On the 25th of November, I had the pleasure of hosting The Second Digital Middle Eastern FP&A Board that featured five presentations on building FP&A teams in the New Normal.
Making the Most of FP&A Critical Roles at Gallagher
Matt Poleski, regional CFO at Gallagher, took us through how the teams are set up in his company and how the different roles interact with each other.
With 50 strong members in the team serving 70 locations in 10 regions, they had to balance local field needs with macro trends they see across the organisation. Splitting the team into a matrix, with 5 critical roles (please see below), has proved to be the optimum way.
There is often conflict between these roles. Matt shared with us how to best manage these conflicts and turn them into business partnering opportunities:
Our first poll was on the most important FP&A role for the organisation. The softer skills were much more prominent at 62% which highlighted the huge potential that still exists through skills in the Analyst /Architect / Data Scientist area.
Building Synergistic & Cross-Cultural Teams at Bayer
Irena Pavunkovic, VP Corporate Controlling & Project Management at Bayer, explained what the New Normal meant for Bayer, how they reacted to it and how they build and sustained synergistic & cross-cultural teams.
The slide below best summarises the three key steps to building synergistic FP&A teams.
In her closing statement, Irena stressed the importance of the following 5 elements:
Align & Focus – engage early, involve in the process connecting individual work to common goals
Collaborate – create & foster platforms to inform, share best practices and new ideas (with greater intent in virtual environment)
Develop & Grow – reskill for the “new normal” in the age of data and digitalization and create opportunities for individual growth
Mindset – focus on value drivers, results over perfection, mind the language (“Us” vs. “Them”)
Have Fun! – reward good performance and celebrate successes
Our second poll, which looked at the biggest barrier to team synergy showed that the majority 34% was due to lack of alignment around goals and 26% because of different mindsets which shows the importance of goal setting and ensuring these are well communicated and understood by team members. This will indeed help improve mindset and knowledge deficit through communication.
Adapting FP&A Teams at AP Moller Maersk
Joao Almieda, Chief Financial Officer Hubs – A.P Moller Maersk, talked about how his organisation had to change to adapt to the New Normal especially around building & sustaining award-winning FP&A teams six key areas:
Vision and understanding
Strong leadership
Clear roadmap
Capability Building
Strong soft skills
Strong sense of loyalty
In conclusion, in times of uncertainties, we need to ensure we remain relevant through Digital Way of Working, keep a Continuous Learning & Development Mindset and Lead with Vision & Passion.
Our third poll highlighted the challenges of remote working with 35% feeling lonely and lack of human interaction and more surprising that 41% felt there were communication issues. Leaders understand these challenges and try to better manage them. For example, Irena mentioned use of Yammer as an informal chat tool, buddying up with people to ensure we have someone to talk to and most of all the usual Monday morning / Friday afternoon zoom calls.
Using Technology for FP&A Team Building
In his presentation, Andreas Simon, Director EMEA at Jedox, shared how 86% of organisations are still using Excel as the foundation for their planning process (hardly any change from 30 years ago) and what are the issues with using Excel compared to a planning tool.
The two slides below explain collaborative planning and how new tools today works so FP&A can free up time add value by becoming Strategists.
The final poll, which looked at the use of modern collaborative technology, surprisingly showed only 34% of companies do. Encouragingly 53% are planning to implement and the rest will hopefully follow soon. Key takeaway is whether you are using tools or not, people have to collaborate.
What are the Latest Trends in FP&A Recruitment?
Joe Robinson, Manager at Michael Page, shared an overview of what organisations are looking for in terms of skillset from FP&A recruitment, relevance of FP&A and finally how to market yourself as FP&A professional.
What are clients looking for in FP&A recruitment:
Ability to tell the story behind the numbers.
Eloquence is crucial.
Modelling skills are highly in demand.
Clients are differentiating by ambition
How best to market yourself as an FP&A professional:
Balancing the emphasis of technical skills vs softer skills.
Play to your strengths, specialist or generalist?
You must be a Business Partner!
How have you made a difference?
Conclusions
COVID-19 and potentially other black swan have taught us the importance of recruiting & having great synergistic team, ensuring their welfare, making sure we assess the skill sets required for the changing world and leveraging technology to ensure best performance.
We would like to thank our global sponsors and partners Jedox and Michael Page, for their great support with the second Middle East FP&A Board.
Also, we are very grateful to our panel of expert for delivering great presentations and insights and to the FP&A Board attendees!
