SMBA HR Circle Q3 event
The third SMBA HR Circle in was graciously hosted by DKSH Malaysia with the agenda to discuss best practices in talent management alongside frameworks in talent
development and employee retention in a roundtable session moderated by DKSH. After DKSH group chief information officer and SMBA board member Mr. Michael
Hutab’s welcoming speech, its director of talent, leadership and analytics Ms. Shireen Chaw facilitated the session, sharing her insights about managing talents within the
group while Ms. Ranjani Kumaraveloo who is DKSH’s director of global people and organization partnering shared her experience managing talents across various
countries.
As Ms. Shireen unpacked the different stages of how the role of HR has evolved in DKSH despite undergoing two mergers, Ms. Ranjini pointed to how they’d leveraged on
technology to help them manage. She said having “a unified performance management system” has enabled “talent visibility in all countries with just a click away” – beneficial
for individual performance tracking and pulling up data for discussions with staff, and “empowering people so they can be promoted better”. According to Ms. Shireen, this is
what spurred them to look at talent analytics.
They also shared how their 35 in-house designed HR training programmes has savedthem about 1.3 million Swiss francs in costs, making a case for better in-house
trainings.
What also emerged were different strategies employed for each phase of their HR’s transformation – from establishing HR policies, looking at crafting good leaders who will
spread the influence of DKSH’s culture to having their first ever employee engagement survey which saw deeper interactions between senior leaders and employees on the
ground. From there, they’d learned that the “absolute top down approach” did not work for them.
Ms. Shireen and Ms. Ranjini also shared about improving onboarding experiences by engaging with talents through their “assessment centres” which has seen integration
success with 70-80% employee retention.
The discussion also shifted to addressing the challenges of managing gen-Y talents with excited comments from participants, including a Gen-Y member himself.
“Across generations, all people just want to be heard, and find their footing,” Ms. Shireen said, distilling the core of what motivates people with a further call to look at
the similarities between generations instead of focusing on differences.
Overall, the discussion was teeming with rich insights into DKSH’s best practices of talent management, delving into employee expectations with thought provoking
questions adding to the conversation. “It’s an art,” Ms. Shireen summarized. Thereafter, the roundtable discussions continued at the lunch tables.
The SMBA HR Circle was established in 2016 and is held quarterly to foster the exchange between the Human Resource Practitioners of Swiss Companies active in
Malaysia on all human resources related matters.