Why human capital leaders are the rising stars of business recovery

Figures can tell a powerful story.

In 2020, the first year of the Covid-19 crisis, French-based Imerys achieved €3.8 bn in revenue. A publicly listed global company specialising in industrial chemicals, it rose €600 m to €4.4 bn last year, experiencing 15,6% growth.

The company also increased employee numbers by three per cent, from 16,000 to 16,400 during the pandemic. Overall, staff engagement and enablement sit at 6% and 3% above the Korn Ferry benchmark and for Sean’s HR organization, it’s a further 14% and 5% higher than Imerys Group’s.

Organisational health is reflected in staff attrition. In many APAC countries where Imerys operates, it enjoys a rate 50 per cent lower than the authoritative attrition benchmark that asset management firm, Mercer, has decreed.

Imerys is a company untouched by the Great Resignation sweeping first-world countries - a legacy of pandemic disruption prompting job, career and life changes. Not a single key talent has resigned from the key talent pool that Sean is responsible for.

How is he doing it?

Balancing people and profit

In times of crisis, businesses seek a path to a fast and effective recovery. Often, human resources professionals are asked to ensure operations run smoothly as they guide companies through challenging times. Covid-19 impacted lives, so people-centric leadership is proving a successful way forward.

Imerys offers impressive figures that give credence to the late influential management expert, Peter Drucker, and his popular maxim: ‘if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it'.

That’s a driving force for Sean Cao, Imerys’s Vice-President of Human Resources for Performance Minerals in the APAC region and SMU Master of Human Capital Leadership (MHCL) graduate. It underpins this HR veteran’s strategic, critical thinking in balancing business profit and people in the long and short term in his dual roles. The second involves him as the HR business partner/VP for one of Imerys’ five business areas. Two-thirds of these operations are in Asia and the rest straddles Europe and North America.

“HR should provide employees with a sense of security, and trust that they’re being treated fairly and consistently. Why?”

The role of HR is to enable and facilitate organizational efficiency and effectiveness and companies need to adapt themselves in the dynamic environment. “During Covid-19, many companies have had financial problems and that means employees were worried about their own job security. If you lay off some people to maximise profit, that doesn’t give a sense of job security to those who remain and thus couldn’t focus on their work every day.”

“That’s why striking a balance between profit and people during the pandemic became so obvious and critical; we took some actions such as encouraging our managers to donate part of their salaries to charities voluntarily and the company would match it. We also didn’t make any employee redundant for financial reasons, at least not in the area of my responsibility” Sean says.

Stemming the staff haemorrhage

He cites the example of a former staff member who left during the pandemic to take a role that doubled her salary at Imerys, only to be laid off soon afterwards. Sean unearthed this as part of a capstone project into exit interviews he tackled at Imerys while undertaking the MHCL programme.

“I had wanted to learn systematically what I’ve been practising in HR for many years. I’d worked for various international companies, but somehow, I never really enriched myself academically and specialised in HR studies. That’s why I decided to go to SMU,” says Sean, who graduated in 2021.

Sean had also just spent nine months in an extra role as one of 12 global transformation specialists in the company. They were agents of change as Imerys pivoted from acquisition-to-organic growth, slashing its organisational hierarchy from 13 to just seven layers.

“Imerys was coming from a history of acquisitions, so we had very different practices everywhere, including the exit questionnaire. We were basically asking the same thing, but it was impossible to summarise and integrate the results, and then develop actions from them. So, managers didn’t use the exit questionnaire, and instead emailed staff who were leaving. The questionnaires became useless.”

Along with an SMU study partner, he developed a solution that hinged upon meaningful metrics.

“We looked at all the literature, best practice and current practice, then consolidated it into a single exit questionnaire with eight categorical reasons and 32 sub-reasons.”
Imerys has since integrated a single version of the questionnaire globally into the HR management program, Workday. It affords the company clarity about why staff choose to leave, gives insights into emerging trends, and suggests actions to stem the flow.

His studies at SMU also impressed upon him the need for HR to quantify the effectiveness of individual staff performance and have the evidence to show for that. That translates to recruitment, too. He uses a methodological framework he learned at SMU to parse a job description into key competencies and give them weightings. It converts hunches into numbers, simplifying the process. If no candidate in the pool achieves above, say, 80/100, the panel knows to re-advertise the vacancy.

Resetting traditional business strategies

Reflecting on how the pandemic reset the traditional strategy for business recovery, Sean highlights emotional intelligence - open-mindedness, democracy, and empathy.

“Yesterday, business leaders didn’t believe meetings should be organised virtually so were very reluctant to adopt the technology. We also never thought that in the 21^st century, Covid-19 would bring everything to a standstill, or that there could be a war.”

“We need to be very open-minded and understand everything is possible. Some of the good surprises for me were that as human beings, we need to respect human nature, and respect the personality and the strength of each person.”

That respect translates to Imerys’ new protocol to be more responsive to staff questions and requests to reduce anxiety. If staff or customers ask HR a question or make a request, they will receive a response within 48 hours. The company also rolled out wellbeing and mental health training; managers in each country choose how to connect with their staff about showing appreciation.

“HR needs to look at the whole human being – you can’t take them out of context and treat them one way at work and not care for them outside of work.”

Imerys also respected that staff wanted the flexibility to choose how they work – remotely, hybrid or in-person. For virtual meetings, it is not mandatory to have the camera switched on. It’s about trust, he says.

“As an HR leader, you need to be a good learner to motivate and engage people to feel accountable and take ownership to deliver the business for you. And in the meantime, they’ll feel joyful that they’re growing together with the company.”

“People make the difference in business. You can have the same facilities, equipment, etc., but it’s people who make the difference. You can have the best strategy in place, hire the best consultant for, even the best students who’ve graduated from the best schools to be CEO, but there’s no fixed formula for human capital leadership.”

Leadership also means not reverting to the conventional. For example, running a sales contest during a pandemic disruption doesn’t sound like a good idea, but Sean initiated it to encourage staff to beat their forecasts.

“I made it concrete for them, asking how much more they can achieve from the set target. It worked - we over-delivered €6 million in cash flow.”

Sean is leading the charge towards creating long-term resilience and internal social sustainability at Imerys. His success rests on people and metrics. For him, figuring out the future means using numbers as guideposts to build a compelling narrative.