Changing gears
These major strategy changes have meant that within two years, Pacnet jumped from being a traditional telecom bandwidth company to one that thrives on providing innovative cloud computing and managed services.
That high performance culture became the backbone of Pacnet’s HR plan to sustain the company’s journey on the road towards innovation. This consisted of a list of 10 carefully selected initiatives that were reviewed and agreed upon by the entire C-Level team.
One such initiative has been to improve leadership skills and behaviours. “We implemented leadership development programmes in the first half of this year to ensure leaders not only manage and lead better, but also get help to improve themselves as individuals and perform better,” Abbas explains.
To achieve more clarity on how employees’ roles and objectives connect to the big picture, HR helped the senior management team refresh and re-launch the company’s vision and strategy, making it more focused and easier to understand.
A high performance organisation also requires a more collaborative environment. The IT team took the lead in this space to roll out social tools such as Lync and Yammer. These better facilitate collaboration amongst staff and support a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy across the company, Abbas says.
“Because we’re a mid-sized company, it was not possible to roll out all these changes in a single year,” says Abbas. “We’ve been working on them in a quarterly manner.”
Q1 2014
• New vision and company strategy introduced
• Implementation of leadership programme that included 360-degree feedback, executive coaching and group workshops on personal leadership styles
Q2 2014
• More “pay for performance” differentiation in annual bonus payments
• Leadership development programme continued
Q3 2014
• Career management programme and new compensation and benefits policies rolled out
• Interview forms, collateral and workshops initiated
• Started a new peer-to-peer recognition programme that empowers all employees to recognise the right core values in behaviours of their colleagues
Q4 2014
• In the process of reviewing KPIs, resourcing and organisation structure for 2015
• Implementing SuccessFactors HR Management System (HRMS) and Talent Management suite to replace legacy systems by year-end
• Preparing employee and manager training to be rolled out in 2015
Looking ahead, the results have pointed to a successful business and HR transformation thus far. On the business front, profitability, productivity and innovation have all improved significantly. Pacnet has also seen significant success in new business areas such as data centres and software defined networking.
On the HR front, Pacnet made good measurable progress in terms of hiring, recognising and retaining talent. HR also revamped compensation and benefits policies and engagement practices, and is now looking to do a massive upgrade of its systems by the end of 2014.
“We have moved from a traditional HR function to a more mature and innovative one, emphasising the use of feedback, technology and HR metrics to drive performance,” Abbas concludes.