Case study: SATS' recipe for doubling employee engagement scores

With a staff strength of more than 15,000, SATS is Asia’s leading food solutions and gateway services company, with an annual turnover of about S$1.8 billion.

People are an organisation’s most valuable asset – an observation which is especially relevant for SATS, a large organisation that is heavily dependent on human resources to execute its business strategies.

The company’s vision for the human capital (HC) department is to engage and develop employees in an open environment of learning and sharing, with managers who lead by example.

To deliver its HC strategy, SATS has established a people development system, comprising the company’s learning principle, policy, learning centre, training framework, learning roadmap, learning initiatives and learning management system.

An employee engagement survey was also conducted in 2012, which identified two key areas that SATS needed to work on to ensure its continued success – strengthening the company identity and culture, and enhancing communications.

The senior management team thus concluded that employees’ sense of identity and belonging to the company needed to be enhanced, and leadership at all levels needed to be strengthened for a culture to be nurtured.

To strengthen leadership from the top, new key programmes for leaders at critical turning points in their leadership development were implemented. These new programmes were called the SATS connect series.

Fundamentally, the series aims to get SATS leaders to re-evaluate their own leadership styles with the aim to achieve business goals that enable SATS to fulfil its vision and mission. The series focuses on strengthening leadership by improving communication and bringing visibility to the brand identity which is represented by the company’s brand promise “passion to delight” and its core values.

Another prong was to nurture and inculcate in all employees an understanding of SATS’ core values and its related service standards.

Since 2013, the SATS ambassador programme has served as a platform to consistently heighten the awareness of the SATS philosophy among its employees, hence, building an esprit de corps among them.

The goal was for it to be a learning carnival.

To translate SATS’ core values to actionable behavioural statements and service standards, HC worked together with the company’s corporate communications department to study ways to help employees more easily understand and relate to the core values.

A set of behavioural statements were established and endorsed by the senior management team.

The programme has certainly delivered in terms of the feedback and results it has garnered.An engagement survey carried out in November 2015 showed the overall engagement score for SATS had improved to almost twice the score from 2012 – from 40% in 2012 to 72% in 2015.

Looking specifically at the key drivers for engagement, the score for brand identity improved significantly from 37% in 2012 to 83% in 2015.

The score for communication rose from 32% in 2012 to 76% (intra-department) and 61% (inter-department) in 2015. These contribute saliently to the improvements of SATS’ overall engagement scores.

For more case studies from ANZ, Unilever, and SMRT, and tips to create your very own effective learning and development programme, head over to the Human Resources’ January-February feature. 

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