Prioritizing Innovation in People Strategies With Electronic Arts (EA) Chief People Officer, Mala Singh

In this episode of Redefining HR, I’m joined by Electronic Arts (EA) Chief People Officer Mala Singh. We discuss her background in HR, how international assignments shaped her view on global people practices and how she thinks about innovation at scale in hybrid work. We also discuss the importance of listening to your workforce and prioritizing mental health.

Mala has been EA’s people leader for nearly six years and calls it an “honor and privilege.” But she didn’t start out intending to go into HR or video games. Mala entered college as a pharmacy major, switching to organizational psychology after enjoying elective courses in social sciences. 

“This problem statement around the amount of time of people’s lives that they’re spending in the world of work — and how to make that as good as it can be and help people actually achieve their potential — was something that really resonated with me,” she says. “And so I decided to focus in on org psych and, specifically, human resources as a career.”

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Grounding Your Strategy in Analytics

HR leaders are challenged to adapt to the wider trends in how work is done and where it happens. But before people leaders take action, they have to understand what’s happening right in front of them.

“Strategy has to be grounded in insights about what’s happening in your workforce,” Mala says. At EA, for example, games are developed in large part on analytics — “what our players are doing, what they enjoy, what content, what features — but that wasn’t always the same approach EA’s people function took. 

The first thing Mala did was understand what was really happening in the workforce. “We invested pretty heavily in listening tools and programs to understand what our people cared about and built the level of trust so that they felt comfortable actually sharing their perspectives,” she says.

Listening to Your Workforce

Mala has found surveys to be very effective at EA, but it’s only one tool to gain feedback from employees. People leaders must also ground themselves as leaders and listen deeply.

“When we have trust that people actually believe their perspective matters and is welcomed, that gets you to a place where you have the insights that help you really prioritize what you have to focus on from a business perspective,” she says.

This became especially important when the pandemic forced many workers to stay at home. “People were struggling to feel connected to the company because, again, we had been a very much in-person. The company had been designed for in-person collaboration. We needed to overcome that,” she says.

Mala and her team found that, even with communication tools for collaboration and asynchronous work, they couldn’t replace that in-person feel of huddling together and sharing ideas.

Mala and EA worked to improve the onboarding process and improve managers’ prowess at bringing their teams together.

Emphasizing Mental Health

Work can be stressful in the best of times, and the pandemic has not helped. “We see that in their patience and tolerance for things. We see that in just the outright sadness over some of the things that are happening in the world that feel out of our control,” she says.

EA was already improving its mental health benefits before the pandemic, although Mala is aware that the company alone can’t solve these issues for many people. However, that’s not stopping her from doing everything possible. 

“Create moments that are cup-filling for people that are just drained in other aspects of their lives,” she says.

People in This Episode

• Mala Singh: LinkedIn