Photos and roundup: Talent Management Asia 2018, Malaysia

Back for the fifth year, Talent Management Asia 2018, Malaysia saw more than 100 attendees gaining insight into some of the biggest talent trends and challenges through a series of keynote presentations, panel discussions, case studies, and interactive sessions.

Organised by Human Resources, the regional conference devoted to human capital strategy was held at Intercontinental Malaysia on 21-22 March. Produced by Priya Veeriah, the event was specially curated to bring together HR heads and business leaders to discuss updates in the talent marketplace and other HR trends. Here are the photos and highlights.

Day One

The first day kickstarted with Subhankar Roy, executive director of HR for Asia Pacific at Lenovo, sharing tips on how HR leaders can craft a win-win strategy with data science.

When setting up an analytics function, Roy advised HR to start with the business needs and business drivers before selecting metrics, collecting data, analysing findings, and sharing the findings.

Following that, Mawar Mustaffa, who looks after global people and organisation development at SWIFT, took the stage to give insight to building a future-ready workforce with disruptive learning.

Sharing about SWIFT’s onboarding strategy, she said: "We have a 12-month on-boarding track with three customised tracks for people managers, individual contributors, as well as for specific divisions and functions."

Mawar added that there will be a check list for employees fr the first three months so they are aware of where they have to be at. Onboarding has also been gamified to ensure maximum engagement.

[Check out photos from the event here]

Next, we had Guilherme Silva, managing director of JT International, shed light on the full reality and key challenges posed by a turbulent economy, as well as how to tackle those challenges.

He revealed: "After we know what our employees think, we need to start doing something about it – words mean nothing if you don’t act on it."

That was followed by a lively discussion moderated by Claudia Cadena, principal consultant of Thread Advisory. Cadena was joined by panelists Jacob Jacob, group chief human resources officer of Columbia Asia Healthcare; Peter Law, head of people development and performance at Mah Sing; and Sharifah Sarah, head of strategy and corporate development, and director of human capital at Maybank; who shared their thoughts about the Malaysia budget 2018 as a catalyst for human capital and enterprise transformation.

 

The next session saw Ramya Balakrishnan, senior human resources business partner at Unilever, sharing how HR can groom employees to become brand ambassadors of the organisation.

She said: "It's all about the 'why'. A survey by Deloitte showed that 70% of people are more engaged if they know the purpose of the company. For example, in Unilever, our purpose is making sustainable living commonplace and we make that known to the employees."

Up next was Rudy Malik, chief executive officer of iM4U, on personifying the brand value through employees as well as balancing expectations between stakeholders and employee needs.

He shared: "When we did our brand audit, we came up with a 360 brand promise – 'Growing you for a better us' - that applies to all stakeholders, including employees."

[Check out photos from the event here]

Day two ended with a presentation by Ahmad Risdan Abdul Rahman, head of talent management and development at CMC Engineering, who talked about designing HiPo programmes throughout the employee cycle.

He said: "For high performers and top talent, we have various programmes to identify them as part of the succession management plan. We also have a performance based reward exercise which includes an annual bonus or project completion bonus."

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Human Resources would like to thank everyone who made this possible – speakers, delegates and sponsors.

Here’s a list of our generous sponsors:

Gold sponsors– DDI– K-Pintar– People Potential

Silver sponsor– Eruditus

Exhibitor– Asian Institute of Finance– KNOLSKAPE– OfficeWork Software Asia– People Psyence– Prasetiya Mulya Executive Learning Institute– Ramco

Association Partner– International Professional Managers Association

Media Partner– Centre of Executive Education