'Having a very thoughtful and intentional performance discussion is paramount to the employee experience,' says HR leader
“It’s going to be a huge part of our lives,” says Isa Notermans, CHRO at Airtasker, in discussing the possibilities of AI.
HR should embrace the opportunities of the new tech, especially in its ability to take care of menial tasks so HR can focus on more complex aspects of the role, she says.
It’s important to keep testing AI’s capabilities for the needs of the organisation, says Notermans, noting that it’s not enough to think superficially about the advantages, but consider how it can be solidly embedded.
“One thing we’ve missed out on in this whole process is ‘What is our AI internal policy at companies?’ I think that’s something that the HR team needs to design and co-create with the IT team.”
Launching HRIS provides ‘comprehensive view’
Speaking of IT, one of the first challenges Notermans faced was launching an HRIS at Airtasker.
“When I walked in, we were working with spreadsheets,” she says. “We came up with a solution – using platform HiBob - with information centralised, and we’ve never looked back. It has been a bedrock of what we’ve needed in terms of a source of true, accurate data, and just a really comprehensive view of our people.”
The system has been crucial to understanding people across the organisation, wherever they are in the globe, she says, “so we don’t miss a heartbeat, we don’t miss a government’s report, we don’t miss a regulation that needs to happen. And we can communicate at scale with our employees. That’s really been at the core of the work that we’ve done over the last year”.
Building an HR team
Joining Airtasker in January 2022 as the first CHRO wasn’t Notermans’ first experience of establishing an HR team – she’d also built an international one at Pandora, and has previously headed HR at LinkTree and Spotify.
She says the key to her strategy in hiring successful teams is to ‘hire people who are smarter than you.’
“I think that was the advice I got really early on – surround yourself with really skilled experts, people who know what they’re doing and who know how to get stuff done. To me, that’s the cornerstone of an incredible HR team.”
In such a new position, it’s also important to convey to the team that they shouldn’t be afraid of making mistakes, says Notermans.
Throughout her career, one game-changer has been to find leaders who align with her own beliefs. Another has been to always be willing to put up her hand to give new experiences a go.
“I was super curious, I wanted to learn quickly, so I just put my hand up and said, ‘I'll do it, I can give that a go. I'll see how far I can take that’. And I think that served me really well, because it enabled me to learn all parts of the HR space really quickly, and then learn more about the business as I went along as well.”
Conversations with employees to build engagement
Taking on her role at Airtasker involved quickly earning the trust of others on the leadership team, and understanding their priorities, says Notermans. To assist, she employed a ‘walk and talk’ strategy, exploring the neighbourhood by foot while having relaxed conversations on a one-on-one basis, rather than sitting across the desk from people.
The strategy has served her well in successfully implementing policies that might not otherwise have been well received, she says. An example, Airtime Fridays, the organisation’s equivalent of a four-day working week.
“What we do is we strip back Fridays from meetings, emails, phone calls… and dedicate that time to focus, to learning and to development. And it's a way for people to finish off the week with any last-minute pieces they need to do,” says Notermans.
“It took a long time – there’s a whole lot of traditionalists out there who think the world of work needs to remain a five day, nine-to-five thing. We're changing that - our employees want something different, and they want something more.”
The result has been positive in terms of engagement, she says, because people feel really valued and that their wellbeing is being considered.
“We know that people care about feedback, they want to be recognised, and they want to know that they're doing a good job,” says Notermans. “So having a very thoughtful and intentional performance discussion is paramount to the employee experience. We create moments of celebration, moments that bring people together that we know drive engagement and connection with one another.”
