By Dr Ernesto Marinelli: SVP, Head of HR for SAP Europe, Middle East and Africa at SAP
In HR we must transform and be disruptive if we are going to add value to the business and enable people to really reach their full potential.
This is the age of Digital Transformation; transformation of all elements of business; from processes, to products, services and delivery. Common to the transformation across all businesses, are employees; skills, motivation, retention, ability to adapt. From a business perspective, it’s not enough anymore to provide a training curriculum to employees, put people into high potential programs, or offer rotational programs. Businesses need to become faster in anticipating newly required skills, to ensure employees become more agile and adaptive, to transform the organization to allow faster decision-making processes.
Recently I met with a customer interested in SAP’s new Performance Management approach, “SAP Talk.” SAP is piloting SAP Talk and the idea is to focus on continuous conversations between managers and employees for more frequent performance feedback. This replaces formal performance reviews which seemed like a compliance-driven event.
With SAP Talk, we hope to empower our employees and our leaders by promoting two-way dialogue and regular reflection on performance and goals. We also hope to build strong leaders who can facilitate conversations.
At the outset of the meeting, the customer questioned whether their culture would be ‘ready’ for this model. My response was this: HR needs to be disruptive to remain a strong asset that adds strategic value to the business.
Transformation is driven by the business, and we in HR have to be disruptive by implementing innovative HR practices that allow the business to grow and adapt.
SAP Talk is a great example of this. Be disruptive.
For more information please read here:
How SAP is Re-Imagining Performance Management
SAP Performance Management Mythbusting: the true story of SAP’s performance assessment transformation
