HRM sat down with Atlassian’s Chief People Officer, Avani Prabhakar CPHR, to learn how the foundational HR capabilities she embedded early in her career are serving her well today.

In my first-ever HR role, I wasn’t allowed to work in the HR function for the first two years. That might sound strange – an HR practitioner who doesn’t practise HR – but it was part of a unique HR leadership program at GE Capital in the late 1990s.

The leadership team felt that before anyone was truly ready to work in HR, they first needed to deeply understand every inch of the business. It was one of the first big businesses to position HR as a business function rather than a support function.

Over those two years, I rotated through the financial insurance, pricing, analytics, quality and underwriting teams. This wasn’t just an extended onboarding program; it was something GE took seriously. For example, I had to become Six Sigma-certified in the quality team in order to work in HR. 

Once I had a comprehensive view of how the business operated, I was finally ready to step into the HR function. I am forever grateful for this experience. It provided me with a solid foundation on which I could layer my HR expertise, it taught me how HR fits into the broader business strategy and it gave me the gift of business acumen from an early career stage. Now, if you asked me to read a P&L sheet, I could do so with the same confidence as anyone in the finance team. 

1. Working across different businesses and geographies 

I worked at GE for over seven years and learned a lot from the business context at the time. 

In the early 2000s, during the boom of the business process outsourcing industry and IT-enabled services, we were going through a period of massive growth. We were hiring around 10,000 employees per month.

It was an exciting time to work for such a large business, but I had a great mentor at the time who said to me, “In order to be a well-rounded HR professional, you need to see the other side of a different business and experience a different business lifecycle.” So I did a 180-degree pivot from this fast-paced business to a bureaucratic, traditional company, British Airways, where I worked as an HR Manager.

It took me nearly 12 months to adjust to this new way of working. They didn’t use PowerPoint presentations – everything was just documented on pages and pages of Word documents – and they didn’t have a 12-month plan like I was used to. They were focused on solving the challenges in front of them.

While the transition was initially challenging, I gained incredibly valuable skills in managing change in a highly regulated, highly unionised business environment. At the time, the company was going through a massive period of mergers, acquisitions and demergers (Qantas and British Airways were separating), so I was managing a lot of complex people-related challenges across a variety of regions.

I now tell my teams that the one way to grow quickly in HR is to work across different geographies. At British Airways, I worked across the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, Asia and Australia. 

I remember being escorted by security guards in Johannesburg to have difficult conversations with the unions because things could quickly get out of hand. 

I remember being in the Middle East and realising I was the only woman in the room, so when I gave my perspective on an issue, it only counted on a 1:7 ratio.

All of this gave me exposure to complex change management projects and taught me how to drive change in a highly regulated environment. For example, we always had to be prepared for a strike. Every decision you make in those moments carries a lot of weight – you’re making plans for how you’d roll out an entirely new ground crew if you needed to, and assessing the business impact if the company had to ground an entire fleet of planes. 

These are all valuable life skills that served me well in smaller-scale negotiations and contingency planning throughout my career.

2. Understanding a business at three levels

The training ground provided by these two roles was fundamental in helping me become an effective HR practitioner. The skills they afforded me are critical for anyone with aspirations of stepping into HR leadership.

Most of the great HR leaders I’ve encountered are people who’ve done a business rotation or have come from other parts of the business. It means there are fewer friction points when it comes to quantifying HR outcomes or knowing how to make them relatable to the broader business goals. It all becomes second nature.

I now tell anyone who’s looking to rise up in the HR ranks that they need to understand the business at three levels. First, you need to deeply understand the product or service. That doesn’t just mean knowing about the product you’re selling, but knowing it well enough that you’d be confident making a sales pitch.

The second level is all about knowing the customer deeply and understanding their pain points and needs. The third level is P&L. This is the nerve centre of your business, so it should be at the centre of your HR practice.

You need to know these areas of the business like the back of your hand before you can come to the table to advise on people matters.

