Exclusive Interview with Samantha Chestney - HR Director, APAC at LexisNexis

1. Could you tell me a little bit more about yourself and your role at Lexis Nexis?

    I am accountable for the end to end HR leadership, strategy and function at LN across the APAC region (9 countries with 9 diverse jurisdictional frameworks). 

    

2. What are you focused on right now?

    Primary focus areas right now are Employee Engagement, Performance Management, Talent Review & Succession mapping, profiling and accelerating leadership capability via regional Mentoring Program, Meet the Leader Series & 360 Degree Feedback opportunities. In addition to the above, also undertaking rigorous process around budgeting and commercials.

    

3. How is the role of the HR function within Lexis Nexis responding to the current aims and challenges of your business?

    At LN, our customers are at the centre of everything we do.  As such we are always focused on customer centricity, the Customer Experience (“CX”) and Customer Net Promoter Score (“NPS”).  The HR function responds by marrying the CX with the Employee Experience (“EX”).  There is a very intimate and critical relationship between the two. We strive to create an exceptional employee experience for our culturally and generationally diverse workforce.  Employee NPS and our EVP is therefore critical with ensuring that we retain our top talent creating a stable and sustainable workforce that then delivers greater outcomes for our customers. Our HR team’s challenge is to adopt an agile approach and mindset in the way we listen and respond to our business in providing commercial value and priority of initiatives.

    

4. What do you see as the main challenge that the HR function faces in the future?

    In the APAC business, there are two things that come to top of mind:

1. Elevating Human Capital:  Acquiring human capital and optimizing human capital investments. On deeply analyzing our challenges and our workforce, it’s difficult to retain top talent and attract the best candidates, as well as envisage the future skills and capability we will need in an evolving disruptive technology landscape. Challenge is how will we compete with AI and Bots?
2. Flexible Work Arrangements:  We are a progressive information analytics company who pride themselves on advancing the rule of law, possessing rich data and enabling best practice initiatives.  With this we are on a journey to move away from our traditional desk-based workplace practices. Challenge is how will we measure productivity and ROI of our employees working remotely? 

1. What key characteristics do you look for in HR professionals when recruiting for your team?

    My top 5 are:  Agility & Resilience | Financial Acumen  |  Confidentiality  |  Strong Ethics  | Solid communicator

2. What is the best career advice you have ever been given?

    Two things for HR:  1. Lead with your heart, then your mind. People are unique, there’s no one size fits all.  2. Leadership is influence, feedback is a gift.

3. What do you love most about your role?

    People are awesome beings.  Everyone is unique.  My role enables me to liaise and deal with, all types of issues and emotions, levels of hierarchy and resilience within the business and diverse cultures around the globe. Human behaviour is contagious, stimulating and intriguing.

    

4. Best place or holiday destination you have visited?

Crans Montana comes to mind first. Crans-Montana is a quaint and culture-rich municipality in the district of Sierre in the canton of Valais, Switzerland. I was fortunate enough to visit there in the Winter for work and pleasure with a previous role/organisation.  It was the perfect fairy-tale picture of a winter wonderland including open log fires while sipping classified Bordeaux wine.