“I always joke that it taught me less about the
capability itself but a lot about being resilient in a
role where things can change every hour of the day,”
de Noronha says. “And that’s the nature of HR. HR
is about people and people change, so it’s important
to be resilient in times that are easier and times that
are tougher.”
She describes her next move into private equity as
her “first real encounter with the corporate world”
and her “stepping stone” between advisory and a
full-time corporate role. It was here she had an
“epiphany”: “I was sitting on the board of two
companies and I remember thinking ‘these
individuals know more about the business than I do,
what am I doing here telling them what they should
do? I should be on the other side of the table
learning about the business’. And that’s when I
decided to move into the corporate world.”
Moving to Kraft Heinz as director of sales met
this desire, de Noronha says. But then her mentor
Melissa Werneck, Kraft Heinz’s global CPO, inspired
her to move into HR as head of talent. “She saw
something in me I don’t think I realised I had, which
was the ability to connect with people and help
build capability for the business by understanding
what the business needs and what people need to
deliver that,” she says.
“My first responsibility was being given a blank
piece of paper and being asked to build a team and
all these things,” she says.
So de Noronha set about first building a graduate
trainee programme to attract young talent to the
organisation, which includes a 10-week live business
project aiming to solve a real business challenge. It’s
something de Noronha calls her “proudest
achievement”, pointing to retention rates of more
than 80% for employees who have gone through
the programme.
Then came her promotion to heading up people
and performance across all of EMEA – a role she
admits has its “complexities”. “It’s a very different
agenda to what I focused on in 2016,” she says.
“Today we have the agenda of following the growth
of the organisation.
“So when we think about what the organisation
needs to do to grow: we can grow our existing
business, we can grow through new categories, or we
can grow through new geographies.”
One thing de Noronha quickly realised was that
to support this growth the people and performance
function needed to look for talent with different
profiles than it had sought in the past. “To do those
three things we need to fill the organisation with
individuals who have an entrepreneurial mindset,”
she explains, adding that this need is amplified
because of the scope of the EMEA zone.
“The markets in the Middle East and Africa are
very much a white space for us, so there’s huge
growth potential there,” she says. “There’s a very
HR is about people and
people change so it’s important
to be resilient in times that are
easier and that are tougher
different profile needed for someone who’s going
into new market opportunities than for someone
who needs to grow a mature market.”
Getting the right talent into each market has
involved developing the workforce already there,
recruiting locally, as well as giving the “opportunity
to our people who aren’t in these markets at the
moment but have the right entrepreneurial profile”.
It’s this focus on bringing in more diverse talent
that de Noronha believes will foster growth. It was
also a driver behind her decision to revamp the
organisation’s parental policies into what she
describes as a “holistic approach”.
Key to this has been making language more
inclusive “so we don’t call it maternity or paternity
leave or mothers or fathers, we call it primary and
secondary carers”, she says. “You could be having a
surrogate, have a notice of adoption or be pregnant.
Whichever way and whichever parent you are,
whether the primary or secondary carer, we’re here
to support you.”
The second part, says de Noronha, is about
“looking at the whole span of parental experience
rather than just one stage”. This means supporting
employees at all stages, including the planning stage
(when someone decides they want to become a
parent), the pre-leave stage (when someone is
pregnant or has put in a notice for adoption), the
leave stage (where the employee can stay connected
as much or as little as they wish), and the return to
work stage (where the organisation supports their
needs for flexibility).
She is no stranger to the importance of this
support, having herself gone on parental leave while
at Kraft Heinz. “Yes it’s close to my heart but that’s
not why I did it,” she says. “If we don’t do it we don’t
foster a balance in the company, which is needed in
Strategic HR Profile
CV
Education
University of Virginia
BA in economics
2017 – Present
VP people and
performance EMEA
Kraft Heinz
Company
2016 – 2017
Head of talent
Europe
Kraft Heinz
Company
2015 – 2016
Sales director, Tesco
Kraft Heinz
Company
2013 – 2015
Director, merchant
banking
BTG Pactual
2010 – 2013
Associate director,
merchant banking
BTG Pactual
2008 – 2010
Associate
First Reserve
2006 – 2008
Analyst M&A
Lehman Brothers
28 HR June 2019 hrmagazine.co.uk
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