People focus returns

New focus: Russell Blunsdon will oversee the number of Halcrow staff grow from 220 to 500

United Kingdom engineering group Halcrow has big plans for its Australian business, marking it for rapid expansion in the next two years as the local economy emerges from the global financial crisis and growth returns to the business agenda.

With local staff numbers expected to more than double from 220 to 500 by 2012, human resources manager Russell Blunsdon’s focus has changed dramatically.

“Last year there was significant discussion about our head count [in Australia]. The attitude of the leadership team was that we would do whatever it took not to lose staff,” Blunsdon says.

Redundancies during the financial crisis were kept to a minimum by reducing hours, creating more part-time jobs and moving staff between the global divisions of the company.

Today the challenge is to attract skilled people for its water, energy and transportation practices in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.

“My attention now is on what I need to do to drive our service delivery, and that includes reassessing our HR systems and processes. In a tight labour market I have to be innovative about getting the best talent in the most effective way and I need to understand what makes our employees want to stay with us.”

That innovation includes using social media, including Twitter, as a recruitment tool, an idea Blunsdon picked up from one of his Halcrow counterparts in the United States.

“I would never have thought you would get the talent you do using social media, but it really is a powerful tool.”

Blunsdon says strategies for attracting and retaining skilled staff after the global financial crisis are not so different from those employed beforehand: an attractive culture, internal communications programs and opportunities for personal and professional development.

The biggest priority to emerge from the downturn is ensuring that Halcrow has the leadership talent to guide the company’s expansion plans in Australia and the immediate region.

“Good managers are the most powerful tool in a business in terms of achieving outcomes. They are also a key retention tool and one of my key priorities is how to nurture and foster leadership talent within the business,” he says.

Halcrow has expanded its coaching and mentoring programs. The firm already engages external coaches for its rising stars but it will make the programs available to a wider group of employees by training senior and executive staff to take on mentoring and coaching roles. The company is also establishing an internal learning and development centre, which will place greater emphasis on management and leadership programs designed and delivered by in-house trainers.

The centre, expected to be in place this year, will be based on learning and development centres operating in the UK, the US and India. Trainers and facilitators from the UK will plan courses and train senior Halcrow Australia staff to take on training, mentoring and coaching roles.

Blunsdon says the aim of this structured approach is to develop management and leadership talent by aligning training with individuals’ career plans, as well as the wider strategic objectives of the business.

“We’ve got some great talent at Halcrow and this is a way of making sure we keep it. It’s also a way of ensuring that the leadership and management skills we develop have consistency across the global group.”

Other initiatives introduced by Halcrow Australia in the past 12 months include regular roadshows, which enable staff to be briefed by senior management – including managing director Bill Austin and his business group heads – on Halcrow’s performance and business plans. Employees are encouraged to quiz management and contribute their own ideas and feedback.

Blunsdon has also introduced a series of employee workshops “to encourage knowledge-sharing … and brainstorming of new ideas”. The workshops will also discuss the findings of client and employee surveys.

The managing director of human resources consultant Hewitt Associates , Tim Powell , says companies that kept their focus on their employees during the crisis are in the best position to benefit from a growing economy.

“Despite the apprehension, financial constraints and uncertainty of 2009 [the best employers] didn’t cut investment in developing people or focus only on the market,” he says. “[They] understand that energy and time spent on their people is energy and time spent on their performance.”

Powell believes that HR “increased its relevance to business outcomes and business strategy” during the downturn, but agrees that some companies “misused” employee engagement strategies prior to the global meltdown. “There were certainly cases where engagement programs became decoupled from overall business performance,” he says.

The managing director of listed Brisbane information technology services company Data #3 , John Grant , says his industry is known for high staff turnover as in-demand IT professionals chase higher salaries and the opportunity to work with the latest technology.

“The GFC put a lid on that for a time,” Grant says. Although this provided some welcome stability for IT employers, he adds that the emphasis on positive HR strategies never diminished at Data #3, which employs 500 people.

“We’re a people business, we rely on our people, so it [HR] has to be an ongoing commitment.”

Like many business leaders who are assessing the post-GFC economy, Grant is sceptical about the “recovery”.

“I’m not convinced that the GFC is over at all,” he says, although he agrees that IT employees are back to their transient ways as companies unfreeze their recruitment and IT budgets.

Grant believes that maintaining Data #3’s investment in its people during the downturn has placed it in a stronger position than those competitors who pressed the panic button. Data #3 had a no-retrenchment policy during the downturn – the only exception was a scaling back of its recruitment business in Sydney in 2008. It also maintained its professional development programs and so far this year has increased spending by 16 per cent compared with this time last year. The company introduced its online school of excellence five years ago and a range of leadership development programs since.

“These are programs that you run to keep people career-focused within the business. They provide an opportunity for people to improve their professional and career capabilities,” Grant says.

Irrespective of the strength of the recovery, Grant says the time is right for the company to step up its investment in leadership development.

This year the company has chosen 86 “current and emerging leaders” to undertake its leadership development program. The internally developed program can operate as a standalone program or can be used as a link to certificate and diploma courses in management and leadership at Sunshine Coast TAFE.

“From an HR perspective it’s business as usual for us, but it’s also an opportunity to do it better and more of it. It’s not only an opportunity, it’s an imperative because we’re nothing without our people.”

BRW

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