Human resources 2 - PLANNING FOR GROWTH 4 cbs organization What's News Issue 5 May 1996 Current growth forecasts for CBS indicate rapid expansion worldwide over the coming years. In terms of personnel, CBS looks set to increase dramatically in size by the year 2000. According to chief of human resources Flip Goudsmit, one of the challenges will be to find the right people, both within and outside the present organization to support that growth. He outlines a new strategie HR plan to achieve it. Flip Goudsmit Goudsmit and his team have been working on the development of a comprehensive, proactive HR plan for CBS since he joined the bank last September. 'Our approach was to come up with a number of ideas which we subsequently tested out with senior management, both in Utrecht and around the regions. We talked - fruitfully - with general managers at the regional conferences in New York, London, Singapore and Buenos Aires before actually sitting down and finalizing the write-up of our plan. We feit it was extremely important to have the support of the whole management team - both national and international - before we got down to work.' STAFF MOBILITY According to Goudsmit, the present plan differs from previous approaches in a number of ways. 'That's right,' he says. 'One major change is that we will be introducing a planned, proactive strategy to meet our human resource requirements. This means we'11 be doing a lot more planning on management development, training and creating the terms and conditions to support staff mobility. We envisage a future organization in which increasingly more people of different nationalities will spend periods in offices other than where they started. To achieve that, you need clear policies and an integrated approach to human resource development and management.' AMBITIONS AND SKILLS Asked what this means in concrete terms, Goudsmit says: 'For a long time, the concept of "careers are the responsibility of individual staff" has been part of the bank's culture. That is all well and good, but if you never teil people what you think about them, what you think they could potentially achieve, it is very difficult for them to be responsible. What we want to do is to work more closely with our personnel, not least to discover what their ambitions and skills are and how these can best be deployed in the organization. If we want to retain and recruit quality people, then you have to offer perspective. You cannot hire someone and say: this is your cliënt base, get on with it and 1*11 see you in five years; we'11 talk about your bonus at some point, but don't ask us about future development. The chance that good people will still be there in five years is very slight indeed.' STAFF FEEDBACK One of the basic elements to Goudsmit's plan is inventorization of existing skills and potential within the organization. 'In recent months, we have done a number of pilot projects to define the best instrument and how we have to use it to make it work. What we needed was an objective system which would assist us in placing the right person in the right place. Over the next six months we'11 be carrying out our "inventories", so staff should already be thinking about what that means for them. You know, the "individual responsibility" concept has led to a lot of internal job hunting. People see an opportunity elsewhere within the organization and they go for it. That is actually detrimental because it makes planning very difficult. The system we will be putting in place now will be much more objective and I think staff will welcome it. The idea is for regular appraisals, not only on past performance, but on what people's ambitions are, and we will provide more feedback to staff. In addition, man- MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT ON TRACK One of the concrete results of the reoriented human resources plan is a new management development plan, not only for senior staff, but for personnel in all levels of the organization. Pieter van Gent is the man behind the new plan. He explains how it will work in practice. Rabobank has actually had a management development plan for at least the past eight or nine years.'But,'says Van Gent,'like most traditional plans, it focused on higher management positions - the"crown princes" What we want to do now is move from what is in effect a senior management model to a more comprehensive human resources strategy - and that means everybody.' CAREERS NOT JOBS The plan Van Gent will be putting in place over the coming months is inspired by the need to ensure that an organization will have qualified managerial people five, 10 and even 15 years down the road. To achieve that, you have to put in place a structure that extends right through the organization. What we're saying is that career - I use the word advisedly, we're not talking jobs here, but careers - or managemen^k development is a line responsibility.Our aim i^W to organize management in such a fashion that everyone in the organization will have their own structure for development. Essentially, it comes down to offering people a

Rabobank Bronnenarchief

blad 'What's news' (EN) | 1996 | | pagina 4