HR Summit: Lessons from Carnival Australia

Last week I attended the HR Summit which with the public holiday made it an extraordinarily short week for me being in a new role. In any case, I did want to share a few gems with everyone who perhaps couldn’t attend.

The HR Summit claims to be Australasia’s leading event for the HR industry. It was spread across two days, and was located at the fantastic Luna Park (gorgeous views). We heard from speakers from some of Australia’s leading companies as well as being able to roam through the industry expo.

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The first speaker I really enjoyed was Simone Shugg who is the Director of People and Performance at Carnival Australia. Formed in 2004, Carnival Australia is a division of Carnival Corp, and claims to be the backbone of the cruise industry in this region with the P&O Cruises brand sailing from Australia for 78 years. They represent six of the international cruise brands in the local market including P&O Cruises, P&O World Voyages, Cunard, Princess Cruises, Costa Cruises and Seabourn.

Simone acknowledged that as HR professionals we know that there is a direct link between engagement, productivity and then bottom line in a business. However she now believes that it is definitely on the main business agenda in terms of priorities in achieving organizational objectives.

She then spoke of a great deal of change that had occurred in the organisation including the appointment of a new CEO. With all this rapid growth things had become very disjointed and disconnected, and they were still doing things as if they were operating on a much smaller scale (communications methods for example).

The new CEO (an ex HR exec) obviously with her background had an inherent knowledge that people were really important for business success, and this was a key message that she really drove across the leadership team.

One of the first things they did was to measure employee engagement. They engaged Hewitt, and the overall score achieved was 48%. This puts them in the indifferent category.

This sent a very clear message to the executive team, and key people centric initiatives were then put into the leadership teams KPI’s for that year.

After participating in the Hewitt employee engagement survey, the data allows you to focus on a number of keys areas to make improvements. On this basis they created an action plan and got it signed off.

They went back to their employees and communicated to them that it was also their responsibility to make it a great place to work. They needed top down support but also bottom up support too. They conducted focus groups for over four months, putting a lot of effort into making sure they were effective and facilitated by the right people.

The focus for the organization was to find solutions. Sounds like a great deal of intense work for the company but it appears to have paid off. Here are two of the things I liked:

1) People wanted better communication, particularly from leaders. Things were moving quickly, they were expanding in size and people were losing trust. People were feeling disconnected with the rapid pace of change, and they hadn’t changed the way they were communicated with staff in 10-15 years. They couldn’t rely on informal communication methods anymore.
The solution was to hire an internal comms manager which now allows them to communicate with staff via a new intranet platform, and share media like photos and videos with those external to the business using social media sites like facebook and youtube.

2) People felt disconnected from the CEO. There was no visibility of her in the business. Obviously she is an incredibly busy woman but Simone explains, when you talk to her she is very down to earth, very engaging and inspirational. People just weren’t getting the opportunity to see it.

The solution was to hold a CEO lunch each month with a different theme such as people who had been with the company for ten years, or perhaps people who have just started. The idea is to have an informal lunch and ask any questions of the CEO that you might not ordinarily get to ask. Also, the person who asks toughest question gets a bottle of wine!

Simone says this approach was hugely successful and last year over 20% of the workforce got to have lunch with the CEO.

Pretty cool I love hearing other people’s stories at conferences.