Company Culture, Employee Onboarding

What You Can Learn From Tracy Keogh – HRE’s HR Executive of the Year 2015

When businesses make big changes, there are bound to be challenges for HR. When a company with 300,000 employees splits into two separate corporations, it could be an HR catastrophe—but not if the Human Resource Executive’s HR Executive of the Year is heading things up.

tracy-keogh-hr-executive-of-the-year That scenario is exactly what happened at Hewlett-Packard over the last year, with HP’s Executive Vice President of Human Resources, Tracy Keogh in charge of not only managing the HR actions within the company, but also recruiting a new board for the second corporation. She pulled it off amazingly well, and here are a few things we can learn from Tracy Keogh and her success.

  1. Take Decisive Action – Tracy didn’t waste any time waiting to see how things went. The day they announced the split, they conducted a survey to find out how employees took the news (it was 70% positive or neutral). Monthly surveys have been administered since then to ensure employees understood the strategy for the separation and felt like they understood how it affected them.
  2. Focus Energy – Early on, Tracy assessed all the HR initiatives being taken in the international corporation and found that about 250 were in effect that hadn’t even gotten off the ground. She put a halt to all of them and brought in a consistent, focused program.
  3. Develop Talent In-House – When she found out that 65% of senior leaders were being recruited from outside the company, Tracy turned that around by making the leadership responsible for developing talent, rather than trying to keep their best people under their own control. Division managers were expected to identify and train new leaders.
  4. Power Up Company Culture – Another way Tracy’s strong leadership helped pull the company out of tough times was in re-instituting company culture. “The HP Way” had lost meaning for employees. She rebranded it as “The HP Way Now,” and worked with HR leaders in 150 countries to get the program translated into the local languages. The result has been an increase in engagement and a drop in voluntary turnover.

For WorkBright Users

Did you know that you can use your WorkBright account on an ongoing basis to upload survey responses and scores like the ones Tracy took above? Just upload them to the employee’s account and mark it as “internal” for future reference. For help setting this up contact support@workbright.com.

Not a WorkBright user but want help automating your day-to-day process so you can focus your energy on things you are passionate about like Tracy did? Request a free demonstration here.