Member showcase: PVPA Lithuania

You represent PVPA Lithuania, what is unique/typical about Lithuania?

Lithuania is a small country in Northern Europe, on the coast of the Baltic Sea. The landscape is flat and green – the forests cover one third of the territory of the country.

Having a population of only 3 million, Lithuania has the oldest still-living Indo-European language – Lithuanian, which is quite difficult to learn. The Lithuanian language is like a workout for the brain: anthropologists say that its archaic letters and unusual-sounding words really make our brains exercise.

Lithuania has globally recognized Laser and Bio-tech industries, a lot of Start-ups (some of them disrupted global payment structure), C2C Apparel market. During the past years we became global leaders in the field of Online Privacy and Security.

Photo credits: ©Laimonas Ciūnys_Lithuania Travel and ©Andrius Aleksandravičius_Lithuania Travel

What are main challenges for HR in Lithuania, for the time being and looking into the future?

There are a couple of challenges to be considered today:

• Strengthening the position of HR within an organization further on. Recent crisis (COVID, Ukrainian war) created real possibilities for HR to move from administrative support to leadership position.
• Upskilling and reskilling make into two-fold challenge: what do we do about it for others, but it is also a matter for HR itself.
• Talent acquisition. The world becomes smaller thanks to technology; thus, fight for talent becomes on a world-wide scale. Global players do understand it, but local businesses are still seeing their labour market limited to Lithuanian geography.
• Employee experience management or, rather, facilitation. Promoting wellbeing, leading from burnout, growing engagement, etc. – all these are important aspects of employee life. However, the real challenge is about redesigning organization, rethinking its architecture and raison d’être of work to get the long-term changes.
• Strengthening Leadership. Business needs a new way of leadership (Adaptive, Authentic, Agile) … HR has a challenge to create a strategy for strengthening it.
• The war in Ukraine – refugees and their needs to work. This is real challenge for us from Inclusion perspective. HR has a lot to do with this.

In a few sentences, how would you describe PVPA?

PVPA is the biggest national association embracing HR professionals in Lithuania. The wide spectrum of activities (forums, seminars, webinars, visits to the member-companies, HR-standard training programs, annual conference, etc.) aim to ensure the best local and international practice sharing in Lithuanian HR community to bring added value for the organizations.

What are your challenges?

Over the past several years through its activities PVPA has gained the reputation as a highly professional and reliable association. Sometimes it gets quite difficult to keep up with the level that we have set ourselves 😊.

We are also working hard finding a way how to increase members engagement, how to nudge them to get out of “receiving mood”, to be more active in sharing ideas, setting the tone for the PVPA projects.

Our new goal – to get more attention and involvement of the managers from different levels. We believe, that “HRless approach” is valuable for any organization and we aim to spread this idea between the managers by getting them interested into our activities and HR related topics.

We are happy to say, that for now we are an opinion leader in our media about Labour market. We are doing our best to strengthen this expert role in media and community.

What are your ambitions for the future?

• To stay trusted organization for Lithuanian HR community.
• To become the highly recognized HR topics and Labour market experts in media.
• To be valuable knowledge and competence centre for HR professionals and Managers.

Are there any things you are especially proud of, on behalf of PVPA Lithuania?

We are proud to be the country where the idea for International HR Day was born.

Being the relatively young association (PVPA founded in 2006) we are valued by the organizations and our HR community for the knowledge, practices, and ideas we share. Also – for our client orientation, adaptability in the times of crisis, etc.

More and more organizations trust us, and the number of our members is consistently rising (despite all turbulences).

 

What does the European and EAPM community mean to you?

EAPM membership for us means:

• The possibility to share experiences,
• Space for co-creation of the solutions for common challenges,
• Ability to be a voice for the rest of the Europe about the situation and mentality of the post-soviet region.

 

Fun fact about yourself PVPA Lithuania:

• Lithuania is the geographical centre of Europe.
• Capital Vilnius – one of the very few capitals in the World where you can fly a hot air balloon over. We have the highest ratio of hot air balloons per person globally.
• Basketball is one of the most famous sports in the country. Most of the population is into the sport (the numbers are closer to those who are religious). Therefore, it is called as “second religion”.
• Potatoes are found in every shape and form you can think of. The popular potato dish named after a German airship – Zeppelin.