Loyalty NZ HR chief lands top award

22 February 2006

Loyalty NZ HR chief lands top award

Loyalty New Zealand Ltd Manager Organisation and People Capability, Adrienne Murray, is the 2005 winner of the coveted HRINZ HR Person of the Year award.

A HortResearch initiative aimed at developing leadership potential within the fruit science company has won the HRINZ HR Initiative of the Year award.

Both honours are presented by the Human Resources Institute of New Zealand (HRINZ). The annual awards form part of the 2005 Workplace Awards and were presented at a gala dinner at Wellington’s Duxton Hotel last night (subs: Wednesday February 22).

Ms Murray, an HR professional for 28 years has an exceptional reputation within New Zealand’s HR community. She has worked internationally, in multi-site organisations and as a consultant to a wide range of organisations from start ups to mature multi-nationals. She has worked with and for leading New Zealand companies in the financial, science, private and public sectors, including the Tertiary Education Commission, PricewaterhouseCoopers, The Correspondence School, NIWA, the State Services Commission and Johnson & Johnson.
Adrienne is an HR professional who exudes competence. Her breadth of experience, gathered over several years working in many industries, offers a special level of maturity and good judgement.

Her current work has involved taking a rapidly growing organisation with little real legacy of HR strategy, process and procedures and instituting an entire programme that moves Loyalty New Zealand forward with proper people processes in place at both organisational and governance levels.

She has shown a consistent pattern of influence in the profession. She has a strong business focus, and clear understanding of technical, humanistic and strategic HR issues.

Well-known for her natural humility and very high personal integrity, Adrienne Murray is an ideal ambassador of excellent HR practice.

The HortResearch “Good to Great” leadership development programme was born out of the company’s recognition that its national and international credibility depended on it transforming its “good” leaders into “great” ones.

HortResearch’s great leadership programme is a sound project where they have developed their own solution to their own specifically identified leadership issues. They showed excellent alignment with their organisational culture, with a robust research base and sound evaluation processes – ones that achieved buy-in and commitment from their audience. This specifically impressed the national judging panel.

This organisation worked with tight fiscal constraints, and showed its understanding of these and operational drivers to come up with solutions that worked. The results speak for themselves over the medium term, and the organisation is committed to taking their leadership learnings to the next level.

The judging panel would also like to note that the Bay of Plenty District Health Board, Career Development Pilot project showed many of these characteristics as well. This project has definite potential for national and international impact and early results are very positive for the organisation.

All entries were of outstanding calibre they were well researched, topical issues with tailored solutions, delivered mainly by the businesses themselves. All finalists were also working in relatively conservative environments and they all came up with innovative solutions.

However tonight the winner is HortResearch.

Congratulations.

The HR awards, now in their seventh year, are sponsored by Tower, the Department of Labour and the Melbourne Business School.

Outward Bound was the overall winner of the Unlimited / John Robertson & Associates Best Places to Work award, also taking out the Small Workplace category. Bearing Point was the winner in the Medium Workplace category and Flight Centre the Large Workplace winner.

ENDS

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