Transformation at Aurecon demanded human-centred approach

Consulting engineering and advisory firm Aurecon began its digital transformation journey in 2015, to bring together a common HR platform to better understand the skills and talents within the organisation.

Liam Hayes, global chief people officer at Aurecon spoke to Digital Nation to discuss how the company simplified HR processes as well as developing a human-centred approach.

“One example where we had an outdated technology platform, and it was quite a clunky process was our performance and development process,” he says.

“By moving that into Workday, we were able to streamline that and make it a more simple process for our end users and our client base. Something that was manual was around change of conditions of employment where if you wanted to request something that was done through a manual form, that's something we're being able to digitise [as well as our] onboarding process.”

It wasn’t just about bringing manual processes online. Aurecon’s digital transformation meant reimagining processes before they were digitised.

“It was all very much around taking a step back and thinking about our processes before we digitised them. I think that's one of the traps you can fall in as part of a digital transformation journey is you take existing processes, and you put them in a nice new tool, but you really miss out then on opportunity to really challenge yourself [and question], is that still the right process?"

HR plays a key role in promoting the employee experience and identifying areas where the business needs to change to better serve employees.

Looking ahead, Hayes says that the HR strategy cannot be seen as separate to the business strategy, but rather as an enabler to achieving the overarching company commitments.

He believes that questioning the sustainability of an organisation, the skills possessed by employees and ensuring leadership is empowering will bring long term success to the business.

“We [need to] continue to make sure we have the best leaders, that can lead not only the business today, but help also lead and be capable of leading the business in the future.”

Credit: The video was produced by Josh Lundberg, Matthew Ryan and Tejas Bhat.