Walking into Pacnet’s new facility in Singapore, a beautiful office which also houses a state-of-the-art Customer Operations Centre and arguably the best data centre in Singapore today, it is difficult to imagine that just two years ago the company was going through difficult times. Those challenges led to significant change in the top leadership and a decision to exit from the consumer sector – then a core part of the business – in favour of a focus on higher-value data centre and managed services.
Pacnet’s exit from one business unit and entry into another caused a shake-up within the entire organisation, from junior staff to top leadership. Many people left and many more needed to be hired to facilitate the change and grow the future of the company.
“As the business transformed, HR had to do the same to keep up,” says Syed Ali Abbas, Chief HR Officer, Pacnet. He was brought in by the new CEO at the start of the transformation period to drive the change.
“The HR function at Pacnet had solid foundations in 2012 – a good team and a range of useful practices,” says Abbas. “However, it was still a little traditional and needed to change in line with where the business was going.”
“The specific mandate I was given was to place increased HR focus in areas like talent management, alignment with the business, and supporting organisational change,” he adds.