Human Resources Passport to Business Transformation: Tran ...

See abstract below. Full transcript available for download here.

On November 15, 2012, Tran Taylor of Travelocity addressed a session of the human capital leadership forum on the subject of the transformative environment in which many firms currently found themselves. Taylor began by illustrating the role of HR in his firm, Travelocity, and how this firm?s strategy was allowing human resources to drive change moving forward. At Travelocity, he said, each of his direct reports was encouraged to take an empowering view of taking the right to drive change. ?They?re not viewed as just HR professionals.? They understand how we make money, they understand how we drive finance and our financials, they understand how to be more involved in the business and not be viewed as just professionals in the HR function.? Travelocity, he said, consisted of 22 different websites operating out of twelve different countries, which meant that a great many people were actively engaged in creating a successful communicative experience both among employees and between employee and customer.

One of the first acts that Taylor said Travelocity underwent in order to create a more generally effective human resources environment was overhauling the way in which employees thought about the company. When he started, he said, up to 70% of employees would have described Travelocity as a technology company, which was an incomplete analysis, and only five to ten percent would have accurately described the company as an online retailer of goods, products, and services rolled into one: ?Then we were a culture of complacency.? What I mean by that is it?s not that we sat around, we didn?t work hard, but we were a culture of complacency in that the rate of external change was outpacing the rate of our internal change.? You know what happens when that happens?? You lose.? Game over.? You can?t become complacent in your space.? We had to help the organization to understand that.? ?When the company received a new chief executive, according to Taylor, a culture of innovation and of strongly defined corporate culture became the norm, and his human resources function, now supplemented by the title of chief people officer, was able to become a more effective operation. What had especially created a changing environment in the human resources world, according to Taylor, was the changing retail mindset, whch increasingly put the power in the hands of the consumer rather than in the hands of the firm selling the products. With the availability of instant information to consumers, there has been a drastic power shift.

Source: http://www.argylejournal.com/functions/human-capital/human-resources-passport-to-business-transformation-tran-taylor-chief-people-officer-travelocity/

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