Anne Lorgen Riise is Executive Vice President for HR in Mowi ASA. Prior to this, she has held roles in both the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Fisheries. With a long and varied career behind her, Lorgen Riise shares her experiences with Leadership Weekly.
What is your top priority for HR going forward and how are you tackling this?
Mowi's HR strategy is centered around the areas "Culture, Organization Excellence, Talent and Future navigation".
We work purposefully to attract, engage, develop and retain our highly competent managers and employees. We aim to position ourselves as an attractive employer and build a strong corporate culture, where diversity, inclusion, mobility and continuous learning play a key role.
Expectations of us as a company are changing in line with society. Today, we work strategically and long-term with sustainability and were recently named the world's most sustainable protein producer in the world for the second time in a row. We are very proud of this recognition. This is important for us, for our employees and for the world. Our goal is to maintain our position and contribute to more sustainable food production in the future.
In a fast-changing world, we know that continuous learning is necessary, but also something that creates engagement and involvement among employees. It's important for us to reach as many people as possible, which is why we invest heavily in digital learning opportunities and building a strong learning culture.
In an increasingly digitalized world, developing future leaders is a priority. We have just launched a fully digital global leadership development program for our future senior leaders called Mowi Next. In this program, we place great emphasis on building a shared global leadership culture, promoting transformational leadership, and commercial leadership skills. We are very excited and look forward to rolling out through 2021.
To succeed, we must not only understand future skills needs, but also adapt the organization accordingly. For several years, HR has been working to digitize and automate several of our core processes. When many of the time-consuming tasks that HR and managers have to do are digitized, it frees up time for strategic culture and talent development. It also helps us to maintain a lean, efficient and adaptable function. In the longer term, the goal is to make even greater use of data for insight and good decision-making.
What are your main ambitions for development at your company?
We closely follow developments in society in general and the industry in particular, and try to understand and anticipate what the future skills needs will be. This has an impact on what kind of managers and leadership development we should have, what they should know, when they should know it and how they should learn what they need. We manage our development according to what we call The Mowi Way, which says something about who we are, what we stand for and how we make decisions. We actively apply our vision of leading the blue revolution, our 4 values and the leadership principles Inspire People, Live the values, Make it happen and Think and act.
We are committed to learning on the job, implementing change, facilitating and inspiring everyday innovation, and saying that it's okay to try and fail.
What have you done to further develop your own skills?
I learn something new at work every day. We have a lot of talented and smart people working at Mowi, and if you listen, you can pick up new knowledge all the time. I'm curious and ask a lot of questions, and in that way I gain a lot of new knowledge. I also read a lot of articles and have participated in several digital courses and conferences over the past year. Sometimes during the year I try to attend things that are a little outside my comfort zone. In terms of formal learning, I recently completed a leadership course at Harvard. The most important area of expertise I've recently familiarized myself with is the social part of sustainability, which as a global company we must, and are expected to, deliver strong results on.
What is the most important experience you have gained in the past year?
The past year has shown me the importance of the workplace and how strong and important the social community at work is for people. Those who have been working from home have missed colleagues, and those who have been at work have missed those who have not been there. We spend a lot of time at work throughout our lives, and a good, social and inclusive working environment is more important than ever.
The pandemic has shown us the importance of long-term preparedness work and crisis management. As a company that lives close to the forces of nature in many places, we have been working on this for many years, and we have now seen in practice how it pays off. Our units around the world have stood firm here and contributed to the success of our operations during a difficult period.
Development is also about how to work across multiple disciplines to solve the problems of the future. With good digital platforms, we have been able to form better and more teams across disciplines through an expanded virtual network. This has strengthened the organization during this time.
Who impresses you and why?
"We have many thousands of employees who have their jobs in production and out on the cage edge. They have been at work every day throughout the coronavirus pandemic and ensured that the company has been able to keep production going. They have loyally supported all the corona measures and helped people both at work and in society to stay healthy. There has been a lot of talk about home office workers during this time, and all the challenges this has brought with it. It's easy to forget that for a large part of the workforce, working from home isn't even an option. They deserve praise, respect and our gratitude.
I would also like to send a special thought to all employees with a foreign background who have stood up for us, but who have not been able to travel to their home countries to visit family and friends during the pandemic. They may have had an extra hard time. We are proud of and dependent on labor from other countries, and we must also take care of each other during this time.