Winning Secrets: Employee experience initiatives are not a one-time exercise for Kasikornbank

Since all divisions operate differently, the team takes great efforts to customise many of its initiatives to each division.

In the past 70 years, Kasikornbank (KBank) has always strived to develop the organisation, offer financial product initiatives, as well as excellent service delivery to match its slogan, "Towards Service Excellence".

At the third annual edition of Employee Experience Awards - Singapore in 2023, the KBank team won a number of awards. While Kasikornbank brought home the gold for 'Best Employer Branding' and the bronze for 'Best Skilling Strategy', the Kasikorn Business-Technology Group bagged the silver for 'Best Remote Management Strategy'.

To celebrate this milestone, we catch up with Sansana Sukhanunth, Chief Human Resources Officer, Kasikornbank (pictured above) on the importance on iterations for employee experience initiatives, as a result of testing, learning, and failing forward. 

Q How do you ensure your employee experience initiatives are aligned with your business objectives?

KASIKORNBANK’s (KBank) HR ensures alignment by setting very clear objectives and key results (OKRs) that have linkages to our business goals. Specifically, HR implications are cascaded from our people strategy aspiration which focuses on building a customer empowerment organisation linked to organisational purpose of being a bank of sustainability. HR then acts as business thought partners and solutions provider by co-creating initiatives with business leaders through working in squads to achieve our objectives.

Throughout this process, we make sure that HR is up to speed and always put our employees at the center by working closely with the business to design and implement impactful solutions that will lead the business to success and eventually contribute to empowering our customers.

Q Can you provide examples of how the organisation has invested in the employee experience?

To KBank, employee experience is more than wellbeing, it is about the way of work benefits, limitless growth opportunities, and many more. KBank provides employees with healthcare benefits ensuring safety of both mental and physical health (telemedicine services, additional health checks for employees over 40, 'OOCA' platform for psychiatrists' or psychologists' advice, medical treatment by KBank physicians, and support for physical exercise).

As Thailand progresses into a senior society, and as the bank moves forward in its D&I efforts, the organisation has not hesitated to extend the amount of family leave to five days for employees to care for family members in addition to parental leaves. We implemented 'Work That FITS' to transform the workplace from 'FIX' to 'FITs': build 'flexibility' into designing a teamwork mode that fits with work characteristics, create 'impact' setting clear output with teams, empower employees and supervisors with 'trust', and ensure 'security' of data and safety.

We also pay close attention to our engagement survey results and try to improve the experience along the employee journey, such as re-designing the new joiner’s experience and improving employees’ day-to-day work-life harmony via our bank-wide 'Effective Meeting' campaign where we lay down the ground rules and help educate teams in order to reduce the quantity and increase the quality of time spent in meetings.

Q What are some of the key challenges that you faced in implementing your EX initiatives, and how did you overcome them?

Employee experience initiatives are not a one-time exercise, instead, they undergo iterations as a result of testing, learning, and failing forward. Since all divisions operate differently, one of our challenges is customising these initiatives to each division. We have to convince them to prioritise building employee experience within their way of work using HR as their support system to help implement and amplify their decisions. For example, as we aim to upskill our people through learning, they have voiced that it is not about the availability of courses being offered, but rather the time that they need as they can barely manage their workload. HR then introduced 'Learning Day', where the bank purposely "makes time" for employees to pursue their learning interests or participate in knowledge sharing activities, as well as engage them through various gamifications to "keep it fun" and a day that employees look forward to.

Q Do you have processes to measure the effectiveness of your EX initiatives, and what metrics do you use to evaluate success?

When an initiative is implemented, various metrics are distributed to all employees to constantly measure their satisfaction and evaluate effectiveness.

One of the metrics used is the pulse survey measuring bank-wide employee engagement twice a year. Parts of its questions were formulated by co-creating with division leaders to gauge specific divisional areas of improvement. For struggling teams (those with lower-than-average scores), focus groups are conducted to dissect problem areas and possible causes.

When implementing the agile way of work, KBank uses the health check, pulse survey, and overall performance to measure success of the initiatives. For instance, our 'Credit Pillar' received better overall score on health check from all employees from 70% in Y2020 to 80% in Y2021 and 84% in Y2022, as well as meeting the business goal of 2.4mn new customers in untapped areas, which shows that the Credit Pillar’s application of agile way of work resulted in efficient cross-functional working structure.

Q Finally, what role do leaders and managers play in driving a beautiful employee experience, and how are they held accountable for the success of these initiatives?

At KBank, leaders play an important role in driving the organisation forward and implementing a harmonious employee experience for their team. We compile their roles into eight purposeful and practical leadership values:

1. Self-awareness and timely decision making
2. Solve the right thing
3. Get things done
4. Make work meaningful
5. Test, monitor, and learn
6. Coach and empower
7. In their shoes
8. Break silos and help others

Furthermore, we make sure to incorporate the significance of leaders into one of KBank’s EVP attributes, 'Talented People Every-day', which conveys the message that good teams are made of good teams and a good leader. To ensure that this message is portrayed from within the culture, commitment to enhance employee engagement is embedded into the KPI of leaders holding executive responsibility for positive employee experience.

Read more interviews on why organisations have won trophies for their HR practices - head over to our Winning Secrets' section!

All photos / Provided by Kasikornbank