Enza Zaden offers HR-internship to SuccessDay trainees
What makes SuccessDay unique, is that their consultants have both HR and IT expertise. But how do you ensure this with trainees who have little or no work experience yet? Enza Zaden, partner of SuccessDay, offered 5 technical consultants in Workday a short but powerful HR internship. In this way the trainees get a much better understanding of the tasks, procedures and HRIT-needs of professionals in different HR roles.
Enza Zaden is a family business that began in 1938 as Enkhuizer Zaadwinkel. It is now an internationally operating vegetable breeding company, which employs around 2800 people, with its head offices in West Friesland. It has grown particularly fast over the past twenty years. But nevertheless, it still exhibits all the characteristics of a family-run business, with a full focus on its employees. With such accelerated growth, Enza Zaden realized a few years ago that it needed to change its way of working if it wants to remain successful in the future.
“We have branches in 28 countries. Our head office is in Enkhuizen, and we also have offices in Germany, Spain, the US, Canada, Mexico, Tanzania, India, and Malaysia. Almost half of Enza Zaden’s employees work in Research & Development (R&D). We focus on more than 30 vegetable crops, including lettuce, sweet paprika, tomato, cucumber, and onion. The seeds are produced and sold all over the world”, says Roland Kool, Global HR Operations Manager at Enza Zaden.
He started at Enza Zaden nine years ago as a Business Process Analyst, and by the end of 2019 he switched to the HR department. He is responsible for HR services and HR applications. Together with CHRO Anke Schouten, he is shaping Enza Zaden’s digital HR portfolio for the coming years. They mapped out the global HR strategy and identified which systems and tools could provide support. “We soon discovered that a global HR system is a must for us. We were working with various local payroll systems, Excel and sometimes even still with pen and paper. Each country has its own systems and processes. There was a need to streamline and standardize those processes”, Roland explains.
A good fit
Since HRIT implementation processes are a lot of work, and you must have the right in-house expertise to manage it properly and Enza was not ready to do this on her own, it searched for the right partner. Enza Zaden enlisted the help of SuccessDay before, during and after the implementation of Workday, the selected global HRIT system. “SuccessDay seemed to be a good fit for us. As a family business we like to figure things out for ourselves and are not so keen on being told what to do by third parties.” SuccessDay helped Enza Zaden with supplier selection, the preparatory phase preceding the implementation, the implementation itself and after care, in the form of Application Managed Services (AMS).
The company from Enkhuizen was nominated for an HR Technology Award this year for its HRIT transformation project and the jury was impressed with how smoothly the implementation has gone so far. With a global HRIT system Enza Zaden has much more insight into its people analytics. Now it knows exactly who is working where and soon it will also know what talents and ambitions people have. “We often used to say that LinkedIn knew more about our own people than we did, but that will change soon! We will be better equipped to ensure that our knowledge does not walk away. And we no longer have to manage based on gut feeling. More and more we can make decisions based on data.”
Strategic HR-partnerships
Roland tells the collaboration with SuccessDay is based on trust. “We don’t have a traditional supplier-customer relationship. I believe the traditional customer-supplier relationship will fade away. It’s all about strategic HR-partnerships. That means that you’re both in it for the long-term and that you want to help each other out. That also includes the exchange of all types of information.” That’s why Enza Zaden offered SuccessDay a helping hand to let their trainees gain more HR expertise. “Several trainees were involved in our HRIT project. Especially Aitor, who worked on the Workday implementation itself, but Alba and Pim also picked up AMS-tickets for Enza Zaden occasionally”, Roland explains.
Roland decided to offer the trainees a short HR internship at Enza Zaden. “The biggest Achilles heel of big consultancy firms like Deloitte and PWC is that they have good technical consultants that know the global HCM systems very well, but they don’t know anything about HR. SuccessDay’s unique selling point is that they combine those worlds. But with their fast growth – SuccessDay recently won a bronze Gazelle Award – a pitfall is that they slowly become a PWC or Deloitte and that you need another SuccessDay. If you hire new young professionals, it’s almost impossible that they have experience in both fields. That’s why we decided to give them an inside look at our HR department.”
That’s where the idea started to let new people of SuccessDay walk around at Enza Zaden to see what life looks like for people who work with the HRIT system they are implementing. Trainee Pim is very appreciative of this approach. “We were split up in two groups. Both groups got the opportunity to join the HR department for a day, to talk to professionals in different roles and to ask as many questions as we liked. The main objective was to get an insight in the HR tasks, to experience a day in the life of people at the HR department, learn more about HR processes and employee journeys, et cetera. We got a perfect glimpse on the other side of the system.”
A much better insight
Alba adds: “As an HRIT consultant we need to have this HR background and not all of us had that when we started with the traineeship. That’s because SuccessDay expands so rapidly and decided to train young professionals themselves. Because of the HR internship at Enza Zaden we have a much better insight into the tasks, roles, processes, and expectations and needs of HR professionals of an HRIT system, which differ by role. For instance, we had a planned meeting with an HR business partner and someone from HR operations. The different HR roles look at HRIT systems from a different angle. Now I know that we must adjust our language and topics when we are discussing the HRIT system: with HR management you tell them how the system can help them with their HR strategy, with operations you’ll tell them how the system can make their life much easier and reduce paperwork.”
Alba wants to express that it was also interesting to talk with the HR people of Enza Zaden about change management and how their attitude sometimes shifted during or after the implementation of Workday. “They told me how they experience this change, sometimes there was some resistance beforehand, and how they are adjusting. In general, you see that people are getting more experienced with the system and the start to recognize the added value of it. They ask for specific reports and ask for demos.”
Boosting careers of young professionals
Pim laments that almost everything is going digital these days. “Digitalization has huge benefits – I’m doing this interview in my home in Norway for instance. But the downside is that the personal side of things just fades away. I hardly meet any of my customers in real life. Even though I can do my work remotely on my laptop, it’s always nice to get to know people and make real connections.” Alba is happy that she met some of the people behind the AMS tickets she sometimes picks up. “If I know the person and know how he or she talks and what he or she does and wants, I can definitely help them better.”
In conclusion, Roland wants to say that good HRIT consultants must have feeling with their customers. “Know what they are doing, how the system is being used and what their specific needs are. That’s the primary added value of SuccessDay. So, keep up the good work. We’re happy to help them out.” Enza Zaden wants to evaluate the HR internship with SuccessDay, enhance it and then offer it to a new class of trainees of SuccessDay in the future. Roland hopes other companies will follow this example. “Boosting the careers of young professionals with internships in general and strategic partnerships with clients is always a good idea. As strategic partners there is always some mutual exchange. In this way we can be both successful.”
Roland Kool
Global HR Operations Manager at Enza Zaden
