more user friendly than computers. The panel also spoke about employee motivation and how employees can be segmented according to their motives. Rania gave examples that sometimes in Vodafone they provide tickets for movies, or allowing parents to bring kids to their work.
The second speech was led by Joe Chalouhi, Senior HR Director Middle East, North Africa, Turkey & Pakistan GE Energy who talked about “Developing Competency Based Human Resources Infrastructure”. He started his speech by pointing out a question: “How do we do HR around the world?” He then explained the different transformations of human resources among different eras. Joe highlighted the importance of HR Business Partners in organizations, and how case-studies proved that this business model is much more effective to the HR and to the employee. He took GE as a major case-study and shared its “partnership model” with the attendees. Joe Chalouhi explained that “It’s normal to feel uncomfortable regarding this model at the beginning” same as any new approach one tries to implement. He summarized this approach in five words: “The new face of HR”.
The third speech would interest a lot of feminists as well, not only business and HR professionals. Maisa Galal – HR Director Egypt and North Africa General Motors discussed “Making the Business Case for Employee Engagement” and the entire scope of her speech was about working women and how General Motors motivates, supports and benefits from their female employees. At first Maisa spoke about the challenges that faced General Motors before and after the revolution.
Nermine Fawzy, Ex-Regional Human Resources & Administration Director – Middle East & Africa Cargill discussed with our attendees: “Maximising the Egyptian ‘Millennials’ Opportunity”.
Nermine focused entirely her talk on the different generations and how can the business world get prepared to the new generation. She stated that millennials travel 7 times more than generation X. They are super ambitious. As an example Nermine spoke about students in schools nowadays how they are in need of continuous recognition, and how a young student can have a wide collection of certificates and awards already. She spoke about how HR people can be ready for attracting the millennials and retaining them. Nermine’s suggestion was to simply “customize solutions for them”.
The delegates were on a lunch break where they socialized and were exposed to new debates on each table inspired by the speakers.
George Sedky, Vice President HR Ghabbour Auto and Mai Abouzahra, Corporate HR Director, Samcrete in a dual presentation talking about: “Understanding the Key Role of Succession Planning in Employee Retention”.
Following the concept of ladies first, Mai started the presentation by talking about “successful succession planning” and about how organizations misunderstand this statement. As Mai clearly stated, “Companies spend money on training programs for their employees to have them certified, while they forget about the job rotations, coaching the even providing feedbacks.”
On the other hand, George spoke about succession planning from another point of view. He said, “Know who are the key people in your organization, then ask yourself, what would happen if they disappear?” He then explained, what if HR has a very good retention plan yet these key persons disappeared, is there a backup plan?
Sushma Ceasar – Senior Manager, Corporate Learning & Development, Emaar Hospitality Group talked about: “Learning at the Speed of Creative Business Solutions”.
Sushma’s charisma was very dominant in her speech as it appeared on the faces of the delegates. She compared between work in the past and the present, and the different training methods that either lead to failure or success. She shared a study that shows how people learn: 70% experience, 20% informal learning or coaching and 10% in class. The mistake that organizations fall into is that they only focus their efforts and budget on the 10%, Sushma stated. Therefore she spoke more about learning by doing, and how to make an IDP “Individual Development Plan”. She also encouraged the idea of making a “workshops that talks about a skill that you developed in the previous year”. These continuous workshops will secure the knowledge of the employees.
The last speech was led by Perihan El Gohary, Head of Learning and Development QNB Al Ahli. Usually banks are stereotyped that it is a noncreative work environment and so on. Perihan’s inspiring speech proved otherwise. She discussed: “Talent Management – From A to Z”.
One of her interesting sayings were, “Leadership does not develop in a closed room.” Empowering the idea of learning Perihan also spoke about the role of HR into developing the CEO. She spoke about “the future CEO” as people always talk about the future of HR and forget about the rest of the shareholders and decision makers. She also spoke about the CEOs that only care about results and numbers, adding her last remark, “Talent & Routine don’t Mix.”
Hassan Ragab Ismail one of the HR Leaders Delegates – Head of HRIS Department in The Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport & an MBA HR Lecturer / Member at AHRA / Rotaract Alexandria Cosmopolitan, shared his view about the conference that he found “a huge diversity of managerial backgrounds from local and international organizations passionate to share their own thoughts and experiences with the whole participants.” Further more Hassan explained, “I was really inspired by the session held by the local water company about her experience of implementing a performance management system rather than the traditional performance appraisal form. Also as for my IT background I was very interested with the virtual reality implementations for training programs that was presented by KLM.”