By | Alexis Saussinan | Global leader, shaping future of work through AI-driven digital people technologies and advanced analytics
Establishing new ways of working – recently heavily influenced by learnings from the COVID-19 pandemic – is much more than just providing employees with appropriate IT infrastructure for their home office. At Merck, we identified and encourage impactful changes in the way we work, learn and lead in the future. Over the past weeks, some of my HR colleagues already shared their thoughts on how to realize our “Future Ways of Working” vision:
- How we Work, Learn and Lead (by Elisabeth Prchla)
- How does a Head of Global Learning learn? (by Laura Krsnik)
- Flexible Working – a benefit for both the employee and employer that also comes with responsibility (by Ralf M. Kania)
- My Thoughts on Leadership (by Tanja Bender)
The driving force behind many (if not all) of those aspects is digitization. For me as Group Head of Merck’s People Data & Technology unit, it is crucial to ensure we make the best out of data and technology to drive high business impact and deliver best-in-class user experience across all our people technologies. I truly believe that data and technology fundamentally has changed and will continue to change the way we work, how we use information, how we collaborate and how we make decisions. How we achieve that at Merck? Let me provide some concrete examples.
Using data and AI to empower leaders to make strategic people decisions
At Merck, we follow a simple dogma: “No Business Plan without a People Plan!”, and no People Plan without data. Making sure that Leaders have the right data to make strategic people decisions has been a focus for several years, and the importance of data has been nothing but growing since the pandemic started. Do our colleagues continue to stay safe, healthy, and engaged? What do we need, as leaders, to focus on now to equip our people and ensure business continuity for our customers and patients? In which areas do we need to double-down to be successful during and after this pandemic? Getting the right people data analytics, on a live basis, truly makes a difference to answer such questions and drive our organization forward.
