Haneen Abdallah Khdour, FATEN

What made Hannen Abdallah Khdour stand out to the judges for the Michael Kelly outstanding student award was her “clear and effective benefit” to Faten, a Palestinian microfinance institution that provides financial services to small businesses and entrepreneurs, offering “invaluable analysis capability and clear evidence to support workforce planning decisions”. 

Working within the HR department, Khdour noticed that recruitment decisions in some branches were often made reactively, mainly when an employee resigned or when a manager requested additional staff. However, there was little analytical evidence to determine whether branches actually needed more employees or whether productivity could be improved by the existing team.

Khdour set about initiating a productivity analysis for credit officers across the company’s different branches, collaborating with the credit department to analyse data related to loan portfolios and employee productivity levels. This revealed differences in productivity among employees and helped provide clearer insights for recruitment, performance evaluation and training decisions across the company. 

To make the results easy to understand for managers and senior leaders, she developed simple visual dashboards that showed productivity levels and workload differences between branches. “This helped make productivity gaps more visible and supported more informed discussions about staffing needs, employee performance and development opportunities across branches,” she said. 

Thanks to Khdour’s work, staffing discussions were no longer based on assumptions but grounded in data. With productivity differences between branches and employees more visible, managers could better understand where productivity gaps existed and where additional support, training or staffing adjustments might be needed. Senior leaders were so impressed by the work they requested it be conducted quarterly to support ongoing decision making. 

The judges said it was “great to see how the work enhances organisational efficiency by supporting proactive planning”, excellently demonstrating the way operational data can be used to inform an organisation’s people priorities and “paving the way” for a repeatable methodology that could be used elsewhere in the business.