Canadian HR Reporter

CANADIAN HR REPORTER May 18, 2015 6 NEWS moves for all of these folks, all at the same time," he said. "We've been pretty deliberate over the last year to ensure we have the right people that are going to drive the growth." As part of leadership align- ment, the group came together to get to know each other, find out about each other's lives. at meant having no agenda, no slides — just hanging out, said Cerrone. "Basic stuff: do you have chil- dren, where do they live, what's important to them, what are their hobbies? Really basic stuff because that's how teams form. is is a really kind of primitive thing." en it was about figuring out: Where the heck are we going? So the team spent two days put- ting together a strategy focused on five pillars over three to five years: driving digital growth; off- price; Canada expansion (know- ing Nordstroms is arriving soon); growing top stores; and synergies and efficiencies. Cerrone — who joined HBC in January 2014 — also interviewed about 30 senior leaders, asking about their HR strategy, HR focus and what should be done in the next three to five years. "ere was no strategy, there was a set of objectives," he said, adding that at the time HBC was hunkering down, making do with what it could. "Nobody really had a roadmap." So the team came up with a new strategy: driving a unique culture, building a pipeline of tal- ent and focusing on leadership development. However, the group can't tackle those things without changing the way they ran HR, said Cerrone. "We need better systems, we need better processes, we need to be more analytical, we need to be more efficient. So these are transformations we are going through." HR, like the rest of the compa- ny, had disparate, disconnected systems, making it hard to get in- formation and data, he said. "If you're an HR business part- ner, generalist, supporter of the business, it's just difficult for you to do your job," said Cerrone. "People spend an unbelievable amount of time in HR on manual, non-integrated processes and they should be spending time on the business." Analytics As for analytics, that was less of a weakness and more of a philo- sophical view, he said. "If you begin using data and science and information and ana- lytics to inform your talent deci- sions, you just must make better decisions. So, we started — we've got a long way to go — we said, 'Look, to transform the way we're running HR, if we're going to be the size company we are — you know, 45,000 people, $8 billion, et cetera — we needed to be more analytical and a bit more scientific about the decisions we were mak- ing," said Cerrone. "We started — in some cases quite rigorously, in other cases more just practically — just try- ing to use data and be more ob- jective about some of the talent decisions." ose analytics included min- ing data on store-level perfor- mance. About 90 stores were cho- sen, with about 15,000 data points over about four years, honing in on different dimensions of human capital such as the ideal density of associates, the percentage of full- time employees, tenured and sala- ried employees and mean age. "It's fascinating work," he said. "We're really mining that to see: What are the two or three things that we know about our associ- ates that drive incremental pro- ductivity over and above other associates?" And it shows people aren't necessarily leaving because of compensation. "People aren't leaving because of pay, they're staying for other reasons. We needed to know that. So... we're mining a lot of data," said Cerrone. Another big move by HBC was an employee survey, which had never been done organization- wide. e poll was sent out to 45,000 employees. e response rate? Eighty-nine per cent or 33,000 employees. "at's pretty damn high," said Cerrone, adding store staff were gathered into a room to complete the survey. "e message? People had something to say." In certain areas, such as su- pervision, collaboration, career development, customer focus and communications, the scores were above global retail. "People were optimistic, so there was some real positive energy in the organiza- tion," he said. However, there were retention risks and other issues of concern. e lowest scores were leader- ship and career development, though scores of 75 per cent were still pretty strong, said Cerrone. And they weren't surprising re- sults as there had been changes in leadership. "(For) the career development one, we didn't have it. People didn't know where they were going… we hadn't told them anything." Talent review HR also put together a common talent review template that started by looking at the top 200 people in the organization using a common set of competencies. "e idea there was to calibrate your definitions," he said, as a high-potential in one department might not compare to a high-po- tential in another. "We are trying to build a com- mon view of talent across the organization so as we grow and move people around, we have a consistent lens to say someone is literally good or not, high poten- tial or not, developable or not," said Cerrone. Building massive charts gave a great view of the situation and also highlighted issues, such as why certain people were vice- presidents in one department but not in another, even though they had similar roles. "We had the back and forth and, at the end of day, I think we ended up in a much better spot in terms of having a consistent view of who's a future leader," he said. Culture In integrating the two compa- nies, another big focus has been on culture. at included a two- day off-site meeting with execu- tives for "culture immersion" to define what the new culture is go- ing to be, in terms of values and behaviours. "We're defining the culture and immersing our leaders in what that means for the company and for them, and we're taking our HR processes and saying, 'Let's make the cultural attributes embedded in the HR processes,' whether it's recruiting, onboard- ing, selection, talent reviews, incentives, benefits — you name it," said Cerrone. "It's a multi-year effort and we're about a third of the way into it. "e note cards and laminat- ed mouse pads don't do much. ey're nice… but they don't drive behaviour so we want the group to make some public commitments to each other… and then we're go- ing to get them engaged in leader- ship development programs." Inconsistencies will also be a concern, to ensure they're operat- ing consistently across the board, he said. "If your… systems are different, your performance management systems are different, your ob- jectives are different, your forms are all different, it's hard to have a common culture," said Cerrone. "So whether it's recruitment, performance management, talent reviews, career pathing, leader- ship… rewards, it's all now going to be integrated — we're building this common cultural element with all these practices." Talent review template looks at top 200 employees HBC < pg. 1 People walk into the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) department store in Toronto. Having acquired Saks in late 2013, the historic company is undergoing an overhaul with help from HR innovations. Credit: Mark Blinch (Reuters) "We're taking our HR processes and saying, 'Let's make the cultural attributes embedded in the HR processes,' whether it's recruiting, incentives — you name it."

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