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For those who still conceive IBM to be a hardware conglomerate,

Pallavi Srivastava, Country HR Director, IBM Singapore, is keen to set the record straight.

“We’re no longer about hardware, and this (change) was many years ago. We’re no longer about services either; we’re actually about cloud and cognitive solutions,” she says.

“It’s a mindset change that needs to happen in clients, and in how the market perceives us.”

Ann Shen, HR Director, IBM Southeast Asia, acknowledges that the organisation finds it a challenge to promote the new transformation.

“This is because people’s perception of us is that we’re a hardware company. However, we’ve actually already transformed,” Shen explains.

Driven by CEO Ginni Rometty, Shen says the transformation has led IBM into a new phase as an industry-focused cognitive solutions and cloud-platform company.

“HR has to align with these business strategies,” Shen says.

Crunching data to predict trendsOne of the first aspects of IBM’s transformation is that the organisation is now placing a significant emphasis on analytics.

Shen says this is reflected in the way IBM’s HR team utilises its workforce data to tell stories, to predict business trends, and to help business leaders drive higher levels of employee engagement. These objectives are then designed to eventually drive improved business results.

Having significantly altered its business offerings in recent years, IBM is now driving an agile culture where employees are firmly in control of their own careers. HRM Asia speaks with the heads of HR for Singapore and Southeast Asia on how their teams are driving business outcomes

Total number of employees at IBM (Global): Around 375,000 Key HR Focus Areas:– Skills transformation across all levels– Employee engagement, employee experience, and building an agile culture – Early professional (graduate) hiring, development and retention– Building HR capabilities for high-value analytics and strategic HR decision-making– Empowering managers to support employees’ career development

AT A GLANCE

Sham Majidsham@hrmasia.com.sg

a self-directed pathway

Srivastava says the first step is for her team to first define the concept of analytics.

“When we look at the trends in the market, there are lots of HR management systems (HRMS) that already claim to provide some automated analytics,” she says.

“However, analytics is not so much about tools; it’s the ability of HR professionals to interpret data and to predict a business trend out of that.”

Srivastava next assigns each member of her team to lead an analytics project for the entire Southeast-Asia region.

“We have not siloed them to do it just for their unit,” she says.

“If you really go through the spectrum of what analytics means, it starts with something very basic like

PLOTTING

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As well as the principle of self-direction, agility within IBM is also about the need to constantly test, revise, and update a programme.

“You don’t have to be perfect the first time; you should start off and keep improving,” Srivastava says.

“Small teams should come together and launch something. That’s what agility means.”

Celebrating generationsSrivastava notes that while IBM marches on with its blueprint on becoming agile, the organisation has a diverse workforce with each generation represented, including a sizeable proportion of millennials, interspersed with many generations of employees.

The company is focusing on emotional environment and gauging how employees in different demographics feel.

“Our programmes, tools and policies are all catered towards understanding what the employee experience is like,” Srivastrava says. “Employees are also our customers in a way and we are very conscious of that.”

Building synergies While Srivastava says IBM has a significant number of millennial employees within its ranks, Shen acknowledges that attracting this group to work for the organisation is one of her team’s key HR challenges.

In response, IBM has created the Early Professional Seller (EPS) programme.

“Normally, sales managers prefer experienced sellers and not new graduates from universities,” Shen says. “This has been a problem for many years. It has been really hard to get buy-in from our sales managers to hire new (graduate) professionals,” Shen elaborates.

Having commenced the EPS programme during the first quarter

of last year, Shen says IBM now has a dedicated programme manager as well as two hub managers in Singapore and Malaysia to build it up over the next six months.

“We need to make sure employees are well-educated and enabled before we deploy them to the business unit. The good thing is that we’ve already started seeing the benefits after we finished our first batch of EPS candidates in June,” she states.

Shen says one of the EPS candidates helped to achieve the company’s first blockchain (a new cloud-based technology) deal in Singapore.

Business consultants are another important group of staff for IBM’s new business focus, and the organisation has a dedicated development programme for them, Consulting By Degrees (CBD).

“The employees go through the entire value chain of a consulting engagement, from proposal building, to designing the solution, delivering it, and then measuring the end satisfaction of the user,” she says. “It’s a rotational programme over two years and they go through all the experiences.”

Srivastava stresses that both of these graduate talent programmes serve a crucial purpose for IBM.

“If you compare EPS and CBD candidates, the latter are the ones who design the solution for a client, while the former will be the ones who help sell or get the deals from the market,” she says.

“In the future, both groups will have to work very closely together. Hence, this is a group of graduate talent that we are building synergies with, and building industry expertise.”

Srivastava concedes that industry convergence means IBM and its clients don’t yet know where each of their future competition will come from.

“It’s a little difficult to also then get the right kind of skills that will address some of those trends in the market, especially leadership skills,” she explains.

“We are trying to build a focus on our leaders so they are able to scale up to these changes in the market. The challenge is really the fast pace, along with industry convergence, which is very new.”

Shen says IBM has had to revitalise and refresh its talent pool in the wake of the transformation.

“This is why we are very focused on our ‘ Build, Borrow, Buy’ framework. ‘Build’ refers to developing up talent internally. “Borrow refers to cross-country movement within the organisation while ‘buy’ means hiring externally,” she says.

Shen explains that previously, IBM was almost solely focused on the “building” aspect.

“This is why everybody thinks that IBM is a good place that has many opportunities, promotions and rotations. But because of our transformation, we’re also very focused on the buying aspect right now,” she reveals.

“It’s very important, not just for the CBD or EPS programmes, but also for senior executive positions.”

Shen says IBM has maintained a strong reputation in talent markets across Southeast-Asia.

