Since early 2020, our society has continuously faced pandemics, digital disruption, and worldwide economic challenges. In order to do that, many businesses must adapt and navigate through these conditions to successfully address changing expectations from customers, suppliers, shareholders, and their employees.

Those conditions lead many companies to accomplish new objectives and do transformation. In my perspective, a transformation has to be done in three areas. The first is to spend much more focus on growth, as opposed to cost reduction. A lot of new opportunities occur. That has been even more apparent with companies facing talent shortages, supply chain disruptions, and potential significant inflation in late 2022.

Second, we should not focus only on classic financial levers, but we have to focus on strategic topics like sustainability and digital transformation. This includes capability building to address the culture in the way how work gets done and redefining the purpose of the organization. Lastly, these current circumstances, we should get focus more on health. This helps create more meaning around employees to build a safe work environment for everyone to increase employee engagement and retention through perceived organizational support.

In regard to that, HR will be the driving force for many initiatives necessary, such as talent mapping, improving the work environment to be more flexible, prioritizing strategic workforce planning to improve HR Productivity and simplifying the organization, performance management, upskilling and reskilling; building an integrated and user-friendly HR platform, and developing an HR tech ecosystem to improve the employee experience through digitalization.

“The key to successful transformation is having the executor at the right place that will support that scale of change."

HR has to play a central role in how companies build or increase organizational resilience and drive value during this disruption era. In doing that, HR leaders have to connect talent strategy with business strategy, implementing changes in the three core areas of identity, agility, and scalability.

If I go back to when I started my career 20 years ago, the thinking was that when I am facilitating the transformation process during quality management system ISO 9001 implementation efforts, I could only see the impact on those initiatives for the company. Today, I have learned a lot from companies that have done a great job of changing their performance and sustaining it. There are often hundreds of initiatives involved in various areas. An individual can successfully drive only less than 1 to 2 initiatives. With the support of my team, which will increase to 7 to 14 successful initiatives that could be done in a year, depending on the size. That means you need more people to be involved in the broader transformation effort for the large company or business.

Learn from the expert. The key to successful transformation is having the executor at the right place that will support that scale of change. Lastly, management has to monitor periodically those hundred initiatives all the way from an idea to the bottom line. You have to build some tools for tracking initiatives all the way to the bottom line so that there is no significant leakage. I mean, having real visibility on a week-to-week and monthly to the monthly basis of where you are and having a way to highlight areas where support is needed is the key to addressing identity, agility, and scalability.

It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage the change! – Charles Darwin.