A senior HR professional with more than two decades of experience in the field, Zac Thomas is currently the CEO of HR 90Degrees Consulting Services FZ LLC. With a unique blend of engineering and consulting experience, Zac has been driving business transformation over his career journey. Experience spanning across FMCG, Retail Manufacturing, IT, and consulting roles, Zac has expertise as an HR specialist and several specialist roles as well. HR 90Degrees, a professional HR consulting company, aims to transform businesses with the highest quality end-to-end HR solutions. Aligning with this mission, Zac assists organizations in making the right decisions and achieving their long-term goals.
Passion Behind The Journey
To start the interview, we asked, “What sparked your interest in HR, and how did your career evolve into consulting?”
Zac Thomas shared, “I started my career as an Engineer, initially working in a Technology company as a Marketing Engineer. Realized that I was not cut out for this role and so, went back to school and trained in Industrial Engineering & Management. Post my PG, my job was with the National Productivity Council of India, offering industrial engineering and productivity solutions.
Productivity consulting offers a tangible benefit, and the outcomes are measurable and that’s what helped me through the rest of my career. Having started in the hardcore side of HR like job evaluations, manpower planning, and productivity norms it was later easier to move into the softer side of HR covering Talent management, compensation and benefits as well as employee engagement.”
Turning Points In The HR Journey
Interested in the career-defining moments of Zac’s career path, we asked him to share the pivotal moments that shaped his approach to HR leadership.
“The pivotal moment that shaped my approach was an opportunity to transform the Personnel and Admin department of a leading company in Kuwait into a Professional HR function. Coming from an engineering background and armed with consulting experience, I had two distinct advantages coming into HR.
First – a strong affinity for numbers which helped me to analyze data and second – a solution-oriented approach to HR business partnering. This has helped me rise quickly up the career ladder in the corporate world. Of course, ably supported by a boss who had the foresight to understand and approve the transition to structured HR processes.” He explained.
Evolution Of The Field
The HR landscape has significantly transformed over the past two decades. We asked Zac Thomas to share his perspective on this shift.
Zac Thomas responded, “HR practice has evolved significantly over the years; In the last two decades, two sub-functions of HR have advanced the most; the first being talent management and the second being HR process automation. Rightly so the war for talent has intensified significantly and the company’s survival today is dependent solely on two factors – their brands and their people. Talent management has advanced quite a lot with technological advancements in the process of hiring and onboarding as well as the introduction of psychometrics to ensure a better fit of the selected candidates.
HR Process automation has also advanced significantly with most processes being automated and some of the application-driven ensuring that employees can do self-service as well as provide necessary info and approvals on the go using mobile apps or PC based systems. This has improved people’s productivity over the years significantly.”
Tailored Solutions Across Industries
Eager to understand how Zac ensures to bring up tailored solutions, we posed the question, “How do you customize HR solutions to fit the unique challenges of different industries?”
“At HR 90Degrees, whilst providing HR consulting solutions we ask certain critical questions, which include:
- Do your brands get to flex all its muscles or does it lack people resources to take it a notch higher?
- How do you ensure that you have the right resources to deliver your brand and business strategy?
- In this war for talent, what strategies do you have to ensure a continuous supply of Leaders to foster your brand muscles?
- What’s the best way to optimize your resource’s cost base?
These questions help us to prepare the right solutions for them, ensuring efficient results.”
Addressing The Common Gaps
We also asked, “What are some common HR inefficiencies that businesses overlook, and how do you address them?”
“Let me flip the question. The businesses where HR has a seat on the board are the ones ready to deliver the best business strategy. HR can only be a true business partner when HR professionals understand the business processes well. So, the foremost quality for an HR professional and HR department is a thorough understanding of the business – that will help them add value.
The second inefficiency is often due to HR acting up as a ‘come to me’ function as opposed to a ‘go to employees’ function. The day this transformation happens, we can clearly say the HR function has evolved much in that business, and the employees will feel well cared for. Productivity in these organizations will be significantly higher.”
