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MENA HR Leaders 

Empowering the Current and Future Workforce through Digital HR Strategies and Enhanced Employee Experience in Times of Disruption 

13th – 15th June 2022 

Conrad Dubai, UAE 

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Sime Darby Property

Soha Chahine is a Career & Emotional Intelligence (EQ) Coach, backed by extensive experience in HR and Recruitment Management. Besides enjoying her coaching role, Soha is inspired by many applications of Solution-Focused coaching in propelling Emotional Intelligence development and Growth Mindset. 

In this interview with she shared her insights on digital transformation, human-machine collaboration as well as people analytics at workplace. 

1. How can HR managers integrate new strategies, processes and technologies to drive digital transformation initiatives within workplace? 

The 4th industrial revolution is, in truth, the technology revolution. As everyday innovations transform the way we work, study, trade, entertain ourselves and connect with our loved ones, technology is disrupting the status quo within the workplace, putting great pressure over HR teams who are now expected to create technology driven environments to increase productivity, efficiency, and talent retention. Although this process has successfully began with functional transformations, upgrading tools and processes with the power of innovation, HR teams are moving forward at a slower pace in the challenge of making employees part of the process by upgrading their skills and mindset. This has a reasonable explanation. While functional transformations can be done in one day, changing a whole team is a long a winding road. As it has been shown during the pandemic, investing in the equipment to grant remote work, for example, can be easy; the challenge was, and still is, to guide the entire workforce towards a new way of thinking, engaging, and operating. This is why I think there are three areas in which HR teams should focus to reach faster the goal of transforming business and employees. 

• 1.1. The first would be to create a culture in which learning becomes a permanent goal and requirement. In this modern world of permanent transformation, those who don´t reskill, cross-skill, and up-skill themselves fall behind, especially considering that most jobs now require not only the specific technical skill for the assigned tasks, but also technology knowledge to carry it through. Today´s world demands us to be as flexible and adaptable as possible, and to grant that to our employees we should support them in the development of their creativity, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence. 
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• 1.2. The second would be to design cross-functional workflows. Teams can´t work anymore isolated in silos, not only because it is inefficient, but also because it kills mutual enrichment. Cross-functional work connects people with different careers, different experiences, and different abilities, and this created a collective nourishment that is positive for business and for employees, who can feel inspired to grow their career on a new field or ability.
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• 1.3. Finally, it would be really helpful if HR teams focus more on developing modern structures that aim to create networks and connections between the teams instead of sustaining old vertical and horizontal divisions. When reaching this goal, information starts to flow faster and more efficiently, and this boosts productivity and success for almost every business. It is true that transformation may be slow, but the modern world is showing as days go by that the cost of being delayed is much worse. HR teams should focus their attention on the new ways of working and the new skills employees need to succeed on them. 

2. What are the factors involving in leveraging on human-machine collaboration to enable new skills and workplace experiences? 

With technology transforming the way we work every day, the latent fear and impact on emotional health among many who believe they could soon be replaced by machines at their jobs is understandable. However, although many may argue that the inclusion of AI on jobs may create a displacement effect, the truth is that this fear isn´t grounded in solid evidence. 

Technology can replace human labor in routine tasks, whether manual or cognitive, but cannot replace human labor in non-routine tasks, and this reality opens a promising door for human machine collaboration instead of promoting human-machine competition. 

Human-machine collaborations is needed, first, because far from competing, human and machine skills complement each other. While humans are increasingly developing soft skills - such as creativity, social skills, leadership and, mostly, emotional intelligence, machines can handle large volumes of data, make analysis and predictions, and develop outcomes at an incredibly rapid pace, which is honestly the most complex side of working and also the side humans find more difficult to perform. And second, human-machine collaboration is also needed to grant that technology works, because when machines are included for a task, the need for people that know how to use, run, supervise, and fix these new tools increases. 

This is why I think that, instead of being obsessed with artificial intelligence, we should shift our focus towards Collaborative Intelligence. This means that we should let humans and machines do what they do best. Let´s allow machines to manage data and offer solutions and let human emotional intelligence and proper judgment pick the best use and creative implementation for those solutions. 

Fast analysis + smarter decisions. That´s the best calculus collaborative intelligence offers us by human-machine collaboration. The challenge, then, is to not only focus on the development of new technology, but also focus on the decisions that must be taken to guarantee that humans become capable of effectively augmenting machines. 

There is no doubt that business processes should be redesigned to support this partnership.

3. How does driving the future of talent acquisition and retention by utilizing people analytics help an organization? 

These days, the analysis of large volumes of data and information lead to smarter and more efficient decisions in all fields and industries, and HR with its talent-related challenges are no exception. 

To succeed, a business needs to sell. And selling highly depends on the productivity, efficiency, and commitment of the workers that keep the business running every day. If the talent of a specific business is a perfect match for its commercial goals and internal values, results will surely be positive. On the contrary, when recruiting is flawed, bad results won´t be long in coming. 

Now, spotting bad recruitment and talent retention policies is a task that may be done by regular people If we speak of small-scale businesses. But when discussing mid- and large-scale companies, having an eye of every employee is close to impossible. This is where HR metrics come in. 

HR metrics allow you to track the productivity of your company and create hypothesis regarding the flaws that are holding back the true potential of your business. For example, you can track with metrics which employee is a high performer and which one is not reaching its goals; and if the number of low-performers is higher than the number of high-ones, then you can start revising if you are hiring correctly. Common errors while hiring are either taking too much time to fill a position, since this leads to an overload of work for the department needing that new person on board, or doing it in a rush, since this leads to the hiring of people who are unsuitable for the position.  

To sum up, metrics are an extremely valuable source of information for HR policies. It is through data that we acknowledge what changes or improvements should be done in talent acquisition, employee engagement, staff retention, and hiring costs.

For registration pricing and multiple attendee discounts, please contact:

Shahlini 
ShahliniM@marcusevanskl.com