How you do that is a different story, and it often comes down to your company’s culture. At Atlassian, I could sit in on a meeting with the product team and no one would question that because learning about other functions of our business is part of how we operate.

In your own organisation, you could sit in on a customer call once per quarter, or seek out notes from the sales team’s meetings, so you can learn about their priorities. Regularly meet with the product and finance teams and ask them questions. In my experience, they are always willing and excited to share their insights with others in the business.

As we continue moving into a more complex business environment, being able to demonstrate a deep proficiency in these three areas becomes non-negotiable. That’s how we’ll shift mindsets about the value of HR.

“You need to know the business like the back of your hand before you can advise on people matters.” – Avani Prabhakar CPHR, Chief People Officer, Atlassian

3. Designing an agile HR team 

When people join our HR team at Atlassian, they’ll often say things like, “This is how Google does it,” or “This is best-practice based on the latest research.” But I always tell my team to meet the business where it’s at.

Some organisations might develop a talent framework and say, “Okay, you have to do a nine-block review,” or, “You have to use this specific talent assessment.” But we almost always start from scratch, and we don’t build plans at an enterprise level in the first instance. 

You usually have to make some kind of trade-off when you’re starting from scratch on these things. You either need to optimise for speed or scalability. So we have developed a model that tells us the things that are fungible and flexible versus fixed. This helps us determine if something is a one-way door decision (big and hard to reverse) or a two-way door decision (flexible and easier to reverse).

We take an agile approach to HR, meaning we start small. We pick out a subsect of the product team, for example, and experiment with a talent approach that makes sense for them. We might run that experience for three to six months and then, once we’ve learned what works, we’d roll that out across the organisation.

A challenge we’re still working through is how we then scale that for a 12,000-strong team. But the agility we’ve built into our HR function means we’re able to work much faster. For example, last year we made a pivot in our performance management system that would take most organisations around two years to change and launch, but we were able to do it in six months. 

4. Taking a ‘pod approach’ to HR

We take an organisation-wide approach for some HR initiatives, such as program management, promotions and benefits, but then we have bespoke HR programs for different business functions.

Many Chief People Officers try to merge the two programs because they think they’ll end up with two very independent bodies of work, but my philosophy has always been to keep them in parallel. Conflict emerges once you start merging those functions, in my experience.

We’ve designed a centre of excellence (CoE) pod model for our HR teams at Atlassian. 

I assign an HRBP to a specific business function. That unit has its own OKRs, and underneath each one will be a people-related key result. 

The HRBPs will work closely with their CoE business partner, and essentially operate like a mini HR team dedicated to working for one part of the organisation.

They will then bring their insights back to the central team, so we can all learn about how ‘X’ approach works well for those in the engineering team, but ‘Y’ approach might work better for those in the sales team.

Across Atlassian more broadly, the way work gets done is also different. Project teams are built into ‘squads’ – cross-functional, autonomous teams typically made up of eight to 10 employees. We work in squads right up to the highest parts of the business, and there’s an HR representative on each squad.

When a member of the HR team is sitting on a squad, they’re not there as a people expert; they are deeply ingrained in the project. HR is right there where the work is happening.

5. Understanding employees’ pain points

Whenever I’ve been in a position where I’m not able to make headway with my peers on the business side, I’ve realised I needed to start two or three clicks down in the business.

Usually the leaders sitting at your peer group level don’t have that level of insight into their own teams, so they appreciate when someone brings that well-rounded view of their team, but not from a pure HR perspective – you’re not saying, “This is the talent gap in your market” – because leaders often feel they don’t have the time for ‘HR speak’. But if you say, “I’ve learned about these three things that are impacting the output you’re hoping to achieve,” then they’ll listen to you.

Go deep and learn as much as you can about employees’ pain points. Over time, that information becomes your currency in the organisation. 

A longer version of this article was originally published in the August/September 2024 edition of HRM Magazine.

Want to take your HR career to the next level? AHRI’s HR Certification program is designed to increase your influence and visibility across your organisation.