Emerging Trends For Businesses
We further asked, “What emerging trends in talent management should businesses focus on to stay competitive?”
Zac Thomas explained, “In my view, there are 3 emerging trends – the first one being flexibility at work. This can be flexible in terms of work practices like remote work, hybrid work, gig work, etc. The second one is about flexibility in compensation – years back when I introduced flexible benefits in the company it was probably ahead of time even though we had a very small basket to choose from. However today, that is seen as a much-required norm for the current generation of employees. Today’s highly skilled workforce can afford to dictate their terms of engagement and hence employers need to be flexible.
The second emerging trend is the increased influence of AI in businesses; routine jobs will be taken over by AI for sure, but this is where employers need to rethink their business processes and reskill their resources. Not many have started this journey although some have started looking at Digitization and Digital re-engineering. Still in nascent stages but it’s catching up. However, very few companies have looked at re-skilling their workforce, as they fail to realize that the business understanding, organization culture, and values that the current employees hold are invaluable and re-training them would be much more cost-effective than hiring from the market.”
Zac Thomas continued, “The third is a re-emerging trend and that’s the use of Psychometrics extensively to hire, onboard, and develop talent throughout their lifecycle. Psychometric tools have advanced so much with cutting-edge research that businesses can make the right decisions at a very reasonable cost. Unfortunately, very few business leaders decide to invest in psychometric tools in this part of the world but those who have done so are already reaping rich dividends.
To support our clients, we have tied up with a leading European Psychometric assessment company, Clevry. Clevry’s portal helps clients make better hiring decisions by leveraging a scientifically backed, skills-first approach. Clevry helps to combine leading psychometric assessments with recruitment automation tools to avoid costly hiring mistakes and enhance team performance.”
Balancing Strategic Vision With Human Aspects
We asked Zac to share his approach to balancing the strategic and human aspects of HR while advising companies.
Zac Thomas replied, “As I mentioned earlier, if people and brands form the core of your business then strategic actions and HR actions should be absolutely in sync. The day businesses realize this, they will see their productivity-boosting.
We recently had a client approach us for a productivity study to set strategic manpower norms for their chemical process units. The units are profitable and there is no burning platform to do this. However, the CEO felt that now is the best time to rationalize the processes and resources and hence he has embarked on this. What’s more important is that a change story will be much easier to sell in good times rather than in bad times in a business life cycle.”
Busting Common Industry Myths
The HR landscape is often filled with misconceptions that need to be addressed by an industry expert. So, we inquired, “What’s one misconception about HR consulting that you often find yourself correcting?”
Zac Thomas explained, “HR being branded as a support function is the biggest misconception. Most businesses think that putting money into getting the right HR advice is a wasted expense. However, they feel they have no issues spending money on Strategic business consulting. The biggest misunderstanding is that HR is not part of that strategic business consulting.
Any good business strategy would be wasted without focusing on the right organizational structure to deliver the strategy. This is where we come in, helping organizations develop the right people strategy at the optimal cost. The HR function has evolved over the years and therefore the use of analytics and data points to support business growth will make it a valued business partner and an Enabler function.”
Recommended Changes In HR Practices
We lastly asked, “If you could introduce a fundamental change in how businesses approach HR, what would it be?”
“There are two fundamental changes in the business model that I normally recommend to my customers – if they are in the start-up and build phase of growth, leave HR to the external experts and focus on business growth. Have a solid employee engagement HR resource who will keep the workforce engaged and motivated.
On the other hand, if you have a well-established business and are in steady growth or sustenance mode then you have your in-house HR team to focus on employee engagement and career or succession planning. Every 2 years you should be looking at your organization structure and challenge if this structure is capable of delivering the future vision. This will help businesses to constantly evolve.” Zac concluded.
Follow Zac Thomas on LinkedIn.
Find HR 90Degrees Consulting Services FZ LLC on LinkedIn and visit their website http://www.hr90degrees.com
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