Making The Best Of People Power

The Age

Saturday October 28, 2006

WENDY TAYLOR

Melissa Fitzpatrick fell into HR after years in other disciplines, Wendy Taylor reports.

IN 2005 Melbourne IT, a company less than a decade old, scooped the Victorian and national Australian Human Resources Institute awards for excellence in people management in the small business category.

This year the company not only made the finalists' list again, this time in the medium-sized businesses category, its general manager operations, Melissa Fitzpatrick, collected the inaugural practitioner award for HR leadership.

Like many people in senior HR roles, Ms Fitzpatrick fell into an HR leadership role after establishing herself in another discipline. She launched her career in the late 1980s with the Hyatt Hotel chain and, after six years managing hotels in England, Canada, the US and the Greek islands, moved from hospitality into the burgeoning call-centre industry. Initially, she managed a police paging service in London and then, on her return to Australia, sales teams and call centres for Optus and Foxtel before joining web services company Melbourne IT in 2000.

"I joined as the global call centre manager and within a few weeks I was offered the role of HR as well," she says.

Despite it being a tumultuous time in the IT sector, with many companies collapsing or slashing staff as a result of the dot-com crash, and her knowing very little about the nuts and bolts of HR, she jumped at the opportunity. It has proved a good decision.

In her six years at the company it has grown from 200 staff to 500 staff and acquired three companies, two overseas. As well as managing more than 2.4 million domain names, it has branched into website hosting, search-engine marketing, web design, corporate brand services consulting and fraud protection.

The HR team of five in Australia provides advice and support to staff in 12 offices across eight countries. Among its achievements, Ms Fitzpatrick's team has developed an employee value proposition that comprises a long list of employee benefits including share options, paid maternity leave, study assistance and flexible working practices. Perhaps most impressive has been the staff retention rates.

"We have been outperforming the IT industry for the past six years," she says. "We have had between 6 and 12 per cent staff turnover depending on the year, but in our call centre - and some call centres can be as high as 100 per cent turnover - we had 100 per cent retention last financial year and in the 2005 calendar year staff retention was 95 per cent."

Ms Fitzpatrick attributes the company's success to a combination of having visionary MDs and a stable board that is "open to new ideas, that has a good understanding of people management". The company has reaped the benefits of investing in people in 2000 and 2001 when most other companies were pulling the plug on HR programs.

"The crash didn't affect us nearly as much (as other companies) because we had a good strategy and a good vision," she says. "The difference from a HR perspective was that we started investing heavily in people. A lot of companies were saying training and development, study assistance and 360-degree reports 'will have to go, we are not going to spend the money on people'. But we said our long-term vision is that in four to five years' time we will have a competitive advantage that can't be matched so we need to build that with our people now."

Whenever a company decision affects people, HR is involved, and Ms Fitzpatrick says she believes HR leaders achieve the status of strategic business partner when they possess solid HR knowledge combined with negotiating and influencing skills and personal integrity.

In her case, after she accepted the challenge to lead HR, she enrolled in the graduate diploma in human resources and industrial relations at RMIT and next month will finish a master's degree in business leadership.

"Formal qualifications are not only essential from a credibility standpoint in the industry, but also it is very difficult to understand the legal side of HR unless you formally study it," she says. "Some HR people use advisers for information and occasionally I will need to, too. But I really believe you need to understand it yourself so you can make your own decisions and you can't always get the adviser you want when you need them. We are a 24-hour business so you really need to know the employment law side."

She also sought help from mentors and deliberately expanded her HR network.

"I had built relationships with HR people I had worked with at other companies but I also joined AHRI early on and went to as many events as I could. And I would often ring HR people when I had seen their name or they had just won an award and say, 'I would love to know how you did that.' "

In the last year, of course, others have been ringing her for advice. She warns, however, that regardless of how extensive an HR leader's knowledge and networks are, if they lack influencing and negotiating skills they will struggle to implement any HR strategy.

"You need to be able to read the financials of the business and listen to people about what's not working in their division, and not just from a people perspective. I think it's about listening to people, understanding their challenges and perspectives," she says. "You build relationships with executives through understanding what they need."

And the most important personal attribute of anyone working in HR, she says, is personal integrity. "You need to be independent, impartial and consistently fair, and ensure you apply the same principles to everyone."

© 2006 The Age

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