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The main HR event of the year - HR Business Summit 2021 - was organized by HR hub on May 31, 2021. Research and Consulting Company ACT were presented with its team and unique products at the summit and participated in the event in several directions.
Tinatin Rukhadze, The Vision Lead and the founder of the company, as one of the speakers of the summit, presented the topic: "Three forces of transformation".
At the event, the company announced its rebranded for the first time with its stand - with a new concept, color, logo, and slogan. All interested guests who came to the stand were informed about the two new areas of ACT - Business Analytics and Management Consulting.
In order to popularize the business analytics direction and to get close touch with the main product - Organizational Network Anatomy in the target segment, a Network Analysis of the Summit was conducted, which revealed the most friendly and professional network leaders of the event. The titleholders were awarded special gifts by ACT.
The HR Business Summit was attended by more than 200 representatives from various companies. The event was held in a one-day format and included speakers, as well as panel discussions, workshops, and networking activities. The main theme of this year's summit was HR challenges and innovations, and it was around this topic that real business cases, experiences, and ideas were shared.
2020 will definitely make it into the history of mankind as the year of world’s transformation.
In this report we have summed up the most important and transformative events for ACT that took place in 2020. We would like to share our experience. We believe that together we will make better 2021!
Click the link to view the report.
Important changes were made in the world under the influence of the pandemic which made us accept new reality we are all in now. Facing big challenges, companies had need of new resources and had to adjust their work. What is current reality of HR field, what are challenges HR specialists face and what opportunities they see can be seized – we offer an interview with a founder of One Point – Nino Niauri.
In the end of 2020, it is interesting to sum up challenges HR field in general had to face?
I cannot say that HR field had to face any particular changes, I would say that 2020 was very challenging for everyone, including HR specialists. Considering their role in companies, it can be said that this was one of the hardest times, because you know one important role of HR is to unite a team, support team work in general. Problems were serious in this direction – managing human resources virtually was something new for businesses. The fact that we did not know what we were dealing with, for how long and what was the threat coming from the virus stirred confusion and uncertainty. The field was significantly affected by part of regulations, lots of companies were forced to cut down the number of employees, which was particularly hard.
As an outsource company, what kind of challenges did you face and how did you overcome them?
What helped us was more mobilization. As a result of analyzing what we have done, I can conclude that we tried to focus our resources to help our potential clients and this naturally increased workload for us. We got familiar with many new fields in this processes, processes were drastically different and very interesting at the same time. There were challenges and hard times, but those hard times strengthened us and made our work much more productive, live and active and we can see this from positive perspective.
Do you believe that the harm done to HR field during the pandemic can be fixed and how?
Unfortunately, so many people were left jobless and to fix this situation requires not only HR, but complex approaches in terms of business and economic development in general. But we cannot speak about harm only, there were many positive things too. For example, many education centers provided quite expensive trainings and master classes for free. This gave access to many individuals to learn what they wanted before but could not because of the lack of time or finances. Now this became accessible and many people took advantage of it to improve their qualification which is clearly very positive on the labor market. But the fact that a lot of people were left jobless complicated things on the labor market and it will probably require much time to fix this situation. Naturally, this was quite tough period for HR specialists, it is very difficult when you mobilize resources and then you lose those resources because of the external factors. It was painful for those who lost their job, but it was difficult for companies too, I don’t think there is any company that got benefit from this process, in contrary, it was quite tough for businesses to make a decision on firing their employees. I hope this process will not continue, it will end soon and the next year will be a year of development.
Which of the service/services you offer became particularly demanded during the pandemic?
If we compare the previous year when we did not have the pandemic, number of consulting projects increased and we had to make systemic and procedural changes in many companies. Some of it were painful, some of it – not so much. Naturally, changes are perceived to be hard, but in the end, proper planning of processes and optimization helped many companies work with minimal costs during the pandemic and thus, survive the pandemic. From this point of view, I believe that we implemented successful projects and we are proud of it. Demand was also high on head-hunting even though companies had to cut down staff, there is still demand on qualified professionals. Demand is still high on management positions, IT professionals and technical positions and it makes us very happy, it means that we are still developing and moving forward which is very good. Demand was also very high on HR software because automatization projects became very important for companies when they switched to remote work mode.
In your opinion, what impact will problems identified in 2020 make for future?
We have different perception of this issue and don’t call it a problem. We have recently discussed it in the company and we believe that 2020 was a big challenge for everyone which did not actually change anything, but accelerated what should have already taken place, I mean digitalization and remote management systems – this is the future of business. The future of business is automatization projects, it would probably take years for companies to switch to online systems and we believe that the pandemic forced and pushed businesses to find the solution and lots of them managed to switch to online space. Even though this seems difficult today, but in long-term perspective, it is good for business and clearly a step made forward.
What professions and skills do you believe will be demanded in future?
We assume and studies confirm, that demand will increase in terms of technologies and exact sciences. At the same time, it is very interesting that main focus will be made on multi-functional and easily adapting individuals. For future, we believe that such individuals will take their place on the market and experience shows us that one profession is no longer enough. Before now, a person would choose one profession and followed this profession for entire life, it was ordinary and usual thing to do. The reality has changed now and people try to acquire as many professions as possible, to study something in addition. This process got easier due to increased access to education, but in any case, exactly such multi-functional and easily adapting individuals will be demanded on the market and employers’ attitudes will also change from this point of view.
What would be your recommendations for companies, what is important when working online?
I believe that communication is key for every kind of management. No matter whether it is online or offline. Online work turned the part of communications particularly sensitive. When working online, support of team work and availability of information became even more challenging. Companies need to make effort in this direction, in reality, there are three kay aspects in online management of teams – communication, planning and timely feedback – on one hand, this is comfortable for employees as they are well aware of expectations and on the other side, results are even more achievable for employers and respectively, those three components would be something that managers need to pay particular attention to.
Here, in One Point, we do our best to keep this style and have consistent communication with each other whether we work online or at the office 100%. We clearly have personal communication with client companies and held meetings, but One Point team works online.
What helps us a lot is that we have consistent, stable communication and we share every novelty or problem with each other. This unified style of work is very productive.
It is difficult for large companies to do this, you cannot meet every single employee on daily basis in a large company, but it is important this communication to take place inside every structural unit and held meetings every day or every other day, but employees need to have a feeling that they are involved in this process and they are not forgotten. We had cases when we were asked for recommendation to improve negative performance and outcomes of the employee, but when we probed, it turned out that since the beginning of the pandemic, manager communicated with the said employee only through e-mails and even that was very scarce. Naturally, this was reflected on employee’s performance. In situations like that, it is difficult for an employee to feel as a part of the company, correctly plan and understand every need, this is why communication is very important for achieving the best results.
