HR Evolutions Perspectives 2023: Empower and Evolve is a detailed study charting the growth, trends and priorities of the HR landscape in the APAC region. This insightful report contains findings from surveys of over 1,200 HR practitioners, 350 CXOs and nearly 1,500 employees. To contextualise the report findings, People Matters and Darwinbox are also talking to global HR leaders to understand how significant industry trends impact their strategy, approach and priorities.

In this episode of Experts Take, we spoke to Angelina Siahaan, Head of People, Lion Parcel. Angelina has been a part of several successful tech start-ups. Her core competencies include HR strategy and policy, organisational development and talent acquisition, among others. Angelina is the strategy architect who develops innovative HR initiatives to streamline processes at Lion Parcel. The conversation explores the following themes:

• Top priorities for HR in 2024
• Engaging and retaining people with innovative practices
• How HR can respond to a changing business environment

Empowering HR to support business growth at Lion Parcel

Angelina says organisational growth has been intricately tied to people and HR growth at Lion Parcel. To ensure that the HR function can play a pivotal role in aligning the people agenda with the business strategy, Lion Parcel will be focusing on the following levers:

• Making talent acquisition more robust: To increase the quantity and quality of hires as per business requirements, and furthermore, make the first interaction of future employees with the organisation seamless, positive and engaging.
• Helping in-house talent develop new skills: Provide upskilling, training and mentoring opportunities to prepare for current and future business challenges.
• Using technology to automate tasks and make data-driven people decisions: Simplify repetitive HR tasks and optimise the entire function using insights from different employee touchpoints.

Angelina explains that Lion Parcel aims to work in these processes by reducing the friction that employees face at every stage of their lifecycle, with an enhanced focus on hiring, skill development, performance management, succession planning and incentives and recognition. Focusing on these five core HR functions will help the organisation mitigate talent risk, develop critical competencies and nurture employees to take on bigger business challenges.

Building EVP for the new-age workforce

Employees today are smarter, more aware and willing to actively voice their concerns in the workplace. A personalised approach to employee management is necessary to manage this diverse workforce with varying expectations. On the one hand, this allows HR to be more creative, and on the other, it also improves employee engagement, retention and experience. HR leaders can effectively tackle persistent process-based and operational challenges by designing different management approaches for different functions and teams.

For example, the requirements of a technical team that maintains the organisation's digital assets can drastically differ from those of operational personnel who deliver packages to customers. Customising your processes, policies and EVP for these different types of workers can produce better results.

It can also be helpful to identify complex and recurring people's issues at fixed intervals and break them down to their core to find new ways to solve them. For instance, with a multi-generational workforce, organisations often face implementation-related challenges. So, HRBPs at Lion Parcel work on the ground with different teams and employees to listen to, identify and solve these problems. At the end of the day, all efforts to build a compelling EVP must be centred around the message that you care for your employees and are willing to invest in people.

Shifting HR roles and priorities

Angelina explains that conventionally, HR has been an operations-heavy function, with excessive focus on due process and was answerable to people on a case-to-case basis. With digital tools automating routine tasks and making processes more efficient, HR professionals have started interacting with other functions and become an integral part of achieving business strategic goals. While HR leaders still run all people-first processes, they are increasingly becoming indispensable to long-term business goal-setting, planning, transformation and resilience.

Empowering people to achieve bigger goals: The top HR goal in 2024

At its core, the HR function exists to enable people to be their best, which, in turn, supports organisational growth and agility. Aided by sophisticated technology, we can expect the HR function to become more effective in supporting organisational goals. HR leaders need to retain the ‘human’ element in these transitions, as people management tools can provide indisputable data-driven projections and insights, but their implementation needs to be people-centric. The tech wishlist for HR can be endless, so we must utilise the tools that we already have and build positive workplace experiences through effective engagement, learning support and feedback.

Find out what other APAC HR leaders are saying by downloading the full HR Evolution Perspectives 2023: Empower and Evolve report here.