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HR INSIDER HR INSIDER
For those who still conceive IBM
to be a hardware conglomerate,
Pallavi Srivastava, Country HR
Director, IBM Singapore, is keen to
set the record straight.
“We’re no longer about hardware,
and this (change) was many years
ago. We’re no longer about services
either; we’re actually about cloud and
cognitive solutions,” she says.
“It’s a mindset change that needs
to happen in clients, and in how the
market perceives us.”
Ann Shen, HR Director, IBM
Southeast Asia, acknowledges that
the organisation finds it a challenge
to promote the new transformation.
“This is because people’s perception
of us is that we’re a hardware
company. However, we’ve actually
already transformed,” Shen explains.
Driven by CEO Ginni Rometty, Shen
says the transformation has led IBM
into a new phase as an industry-
focused cognitive solutions and
cloud-platform company.
“HR has to align with these
business strategies,” Shen says.
Crunching data to predict trends
One of the first aspects of IBM’s
transformation is that the
organisation is now placing a
significant emphasis on analytics.
Shen says this is reflected in the way
IBM’s HR team utilises its workforce
data to tell stories, to predict business
trends, and to help business leaders
drive higher levels of employee
engagement. These objectives are then
designed to eventually drive improved
business results.
Having significantly altered its business offerings in recent years, IBM is now
driving an agile culture where employees are firmly in control of their own
careers. HRM Asia speaks with the heads of HR for Singapore and Southeast
Asia on how their teams are driving business outcomes
Total number of employees at IBM (Global): Around 375,000
Key HR Focus Areas:
– Skills transformation across all levels
– Employee engagement, employee experience, and building an agile culture
– Early professional (graduate) hiring, development and retention
– Building HR capabilities for high-value analytics and strategic HR decision-making
– Empowering managers to support employees’ career development
AT A GLANCE
Sham Majid
sham@hrmasia.com.sg
a self-directed pathway
Srivastava says the first step is for
her team to first define the concept of
analytics.
“When we look at the trends in
the market, there are lots of HR
management systems (HRMS)
that already claim to provide some
automated analytics,” she says.
“However, analytics is not so much
about tools; it’s the ability of HR
professionals to interpret data and to
predict a business trend out of that.”
Srivastava next assigns each
member of her team to lead an
analytics project for the entire
Southeast-Asia region.
“We have not siloed them to do it
just for their unit,” she says.
“If you really go through the
spectrum of what analytics means, it
starts with something very basic like
PLOTTING

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HR INSIDER HR INSIDER
As well as the principle of self-
direction, agility within IBM is also
about the need to constantly test,
revise, and update a programme.
“You don’t have to be perfect the
first time; you should start off and
keep improving,” Srivastava says.
“Small teams should come together
and launch something. That’s what
agility means.”
Celebrating generations
Srivastava notes that while IBM
marches on with its blueprint on
becoming agile, the organisation
has a diverse workforce with each
generation represented, including a
sizeable proportion of millennials,
interspersed with many generations
of employees.
The company is focusing on
emotional environment and
gauging how employees in different
demographics feel.
“Our programmes, tools and policies
are all catered towards understanding
what the employee experience is like,”
Srivastrava says. “Employees are also
our customers in a way and we are very
conscious of that.”
Building synergies
While Srivastava says IBM has a
significant number of millennial
employees within its ranks, Shen
acknowledges that attracting this
group to work for the organisation is
one of her team’s key HR challenges.
In response, IBM has created
the Early Professional Seller (EPS)
programme.
“Normally, sales managers prefer
experienced sellers and not new
graduates from universities,” Shen
says. “This has been a problem for
many years. It has been really hard to
get buy-in from our sales managers
to hire new (graduate) professionals,”
Shen elaborates.
Having commenced the EPS
programme during the first quarter
of last year, Shen says IBM now has
a dedicated programme manager
as well as two hub managers in
Singapore and Malaysia to build it up
over the next six months.
“We need to make sure employees
are well-educated and enabled before
we deploy them to the business unit.
The good thing is that we’ve already
started seeing the benefits after
we finished our first batch of EPS
candidates in June,” she states.
