Canadian HR Reporter

Canadian HR RepoRteR January 26, 2015 News 15 Credit: Santiago Cornejo/Shutterstock April 22, 2015 Unthink Erik Wahl Internationally recognized graffiti artist, author and entrepreneur April 22, 2015 Host Misha Glouberman Communication expert, teacher, and author April 23, 2015 Give and Take Adam Grant Award-winning teacher, researcher, and professor at Wharton School Briant, who is based in Toronto. "We need really committed, tal- ented people who understand the business intuitively and also un- derstand the end user really well." Aging talent is on the agenda for many organizations. Mark Edgar, senior vice-president of hu- man resources at RSA Canada in Toronto, said the insurance sector hasn't done a good enough job of attracting people to the industry. "We need to do more to com- pete with other sectors that have a perception of being sexy," he said. "So there's more we can do to bring people into it and then accelerate people through from a career perspective." Retention was on their radar screens, but it hasn't proven to be a pain point, said Edgar. "And where people have left, we've still been able to attract people to the organization," he said, pointing to a recent round of recruiting for C-suite positions where the available talent pool was very deep. In the realm of mortgages, the business model and strategy at MCAP is very strong so manage- ment's attention has turned to how to embed the strategy and grow both talent and operational effectiveness, said Helen Giffen, senior vice-president of HR at the Toronto-based lender. "e initial thinking was 'Let's do a talent management strategy,'" she said. e early work included col- lecting information about people's backgrounds and career interests and developing long-term views of key employees, said Giffen. "When it comes to developing people, the main concerns were having sufficient depth to support technical excellence and sufficient breadth to support leadership and succession," she said. "We decided to start at the top by putting devel- opment plans in place to further develop our key executives." In addition to developing tal- ent, Giffen said it was important to address productivity — "I've got a board that's eager to have some- thing practical happen and show measurable results." On the productivity front, MCAP started with performance management. "at's probably the most chal- lenging of all HR disciplines. Most organizations can't get it quite right. We worked hard to make it easier, more engaging on both sides and more explicit as a driver of productivity." e message sent out from HR was that performance manage- ment and productivity are inex- tricably linked. "Because if you don't get align- ment, if you don't get perfect integration between individual objectives and business strategies, if you've got gaps between what people ought to be doing and what they are doing, if you don't have coaching that is directly driv- ing results, then you get produc- tivity leakage," said Giffen. "at suddenly made a difference. at was the language they understood — they got behind performance management." At Indigo Books & Music, the change in recent years has been dramatic, according to Laura Dunne, senior vice-president of human resources. e Toronto- based company has morphed far beyond its original roots, now bill- ing itself as the "world's first cul- tural department store," she said. And it's far more than just a bricks and mortar operation — it even manufactures its own products in some cases. "Everything about it is dif- ferent," she said. "We needed to bring into the organization whole new capabilities that we didn't have before on the merchant side, but also on the supply chain side. ere are entire functions that we had to create that didn't exist before: Regulatory functions and QA (quality assurance) functions and global sourcing functions." All that has meant tremendous change and growth for the human resources department and for the skill sets of HR professionals. "ere are a lot of great HR people that are great in a single area — great comp people, great learning people and great employ- ee relations people," said Dunne. "But finding people that have more of an organizational view has been quite difficult." It was also a challenge to find people who have change capabili- ties, she said. "Not just theoretical models but actually know how to take an organization from doing what it's always done to doing what it needs to do." Customers have high expecta- tions and expect a seamless expe- rience, whether that's in-store, on a website, a mobile app or using a loyalty program. ey expect services however they want it, whenever they want it — some- thing that is costly and difficult to provide. "You might have people that are great at wireframing and on- line merchandising, but it doesn't mean they know how to bring that into the store so that the customer experience is seamless," she said. "We had a real challenge find- ing that true omni-experience and capability. Canada's pretty nascent in that space and there aren't a whole lot of progressive Canadian retailers." tAleNt < pg. 14 Addressing productivity

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