Engaging HiPo’s: Creative ways to engage your top talent: with Sunita Kaur
The Frazer Jones team were honoured to facilitate an engaging and insightful panel discussion hosted by Bloomberg LP‘s Vandna Ramchandani around ‘Engaging HiPo’s: Creative ways to Engage your Top Talent”.
The panel consisted of both HR and business leaders; Emily Draycott-Jones and Vandna Ramchandani (Bloomberg), Cornelius Chang (Grab), Sunita Kaur and Tess Mackean (TalentTrust). In attendance were 60 HR leaders from across industry who actively engaged in the lively discussion.
As part of a weekly series, we will be sharing each of the presenters take on the topic. This week we will be sharing thoughts on talent from Sunita Kaur.
Sunita is currently a Member of the Board of Directors for TalentTrust. She has prior experience having served as Spotify’s Managing Director for Asia and VP of Revenue for APAC, as well as Director – Aisa for Facebook.
Sunita is passionate about ensuring talent is given an opportunity to develop and is an advocate for the culture of constant learning and introducing programs that cater to well-being across the organisation.
Sunita’s Key Takeaways from the discussion include:
1. Generational Pulls & Pushes
- Spotify had seen 7 years of high growth and different phases of maturity levels. Initial efforts focused on engaging and attracting ‘millennials’, later in their growth they looked to bring in ‘adults’ and are now concentrating on pulling in ‘Gen Z’s’
- Whatever the generation, you can be sure of one thing – people are no longer just attracted to bonus’ and compensation and they don’t join an organisation with the intention of staying there a long time. They want experiences, to be able to develop their onward careers and to satisfy their personal desires for learning and developing
- Tech companies recognise this and no longer expect a ‘lifer’ to join them, but want to ensure that, as much as possible, their employees walk away as better people, better future performers, better listeners and future leaders – whilst ensuring that the business maximises their value while they are there.
2. Providing a Purpose
- Spotify focused on gender diversity and all of the struggles that entails and they also didn’t want a ‘tick the box’ system. What Spotify has learnt is that ‘new’ workforce looks for purpose within a company and want to work for one they believe in.
3. Innovate
- Spotify are proud to say that they now have 6 months paid maternity, paternity, adoption and surrogacy leave.
4. Train Them Right
- Spotify recognises that the ‘telling you what to do’ scenario doesn’t work with their younger workforce, they offer softer and more guided resilience training, and teach their employees to be strong to help them manage stress.
- A number of people from Spotify (Sunita included) volunteered to become ‘Mentors’ at local charity, TalentTrust. The programs they undertook saw them spend a year (2 hours a month), with a charity – providing sustainable, strategic support. Utilizing their learned, professional skills (as well as picking up a few new ones) the time was spent helping the charity CEO’s build a realistic and sustainable growth plan. Working on a team, with other mentors, in an environment where there is NO one else to lean on (no IT/HR/Marketing etc) made a huge difference to the personal growth, creative thinking and leadership qualities of everyone who undertook the TalentTrust program.
We hope you enjoyed reading this snippet from the event, please follow-us to hear about future events we have planned throughout the year. Stay tuned for the next pulse-article from another of the panel shortly!