“People want to join us; even former IBM employees who have been away for 10 or 20 years would still like to come back to work for us,” she says.

Career development enablersSrivastava is firm in her belief that employees themselves are responsible for their own careers.

“HR is not the owner of anybody’s career development,” she explains.

“We are not there to physically give them their career roadmap. It is

entirely the employees’ responsibility to drive their own careers. If they don’t do that, they are going to find over a period of time that they are falling behind and that’s something they and their managers will have to talk through.”

Rather, Srivastava says the company’s HR team supports people managers who go on to support employees.

“Our managers are extremely important links between HR and employees. They are the ones giving employees work, and they are called ‘people managers’ because they have a team and they have to manage them,” she states.

“They are responsible and accountable to ensure their career roadmap is aligned to what they want to do and we facilitate and enable that through our HR programmes.”

Shen concurs with Srivastava, describing HR in IBM as “enablers”.

“IBM’s principle is clear,” she says. “Employees need to own their career development.”

Training to build a pipeline IBM’s Leadership Development framework comprises of training programmes at different levels.

benchmarking, and you then go into aspects like forecasting, diagnostics and predictive analytics.

“We are really moving from benchmarking to predictive analytics. In order to do that, we have to link a lot of metrics.”

Srivastava says most HR professionals are comfortable with HR metrics and will measure headcounts, attrition, employee satisfaction, and hiring levels.

However, she says the ability to link all of this data into a holistic picture is the key to the people analytics challenge.

“You have to be able to interpret and understand data. You can then come up with a picture for the business,” says Srivastava.

Becoming digitally-attuned is another key element of IBM’s transformation, Shen shares.

“Every company and every industry is also moving digitally. For example, banking and logistics are really focused on going digital. We are also thinking about this in HR and about how to do it in very simple and social ways,” she explains.

One initiative has been the launch of Connections in IBM, an online business social network platform that allows the organisation to gather feedback from all employees.

Self-directed teamsThe IBM evolution is not just about tangible developments in the cloud sphere.

“Now that we’re a new IBM, we’re really focused on encouraging an agile culture,” says Shen.

But what exactly does it mean to be “agile” in IBM?

Shen says it is about fostering self-directed teams within the company.

“You can never say that you will not get support from anyone. Everybody needs to take ownership, starting from the small things,” she elaborates.

“Our programmes, tools and policies are all catered towards understanding what the employee experience is like”

Pallavi Srivastava, Country HR Director, IBM Singapore

For example, the EPS and CBD candidates are exposed to a set of learning platforms, including e-learning as well as classroom sessions.

Srivastava says for IBM’s top female talents can take advantage of a global flagship programme called Building Relationships and Influence.

“There’s also a management development programme for newly-appointed People Managers,” Srivastava says.

“There are more than 50 very popular training programmes.”

“The focus is really on building a pipeline for leadership. All the talent programmes are supposed to build the pipeline for certain leadership positions.”

All-rounded engagementThe IBM club is a key avenue of employee engagement within the company in Singapore.

Srivastava says this is an internal forum that is separate from the management structure and any formal feedback tools.

“There are sports clubs, music clubs, toastmasters, and discounts to events that we hold,” she says. “There are bring-your-kids-to-work

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programmes, and annual gatherings. We also have a ‘We Jog’ club which organises fun runs around the Marina Bay area.

“These are organised by IBM employees.”

“We also try to engage employees by making sure that they have a fruitful and meaningful career with us. I think that’s the most important reason why IBM employees stay with us.”

Tackling retention with analyticsIBM’s rewards and recognition strategies are tied to the “1-3-9” concept that company CEO Rometty unveiled when she assumed her role in 2012.

“1” refers to IBM’s purpose, which is to be “essential”, while “3” refers to the company’s three values: dedication to client success, innovation that matters to the world, and the trust and responsibility of the organisation’s relationships.

“Our CEO wanted to make it more personal to employees. She set out nine practices, and all our reward and recognition strategies are aligned with recognising who has been demonstrating those nine practices.”

“If you go to any of our websites which talk about recognition, it will ask you to choose what practice the person displayed.”

Analytics once again comes into

play when it comes to employee retention.

Shen says IBM launched a global proactive retention programme about four years ago which analyses all of its attrition data.

“For the previous three years, we find out how many employees left, what was their job family, and what was their banding, job content, performance and salary range,” she says.

“We analyse all of these data points together to find out what has been the common propensity to leave, and we then use this to see who may fit (the same pattern) among existing IBM employees. We then provide them with proactive retention.

“After undertaking these steps, our attrition rate decreased by 25%.”

A similar Southeast Asian retention programme has also now seen IBM’s regional attrition rate halved since last year.

Srivastava stresses that throughout IBM’s transformation and into the future, IBM’s HR approach has had to be highly strategic.

“We are transforming at such a fast level that if we are constantly focusing on transactional activities, then we’ll never be able to support our business.

“That’s the core of how we are transforming HR,” she adds.

BOON KIAT TANCountry Recruitment

Leader IBM Singapore

HYE JUNG JANGHR Talent Program

Manager, IBM Southeast Asia

PHYLLIS SETOKExecutive Talent

Management Partner, IBM Southeast Asia

PALLAVI SRIVASTAVA

Country HR Director, IBM Singapore

ANN SHENHR Director, IBM Southeast Asia

STEFANIE WONGStrategic HR Partner, IBM Southeast Asia

KUNIYA TSUBOTAVice President, HR,

IBM Asia Pacific

ANNA LEONGSales Talent Center

Manager, IBM Southeast Asia

WHO’S WHO IN HR“Now that we’re a new IBM, we’re really focused on encouraging an agile culture”

Ann Shen, HR Director, IBM Southeast Asia

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