Summary: In this episode, CT interviews Howard Wallack, the Deputy Chief HR and Administrative Officer at Jhpiego, an international health nonprofit organization. Howard shares insights on how to build an elite HR organization to improve the lives of women and children worldwide. He discusses Jhpiego's mission, the growth of the organization, and the challenges of managing a global HR team. Howard emphasizes the importance of clear expectations, continuous learning, and regular communication in building a strong HR organization.

Key Takeaways:

Continuous learning is a priority at Jhpiego, with a strong learning platform and annual ethics safeguarding compliance training for all employees.

Implementing continuous performance management at Jhpiego was challenging but essential for improving communication and productivity within the organization.

Regular one-on-one meetings between supervisors and employees are crucial for building trust and providing feedback.

Jhpiego emphasizes the importance of hiring HR practitioners who are inspired by the organization's mission and have high standards for themselves.

Chapters:

[0:01:47] Growth and expansion of Japaigo's services

[0:05:56] Prioritizing local HR support and stakeholder alignment

[0:08:55] Embracing continuous learning and creating a learning culture

[0:14:27] Maintaining teamwork and frequent touch points through quarterly calls

[0:17:53] Challenges and progress in implementing continuous performance management.

[0:20:38] Hiring dedicated HR practitioners who set high standards for themselves.

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Howard Wallack: Thank you, CT.

CheeTung Leong: Could you tell us a little bit more about Jhpiego and your role within that organization? How you built it up?

We are a donor funded organization that gets support from organizations like USAID the UN, United Nations Population Fund, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and many other donors.

So the organization has grown. Whereas 18, 20 years ago, we were primarily US located with some staff overseas in the last 18 or 20 years under a very visionary president and CEO by the name of Dr Leslie Mancuso. We've really globalized and and localized. Today, we have about 4100 employees in 39 countries around the world.

And then we have either an HR officer, an HR manager, or an HR director, or multiples thereof in each country, depending on our size and the number of projects and the number of employees.

CheeTung Leong: It's amazing the kind of scale that you guys have reached and you said you guys are in 39 different countries. Does every single one of these have an HR representative, or not really?

Howard Wallack: Most of them do, and I should say close to 40 countries who are now, in the 51 years that we've been in existence, we've actually served in 150 different countries. But where we serve... is often dependent on where there's funds for different health initiatives at a time.

CheeTung Leong: Thanks for laying out that in detail. And the reason I'm I, probed on that was because, to support what sounds to be a really complex organization with different specializations, different healthcare legislative regimes you need a really strong HR team. And with that ratio of one is to 55, that's, As you said, it's intense. I can imagine that everyone's double, triple, quadruple hatting and trying to make things work.[00:05:00]

So how have you gone about thinking through building this HR organization to support the broader mission of the organization?

Howard Wallack: I think the first thing CT is to be very clear about where our local HR team members, priorities and stakeholders lie. So whenever we do hire someone in a country and the global HR team, we will interview along with a country director, a chief of party, a technical lead in a medical specialty.

So first, Recruit HR staff very carefully looking for organizational culture and sectoral fit, meaning working in international non governmental organizations is a little bit different than working in normal industry or normal public sector. So we look for people who have that experience or who are willing to learn it.

The, key is to make sure that once hired, the HR person in the country has a seat at the table on the senior management team in the country.

Howard Wallack: First of all, we support the onboarding of every HR member, regardless of where they are around the world. So while we may hire someone in Nigeria and they're going to be learning about the health delivery programs that we're doing in Nigeria, we from Global HR will help to design their onboarding package and make sure that they are trained in the systems we have. For example, our human resource information system. The other things that we do is we try to support continuous learning. So we have a very strong platform called J learn, which is where all of our learning assets are contained.

So we encourage each of our HR practitioners to embrace learning as continuous learners and be role models because they have to roll out these programs. We have a global learning week every year where we suggest some topics, but we invite everybody to get on our platform at least once that week and do something voluntary in terms of learning for themselves. We encourage the HR managers in each country co promote [00:09:00] that program so that we're creating a continuous learning organization.

CheeTung Leong: That's incredible, because if you think about. I'm just doing the math on what you said. With 66, 000 completions, that's quite significant that's about one to one and a half of these programs per month on average that 4, 000 people are doing. That's, huge.

Howard Wallack: One of the things we've done is we've packaged learning. So while some of our courses might be one hour in duration, and then others might be packaged as a curriculum, like our supervisory curriculum.

