Martha Sami

I'm responsible for the company's Human Resources activities; talent acquisition, talent management and compensation & benefits.

My role is being fully responsible for all People related activities across North Africa.

Staffing, learning and development, compensation and benefits in addition to personnel.

- Strategic Planning and Change Management
o Part of the Senior Management Team for Egypt & Algeria where I am involved in constructing the company vision.
o Assisting and guiding heads of departments into the optimum team structure and streamline staffing for sustainable succession and matching the revenue generated.
o Local and regional reporting on all activities across HR centers of excellence; staffing, compensation and benefits, Learning and development.
o Managed outsourcing of headcount to contractors ensuring smooth operations with no additional headcount and legalizing informal employment.
- Compensation & Benefits
o Lead and managed the execution of Compensation and Benefits meritocracy strategy for annual salary/merit increase, market adjustments, promotions and bonus payouts and ensured employee differentiation takes place based on performance.
o Created and launched salary increases controlled tool to assist managers remain within guidelines while applying increases to their employees.
o Trained and coached managers on the reward strategy of the company and the different reward combinations that managers can use to form an attractive package to retain employees rather than solely depending on the salary.
o Team restructure with adequate severance payment to ensure the fairness of the process and opening doors for exiting employees.
- Learning & Development:
o Performance Management: Launched 2 performance management electronic platforms and fully managed the roll-out process.
o Initiated a schedule for weekly internal trainings to be developed and run by the senior team to ensure the continuous growth and learning of employees
- Legal & Government Compliance:
o Developed part time contracts for Egypt and Algeria that protects the company from part-timers legal potential disputes.

Compensation & Benefits
o Responsible for Annual Salary/Merit Increase, promotions and bonus payouts for South Africa for 2010, 2011 and 2012.
o Roll out of the banding and titles to match Nielsen jobs globally in South Africa.
o Developed with another team member the salary benchmarks for 7 countries out of relevant market salary surveys selected.
- Performance Management:
o Trained and tracked more than 300 employees from all 11 Nielsen offices in South on how to follow the electronic process for performance management.
o Audited the process to make sure we are providing employees with stretch yet achievable objectives and ensured managers are fair in the year end assessment.
Government Compliance:
o Worked with the company to improve our government compliance for South Africa *Black Economic Empowerment (BEE)- where we analyzed the current reality of the company and how we can improve our BEE rating.
o Employed a training company to qualify our unskilled employees to improve their knowledge and skill- with that we have improved our rating by 6 points and upskilled our employees.
Industrial Relations:
o Advised employees and managers on the conflict resolution methods with colleagues, managers and subordinates.
o Worked on more than 5 problematic cases those were taken to Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) and helped the company win each one of them.

- Establishing relations with universities in South Africa, became part in the career fairs, and advertising on their websites and getting the correct profile CVs from their students.
- Sourcing top talent and post graduate talent as well to the business from the universities
- guided disciplinary discussions for employees and managers who got cases against them.
- Training and Development - responsible for putting a plan for the business for the year and also delivering some of the trainings related to people management and performance
Employees Mobility:
o Worked with PWC to project the salaries and tax implications for the transfer either within the sending or receiving countries and made sure we optimize on our spending by increasing the tax free benefits and reducing the taxable ones.
o Was able to cut costs by selecting the most efficient and cost effective immigration firms to process the visa request.
o Worked closely with the facilities department to organize logistics convenient for incoming employees and cost effective for the company.
o Facilitated the transfer of 10 employees to South Africa and 2 to Sub Sahara within my 2 years assignment.

- Managing a team of 2 research Executives
- Finding a successor in my role to take over from me once I was ready to move into my next role
- Account management for 3 of Nielsen's biggest accounts and was also working on business development from local small companies.
- Working with my team to deliver consulting sessions on how their business can grow more, what they're currently doing wrong and what are the gaps in market are that they can use to launch a product and capture all the profits out of it.
- Have received at least 3 awards of excellence for achieving highest revenue, meeting projects deadlines regardless how tight this was and developing the talent in my team.

-Analyze, prepare and deliver presentations to clients, on which key products' decisions were taken; stopping a production line, launching new SKUs. ..etc
-Develop and grow Nielsen’s partnership with several clients through them receiving more data and studies
-Prepare and issue training manual for the agency's software to help clients utilize the software which decreased clients’ calls for technical support
-Assist and advise clients in solving their day-to-day queries
-Presented retail audit trainings for clients and colleagues
-Compile and analyze clients' feedback to improve the internal servicing

-Create a Corporate Relationship Management system to increase partners retention
-Plan for the National Priorities of the organization and help local chapters in implementing it and educate members on goal setting strategies.
- Deliver trainings for the local chapters on successful sales meeting through negotiations and communication skills and delivering trainings to external stakeholders on communicating the brand promise
-Carry out an on-sight research for AIESEC start up in Bahrain and establishe a strong network of contacts with the government and universities.
-Coached the executive board of the local AIESEC chapter at the Arab Academy of Science and Technology in their transition, planning, preparation and team building.
-Participate in a strategic International conference in India with 91 delegations from different countries.

- Create Partnerships with Companies to raise funds and raise international work experiences for students all over the world.
- Plan for the local goals of the organization and work together with a team to achieve them.
- Create the job descriptions for everyone in the team
- Training and facilitating sessions on the technical usage of AIESEC systems.
- Spreading awareness among students and raising their interest during recruitment.