CULTURE, LEADERSHIP AND COMMUNICATION/ Laura Bello

The cycle 'Leaders of Change' brought together Sergio Ezama, Chief Talent Officer PepsiCo and CHRO Global Functions and Groups, and Ángel Gómez Montoro, director from the headquarters of postgraduate program of the University of Navarra (campus in Madrid) to reflect on the future of HR professionals in the current status as a result of the pandemic.

Ángel Gómez Montoro, from the University of Navarra, began the conversation by emphasizing the long and interesting professional career of Sergio Ezama, who is graduate in Law from the University of Deusto and completed the General Management Program at Harvard University. He has lived in New York since 2008 where he manages PepsiCo's global talent area . "My professional process has not been planned, but rather reactive. What was clear to me was that I wanted to live an international professional experience with my family," Ezama reflected.

Although he considers that life away from Spain, his home country has many stories of sacrifice behind it, the eleven years dedicated to PepsiCo continue to motivate him because: "Every day I still wake up with the tingling feeling of what can happen.

The five characteristics of success

Sergio Ezama has had experience attracting talent from different parts of the world. According to Ángel Gómez Montoro, he has been part of a Talent Management and Development program where he has been able to detect up to 200 attributes in the employees of his organization.

Among this variety of attributes, five seem fundamental to the PepsiCo executive: humility, which allows him to accept change; curiosity, to never stop learning and asking questions; common sense, because business cycles are now very short and the pace much higher; the mentality of being a lifelong learner, to never stop training; and skill to laugh at oneself.

To the list, Gómez Montoro adds: empathy and resilience. The two professionals considered that this series of characteristics: "are useful for everything in life and are capable of helping to manage the ambiguity of today's world".

Many of the attributes mentioned are related to personality and are innate in some people. However, Ezama assured that there are mechanisms to work on them at business. "In my experience if you are honest with people, you can get them to modulate. In addition, it is essential that we know how to recognize what we have and what needs to be improved."

Artificial intelligence in HR

"HR functions are becoming increasingly sophisticated because of the use that can be made of data, with the boom in analytics and artificial intelligence," Ezama explained. Many employee attributes are managed on instructions from data and through applications are used for different needs.

In the case of PepsiCo, there is among several an application that generates models to predict voluntary employee turnover within the company. "The application builds a longitudinal database with more or less 200 variables for each employee. For example, it is able to know for each employee the position, the city where they live, how long it takes to get to the work center, among other descriptive data , and through these a regressive model is formed that defines the elements that at the staff or professional level are favorable or not for them to remain in the company," Ezama described.

He added that these models have two advantages: first, they are getting better every year thanks to the learning they generate with artificial intelligence; and second, they allow personalization, i.e. the models are able to know the specific reasons why a employee would leave the company. All this information is very useful to generate strategies that are in line with the needs of each employee.

There is a widespread perception that automation and the use of artificial intelligence leaves aside the human side of HR, however, in response to this discussion the PepsiCo executive assures: "We are seeing in our company that at a macro level the scenario where automation was going to eliminate work jobs is not materializing. On the contrary, the anticipated reduction of jobs is less than projected, and there is greater creation of employment than previously thought".

The role of the university and the business

Therefore, the tension in companies that have automation processes is derived from the training. The two experts assured in the conversation that universities have a fundamental role in the continuous Education , which is increasingly demanding and necessary. "The training no longer ends with a degree program and a Master's Degree, at least every three to four years you have to be updated, because the variation in career content is much faster than when I left university," said the Chief Talent Officer.

The University of Navarra has two master's degrees in HR, so Gómez Montoro stressed that these are a good start for people who finish their degree program in very different disciplines to get started in this area, and also for those who need update.

For his part, the HR expert opined that the role in talent areas has evolved a lot and making an intensive training is important: "People who are successful in HR should know well how a businessworks".

There is an important role for both the university and business. "Now each one must contribute its grain of sand, which is different now but will increasingly lead us to a common place. That is why the relationship between the business and the university must be one of financial aid mutual," said Sergio Ezama. 

The pandemic has changed our perspective

"The pandemic has taught us to value presence, and has also shown that it is not necessary for everything," said Gómez Montoro. So, one of the great rewards brought about by the healthcare crisis is the possibility of making conference work more flexible. " People no longer ask us to work remotely all the time, what they want is to be able to choose flexible conference ," said the Chief Talent Officer. In PepsiCo, as in most companies, this time has allowed them to highlight the benefits of flexible work models. Sergio Ezama highlighted three benefits: financial aid to attract talent, to be more productive, and it is positive for the planet.

This flexibility is reflected in the definition of the days when teams will work from home or in the office, which depend largely on the tasks and objectives. At PepsiCo they have taken two ways to define work home and office days: the first was to analyze the work jobs and define how they could be made more flexible; and the second, by directly asking people how they wanted to manage their conference. Through which they concluded that in general employees want to go to the office two days a week.

The pandemic also helped people demystify work at home and seek other methods of contact remotely. "On the remote work during the confinement there were good things like: many of us have gotten to know each other more than in the office, because our personal spaces like home were out in the open; also, people are much more open to acknowledge their vulnerability; and we have demystified video calling platforms, because now meetings are democratized and the conversation is more horizontal than what was happening in boardrooms," Ezama said.

The conversation between Ángel Gómez Montoro and Sergio Ezama can be summarized in three main conclusions:

• HR processes are becoming more and more automated, but that does not necessarily mean that they lose the human factor; if used correctly, they can make people's needs, strengths and weaknesses more evident.
   
• The university and business need to find common ground on financial aid to benefit both students and employees.
   
• The pandemic brought with it certain benefits, among the most important of which were: accelerating the implementation of flexible work models, and demystifying work at home.