CheeTung Leong: I can see how that would improve the completion rates and the adoption rates of such things. And I think we were also talking a little bit about associations and professional standards, bodies, qualifications. Could you talk a little bit through about how, you manage that?

Howard Wallack: There's a couple of things that we do. There is an organizational membership organization for international nonprofits called Humentum, which we are a member of.

The other thing that we do is we do recommend that we don't require it that every HR practitioner should belong to their local HR association in whatever country they are in. And. If there is a professional certification, usually with a body of knowledge and exam based that's offered, we encourage them to get that as well.

We just did it this year. Earlier this year. We had 45 of our. Staff, which was the highest ranking HR practitioner from each country. And then some core people from our global human resources team in Baltimore. So we go there every two years. We try to do this. We hold it a different location. And one of the things that we do is we try to mix it up and make sure that the learning is multi directional.

CheeTung Leong: I guess it's almost like a cross pollination of best practices thinking across all the different regions in the world.

Howard Wallack: It's a great event because we go a lot into depth into any policy changes. One of the things that we do across the world is every two years. We update the seller scales in each country, and we update the local HR manual so that it's compliant to the country's labor law. So the HR practitioners in each country do that, and then we at Global Human Resources do quality control.

And what it creates is a great team building. Everybody knows each other. And then after that, to maintain that spirit of teamwork, we organize quarterly calls for everyone in HR. Usually of 2 to 3 hours duration where we'll have a check in point, a touch point to continue the learning or discuss new challenges and new policies.

And so that's how I think when you use the term creating an elite HR team, it's all about having frequent touch points, but also clarity around the expectations for the level of quality of outputs for the salary, salary scale updates against compensation policy consistently around the world.

CheeTung Leong: And maybe let's use a case in point because you mentioned in our conversation earlier that one of the major programs that was implemented across Jhpiego was the continuous performance management. In any organization, for profit or not, this is a tricky thing to implement, and it sounds that cohesiveness within the HR team actually made that implementation quite smooth.

Could you talk through a little bit about that experience?

And only after about three years did we introduce then the continuous performance management. And we recommend that a supervisor to supervisee meet weekly for a half an hour if they can't meet weekly. It can be done every two weeks, and if they can't meet every two weeks, it has to be done at least 12 times a year.

Then we have a platform where people have to go in and once a quarter, they have to document that they met what's the the progress against objectives? And then what are the, high level activities or tasks or goals for the next quarter? The challenge CT when we did this is people have overthought it. We don't need, when they get onto our platform, we don't need a novel. We don't need a long discussion. What we need is one or two if all the, one on ones are taking place, then we just need a corroboration.

And then there's also checkpoints where they can check whether the objectives that they entered earlier in the year are complete in progress, not started or postponed.

I will say one of the challenges in this is that some of our supervisors. Have been resistant and we remind them if you work 40 to 50 hours a week. And even though we have in some countries, a 37. 5 workout hour per week schedule. We know that our people are working a little bit more than that. If you're a supervisor, and you're working 40 to 50 hours a week, a 30 minute meeting with a supervisee is 1 percent of your time. And so we say to the supervisors, focus a little bit less on the clinical stuff that you love, delegate more and step up and supervise your teams by giving them the time, the attention and the undistracted [00:19:00] feedback that they all deserve.

CheeTung Leong: We're almost at time. So if you had to give the chief HR officer, who's looking at building a global HR team. What would be some of the key actionable takeaways that you would like to share from your experience today with this person?

And if we can find the HR practitioners who can do that well, Then we are contributing indirectly to improving the lives of women and children and families around the world. The other thing that I would say is clear expectations for performance. And when, just like in any other part of the business, if someone isn't performing. Give them the right coaching, but give them clarity about what they need to do. And if they're not up to the job, then sometimes separation and termination is better for them and better for our organization. So hire people who've chosen the profession, who have an inclination or a dedication to causes and the nonprofit world and people who themselves set high standards for themselves. So if they set high standards for [00:21:00] themselves and we set high standards for them they're going to rise to the occasion.

CheeTung Leong: Thanks for sharing that wisdom, Howard. And if people want to find you, what's the best way for them to do so?

Howard Wallack: LinkedIn, I'm there!

CheeTung Leong: Thank you so much for hanging out with us today, Howard. For those who are listening, I hope you enjoyed the show. Make sure you leave us a review and tune in next time