Shen says one of the EPS
candidates helped to achieve the
company’s first blockchain (a new
cloud-based technology) deal in
Singapore.
Business consultants are
another important group of staff
for IBM’s new business focus, and
the organisation has a dedicated
development programme for them,
Consulting By Degrees (CBD).
“The employees go through the
entire value chain of a consulting
engagement, from proposal building,
to designing the solution, delivering
it, and then measuring the end
satisfaction of the user,” she says.
“It’s a rotational programme over
two years and they go through all the
experiences.”
Srivastava stresses that both of
these graduate talent programmes
serve a crucial purpose for IBM.
“If you compare EPS and CBD
candidates, the latter are the ones
who design the solution for a client,
while the former will be the ones who
help sell or get the deals from the
market,” she says.
“In the future, both groups will
have to work very closely together.
Hence, this is a group of graduate
talent that we are building synergies
with, and building industry
expertise.”
Srivastava concedes that industry
convergence means IBM and its clients
don’t yet know where each of their
future competition will come from.
“It’s a little difficult to also then
get the right kind of skills that will
address some of those trends in the
market, especially leadership skills,”
she explains.
“We are trying to build a focus on
our leaders so they are able to scale up
to these changes in the market. The
challenge is really the fast pace, along
with industry convergence, which is
very new.”
Shen says IBM has had to revitalise
and refresh its talent pool in the wake
of the transformation.
“This is why we are very focused on
our ‘ Build, Borrow, Buy’ framework.
‘Build’ refers to developing up
talent internally. “Borrow refers to
cross-country movement within the
organisation while ‘buy’ means hiring
externally,” she says.
Shen explains that previously, IBM
was almost solely focused on the
“building” aspect.
“This is why everybody thinks
that IBM is a good place that has
many opportunities, promotions
and rotations. But because of our
transformation, we’re also very
focused on the buying aspect right
now,” she reveals.
“It’s very important, not just for
the CBD or EPS programmes, but also
for senior executive positions.”
Shen says IBM has maintained a
strong reputation in talent markets
across Southeast-Asia.
“People want to join us; even
former IBM employees who have
been away for 10 or 20 years would
still like to come back to work for
us,” she says.
Career development enablers
Srivastava is firm in her belief
that employees themselves are
responsible for their own careers.
“HR is not the owner of anybody’s
career development,” she explains.
“We are not there to physically
give them their career roadmap. It is
entirely the employees’ responsibility
to drive their own careers. If they
don’t do that, they are going to find
over a period of time that they are
falling behind and that’s something
they and their managers will have to
talk through.”
Rather, Srivastava says the
company’s HR team supports people
managers who go on to support
employees.
“Our managers are extremely
important links between HR and
employees. They are the ones giving
employees work, and they are called
‘people managers’ because they have
a team and they have to manage
them,” she states.
“They are responsible and
accountable to ensure their career
roadmap is aligned to what they want
to do and we facilitate and enable that
through our HR programmes.”
Shen concurs with Srivastava,
describing HR in IBM as “enablers”.
“IBM’s principle is clear,” she says.
“Employees need to own their career
development.”
Training to build a pipeline
IBM’s Leadership Development
framework comprises of training
programmes at different levels.
benchmarking, and you then go into
aspects like forecasting, diagnostics
and predictive analytics.
“We are really moving from
benchmarking to predictive analytics.
In order to do that, we have to link a
lot of metrics.”
Srivastava says most HR
professionals are comfortable with HR
metrics and will measure headcounts,
attrition, employee satisfaction, and
hiring levels.
However, she says the ability to link
all of this data into a holistic picture
is the key to the people analytics
challenge.
“You have to be able to interpret
and understand data. You can then
come up with a picture for the
business,” says Srivastava.
Becoming digitally-attuned
is another key element of IBM’s
transformation, Shen shares.
“Every company and every industry
is also moving digitally. For example,
banking and logistics are really
focused on going digital. We are also
thinking about this in HR and about
how to do it in very simple and social
ways,” she explains.
One initiative has been the launch
of Connections in IBM, an online
business social network platform
that allows the organisation to
gather feedback from all employees.
Self-directed teams
The IBM evolution is not just about
tangible developments in the cloud
sphere.
