COVER STORY / HRD WHO’S WHO LIST
Bernadette McBarron HR director Australia Amgen WHY HOT? Despite having been with the biotechnology and pharmaceuticals company for just over a year, McBarron has a strong plan for the future. She priortises basics, such as effective onboarding, clear role definitions, goal setting, and constant reinforcement of the company’s EVP, which always emphasises the quality of life that Amgen’s products provide to patients. She also has plenty of experience to draw on, having held international HR/L&D roles across the Asia-Pacific and Africa for over a decade. These strong HR foundations, as well as the ever-popular employee perk of finishing at 2pm one Friday every month – and every Friday in January – has secured the company ‘best employer’ citations, including a number 16 spot on the 2013 Business Review Weekly (BRW) Top Employers list.
Alec Bashinsky Partner, People and Performance Deloitte WHY HOT? It wouldn’t be a ‘who’s who’ list without Bashinsky, who remains one of HR’s most eloquent spokesmen and is Deloitte’s undisputed HR guiding light. The 2011 HR Director of the Year has been at the forefront of technology in the HR space for many years, advocating internal communication channels such as Yammer and YamJam long before most knew what these platforms even were. He also advises that if automation and simplification of backend and frontend HR transactions is not happening now, HR teams “are being wasted”. Doing so, he says, allows HR to do more coaching, influencing and facilitating in the business. It also opens HR up to the merits of predictive talent data. “Anyone can look at data with a past perspective, but how do we understand what’s going to happen in the future?” he says.
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Bob Hogarth General manager, human resources Heritage Bank WHY HOT? Hogarth has been in his current role for the past 16 years – an impressive tenure by any reckoning. The 2012 Australian HR Awards team leader of the year is still excited and challenged by the role, which has changed as Heritage has become more successful in a competitive industry. He concedes that his role has likewise grown in complexity, sophistication and demands and bears little resemblance to the role he first started in. He’s worked hard to develop HR’s capability and credibility at Heritage; this is the only way to gain traction, he says. “You’ve got to work out what is it that the decision-maker values. As long as you can measure the initiative against what they value, then you’ll get a hearing. We often get tied up with something we love, so we pitch that, but we forget: what is it other areas of the business love?”
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