Panasonic: ‘UNLEASH America is an opportunity to learn from others’

UNLEASH America is almost upon us!

In fact, it’s less than a week away. And to share our excitement, we wanted to give our readers an exclusive insight into the thoughts of one of our highly influential speakers – Liz Almeida.

Having been in HR for over 20 years, Almeida, Chief Human Resources Officer for Panasonic North America, will be taking center stage at UNLEASH America alongside Microsoft’s Andrew Winnemore, Trimble’s Jaime Nielsen, and Singularity University’s Gary Bolles.  

The group’s session, titled Steering the Course of Holistic Transformation in the Era of Intelligent Services, will take a deep dive into HR’s pivotal role in driving long-term, holistic transformation within organizations. 

Panasonic’s Liz Almeida

Almeida, who says she’s “thrilled” to be speaking at the event, will be highlighting how the infusion of technology into the dynamic landscape of HR is transforming the world of work. “It’s not just about how we work,” she explains, “but when we work and how we connect with each others.

“Intelligent technology and the emerging digital platforms are really reshaping talent management and organizational developments. We’re excited to explore the opportunities from integrating HR into the overall landscape and thinking about the organizational capabilities that we need to build more broadly.” 

UNLEASH sat down with Almeida for an exclusive pre-event interview to get the inside track into how Panasonic is integrating intelligent technology to enhance HR’s value proposition, to discuss her expectations for the future of HR, and many, many more insightful topics. 

Facilitating change through employee satisfaction  

Although Almeida has several priorities at Panasonic, one specific area of focus is the integration of intelligent technology in facilitating the long-term HR strategy. This includes seeking to discover new ways in which Panasonic can use tech as a facilitator for changes in workplace dynamics and operations.  

For example, how is Panasonic completing the work? How are teams interacting with each other across different functional areas, to have more integrated services and experiences – both internally and externally? 

To address this, Almeida explains: “In our latest iteration of what we’re calling HR transformation, we’re partnering very deeply, not just with IT, but with the finance organization, too.  

For instance, with our new employee or onboarding experience we’re looking at different functional workflows to understand what that experience need to look like to get employees started more effectively and with fewer to-do items.

“As a new joiner, you might need to understand not just the expense policy but where to find the tools and resources to start using this application as part of your day-to-day remit, e.g. a sales employee traveling regularly.

“You may have a trip in your first month in the role, so how can we make sure you have access to the tools and resources necessary to do your job?”

For this to be effectively achieved, Almeida believes that it needs to be a collaborative effort across functions. For example, HR is responsible for facilitating the onboarding process, finance is responsible for the policy, and IT is responsible for the tools.

In essence, this all relates back to employee satisfaction, and the work that Almeida and the wider team at Panasonic have inputted to ensure the business is meeting evolving employee expectations and priorities – a task that is no mean feat. 

In fact, to demonstrate the business’ commitment to reaching employee expectations, Panasonic is currently deploying co-creating employee experience by persona.

We’re focused on employee wellbeing,” Almeida highlights. “When it comes to work, this is going to be different for each employee.  

“We have many different employee segments at Panasonic, so understanding what their day to day looks like, and how they draw upon the services from HR, is very important to us.” 

Fostering a culture of continuous learning and adaptation 

There’s no hard and fast answer as to how business leaders can encourage employees to upskill and continue their growth – but for Almeida, it’s important that knowledge is built upon bit by bit. 

She states that for her, some of the key differences come from the variety of generations in the workforce, explaining that learning has changed in general, not just in corporate America.  

“How people learn varies,” Almeida notes. “At Panasonic, there are multimodal ways of learning, including micro learning, which is a very important part of the mix for us. We work with a learning provider that empowers our employees to create custom, daily learning plans focused on areas they want to grow in.” 

These modules require employees to invest just a few minutes of time each day, making it easy to build into daily routines and providing an opportunity to incorporate learning into the flow of work. This is particularly important, as it’s complementary to long-term learning commitments. 

To do so, Panasonic has partnered with Blue Ocean Brain to create custom learning paths or campaigns on topics targeting specific business unit employees or personas such as people managers to drip feed key content ranging from fast finance to being an inclusive leader. 

We try to take advantage of these moments that matter, so employees can draw from micro learning, while also applying that in an experience,” she adds.

“In accelerating their professional development, we need to think about what learning and development looks like in the workplace going forward – it’s more than just having that training component, it’s the exponential component as well.”

Looking ahead at Panasonic’s HR prioritize

With UNLEASH America just around the corner, we just had to take advantage of this opportunity with Almeida to gain exclusive insights as to what her top priorities are for the future of HR.  

So, of course, we asked her the all-important question: What are your top three HR prioritize going forward? To which she happily shared her insights.

“With tech advancing at its current pace, I believe we must remain connected to our people and curious about their expectations and experiences,” she highlights.

“From a technology perspective, we are at an inflection point where there are so many options available to us to think about how we curate that experience in the workplace.  

We have to remember that technology facilitates the longer-term HR strategy. If the strategy is not clear, it doesn’t really matter what technology we put in place.” 

She continues to explain that strategy must remain culture focused; it will always take priority, especially when looking at how technology can enable it.  

Offering her concluding point, Almeida explains that as we are living in an age where we have access to so much data and information, there’s a capability around really being able to build the insights and drive value from those insights into the businesses.  

“It’s going to take more than being able to slice and dice data,” she concludes. “We must be very clear about the ‘so what?’ of that data and how we apply it to the business.

“For example, can we realistically act on these insights? Can we make a positive change based on what we see in the data? That’s the lens we are always looking through and the questions we are asking one another. 

“This is my first time attending UNLEASH America, so I’m excited to participate, connect and discuss these topics with other like-minded leaders across the conference. But, more importantly, I’m taking UNLEASH America as an opportunity to learn from others – to understand where they are in their journey and how they might have approached similar challenges we’re facing at Panasonic.  

“I frame these as opportunities, not challenges, because I think from that comes growth.” 

UNLEASH America 2024: Joining us?

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