“Now that we’re a new IBM, we’re
really focused on encouraging an agile
culture,” says Shen.
But what exactly does it mean to be
“agile” in IBM?
Shen says it is about fostering self-
directed teams within the company.
“You can never say that you will not
get support from anyone. Everybody
needs to take ownership, starting from
the small things,” she elaborates.
“Our programmes, tools and
policies are all catered towards
understanding what the
employee experience is like”
Pallavi Srivastava, Country HR Director, IBM Singapore
For example, the EPS and CBD
candidates are exposed to a set
of learning platforms, including
e-learning as well as classroom
sessions.
Srivastava says for IBM’s top female
talents can take advantage of a global
flagship programme called Building
Relationships and Influence.
“There’s also a management
development programme for newly-
appointed People Managers,”
Srivastava says.
“There are more than 50 very
popular training programmes.”
“The focus is really on building a
pipeline for leadership. All the talent
programmes are supposed to build
the pipeline for certain leadership
positions.”
All-rounded engagement
The IBM club is a key avenue of
employee engagement within the
company in Singapore.
Srivastava says this is an internal
forum that is separate from the
management structure and any
formal feedback tools.
“There are sports clubs, music
clubs, toastmasters, and discounts
to events that we hold,” she says.
“There are bring-your-kids-to-work

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HR INSIDER
programmes, and annual gatherings.
We also have a ‘We Jog’ club which
organises fun runs around the Marina
Bay area.
“These are organised by IBM
employees.”
“We also try to engage employees by
making sure that they have a fruitful
and meaningful career with us. I think
that’s the most important reason why
IBM employees stay with us.”
Tackling retention with analytics
IBM’s rewards and recognition
strategies are tied to the “1-3-9”
concept that company CEO Rometty
unveiled when she assumed her role
in 2012.
“1” refers to IBM’s purpose,
which is to be “essential”, while
“3” refers to the company’s three
values: dedication to client success,
innovation that matters to the world,
and the trust and responsibility of the
organisation’s relationships.
“Our CEO wanted to make it more
personal to employees. She set out
nine practices, and all our reward and
recognition strategies are aligned
with recognising who has been
demonstrating those nine practices.”
“If you go to any of our websites
which talk about recognition, it will
ask you to choose what practice the
person displayed.”
Analytics once again comes into
play when it comes to employee
retention.
Shen says IBM launched a global
proactive retention programme about
four years ago which analyses all of
its attrition data.
“For the previous three years, we
find out how many employees left, what
was their job family, and what was their
banding, job content, performance
and salary range,” she says.
“We analyse all of these data
points together to find out what
has been the common propensity
to leave, and we then use this to
see who may fit (the same pattern)
among existing IBM employees. We
then provide them with proactive
retention.
“After undertaking these steps, our
attrition rate decreased by 25%.”
A similar Southeast Asian retention
programme has also now seen IBM’s
regional attrition rate halved since
last year.
Srivastava stresses that throughout
IBM’s transformation and into the
future, IBM’s HR approach has had to
be highly strategic.
“We are transforming at such a
fast level that if we are constantly
focusing on transactional activities,
then we’ll never be able to support
our business.
“That’s the core of how we are
transforming HR,” she adds.
BOON KIAT TAN
Country Recruitment
Leader IBM
Singapore
HYE JUNG JANG
HR Talent Program
Manager, IBM
Southeast Asia
PHYLLIS SETOK
Executive Talent
Management Partner,
IBM Southeast Asia
PALLAVI
SRIVASTAVA
Country HR Director,
IBM Singapore
ANN SHEN
HR Director, IBM
Southeast Asia
STEFANIE WONG
Strategic HR Partner,
IBM Southeast Asia
KUNIYA TSUBOTA
Vice President, HR,
IBM Asia Pacific
ANNA LEONG
Sales Talent Center
Manager, IBM
Southeast Asia
WHO’S WHO IN HR
“Now that we’re a new IBM,
we’re really focused on
encouraging an agile culture”
Ann Shen, HR Director, IBM Southeast Asia
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Expression Display &
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Regional HR Business
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School of Mechanical &
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Vice President HR
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HR Director
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