HRD chats to a leading HR professional about her approach to grooming leaders and maintaining a positive company culture
HRD talks to Fiona Crawford, general manager, human resources, InfoTrack, about leadership development, keeping up in the rapidly changing tech space and staying ahead of the game in the tech space.
What is your firm doing to groom great leaders? Do you have specific programs in place?
We have a strong focus on learning and development for both hard and soft skills. We support our employees in courses to upskill in their job areas and we also help with more general personal and career development. I’ve been running behavioural profiling seminars called INteract for everyone across the organisation to help our employees better understand themselves and their peers.
Each employee now has their own personalised profiled that helps them better understand their own working style and that of their peers– their strengths, challenges and how they interact with each other.
We have a structured mentoring program that pairs future leaders with management and has measurable outcomes. We don’t focus solely on experience but potential and we’re happy to give our employees opportunities to expand their skills set and grow.
In FY17 we had 54 internal transfers including promotions and lateral shifts. I check in regularly with all managers to discuss top and bottom performers and our plans for all of them.
InfoTrack has grown quite rapidly. How do you maintain the culture and what made it unique to start with amidst such growth – does growth need to be a negative thing?
InfoTrack has always had a unique culture and that started with our Chairman, Stephen Wood. Steve has always understood that a strong culture is the key to success – it’s what keep employees engaged, motivated and determined to succeed. We had a unique employee base to begin with – it’s highly diverse in age, gender and backgrounds.
When John (the CEO) and I came into InfoTrack, we were used to ‘fixing problems’ and ‘putting out bushfires’ but there wasn’t anything broken at InfoTrack! So, we knew that protecting that culture and keeping that ‘start-up’ feel as the company grew would be one of our main challenges.
Growth should be seen as a positive; if you have a strong culture and keep your employees engaged you won’t have anything to worry about. I see myself as the custodian of our culture, not the manager of it.
It’s our employees that manage the culture and they need to be engaged. That’s why our recruiting process is so rigorous, because we are screening for individuals who have the passion that we look for, who will put effort over obligation and not just clock in the hours. Your culture will never stay the same forever, but if you’re adding the right people to the mix it will continue to evolve.
What’s your top piece of advice for people just starting out their career in HR?
Understand how to show your value so you can get a seat at the table and break past the stereotype of HR being paper-pushers and handbrakes – we are business drivers. Integrate yourself with other departments, understand their inner workings and figure out how you can remove the noise and allow them to better do their jobs.
Use data to your support your work, hard figures will get you the furthest. Most importantly, be genuine, care about people and be prepared to walk the talk – if you’re not, then HR isn’t for you.
The tech space is rapidly changing and new entrants are acting as disruptors. How does your company stay ahead of the game – can you provide a specific example of disruption or change?
All our development is done in-house by our team of 60+ developers. Our dev team is constantly growing and we provide them with the latest tech so that they're always challenged, learning, and evolving. We allow them to work on projects from inception to launch to review; they talk to our clients and integrate with other departments so that they have a real sense of the impact of their projects.
They work fast, taking into account client feedback and releasing new features each day. Our biggest disruptive technology over the past year has been our award-winning e-Conveyancing platform – it’s changing the way property transactions are conducted and it is something that continues to evolve as we get more feedback from the industry. We never stop enhancing our products.
What keeps us at the forefront of innovation is the fact that we don’t just talk about it, we actually invest in it and bring a focus on it throughout the company. This year we launched an innovation team led by our former Head of Development that now consists of some of our top developers along with the smartest UX designers.
We encourage everyone in the organisation to be part of the innovation process from finance, sales to marketing. Anyone can submit ideas for innovation whitepapers. Innovation is central to our culture, not just some abstract idea that we throw around.