Come and hear from Old Mutual’s human capital director in this Friday’s webinar.
On 20 November, Old Mutual’s human capital director, Celiwe Ross, will be the guest speaker in a webinar about how the current climate has affected the war for talent, and how data is the arsenal needed to fight effectively. Celiwe strongly believes that human capital has to be at the epicentre of everything organisations are doing in the data and analytics space.
Hosted in partnership with Workday, the webinar will shed light on how the days of HR being viewed merely as a support function are long gone. Celiwe will be joined by Workday country leader Zuko Mdwaba and will discuss how the changes in work, the workforce and the workplace have made it important for organisations to strike a new social contract with their employees in order for them to thrive in this new normal.
Celiwe says the need for a change in approach, with data and people at the centre, is needed now more than ever before. CHROs and HR directors have been hurled into the spotlight during the current Covid-19 pandemic, with excos and boards relying on their input to make difficult people decisions. This gives HR leaders and HR teams an incredible opportunity and responsibility to make a difference.
Time to step up
Celiwe says: “I count myself fortunate to be part of an organisation where my strategic insights as the guardian of the people agenda are valued. But we are way beyond the ‘seat-at-the-table discussion’ now. The way we respond to change, in terms of the way we recruit, onboard, reward, train and retain our people will go a long way towards determining the success, stagnation or failure of our organisations. This is particularly important at a time when we find ourselves together, apart.”
While data is useful for evaluating whether decisions were justified by looking at their impact on performance in various areas, Celiwe believes organisations have to think about finding ways to make data more predictive in order to allow for more proactive rather than reactive decision making, especially when it comes to people matters.
Be forward-looking
Before she was appointed to her role, Celiwe spent a year working with the CEO as the chief of staff, and what she saw was that some decision making in the people space was still predominantly driven by history. And that is a problem that many organisations face – even those that are innovative and data-centric. Organisations have a lot of data, performance data, healthcare data, salary data and so forth, but Celiwe questions how effective that data is as an enabler of effective decision-making.
“A lot of what you look at in dashboards, particularly from a human capital perspective, is looking back instead of looking forward,” says Celiwe. “We talk about absenteeism, which is backwards-looking because nobody is absent tomorrow. We talk about departures and new hires; those are things that have happened in the past. Our inability to look at what is coming or what is potentially coming is something that we need our focus to be when it comes to people data and analytics.”
This Friday, Celiwe will share ideas around the Human Capital interventions Old Mutual has adopted in winning the war for talent in the midst of Covid-19, while also reflecting on Old Mutual’s choice to use Workday to power its people processes, now and into the future
