Winning Secrets: Erajaya’s strategy to producing people champions

Andhi Kurniawan Chandra, VP Human Capital, Erajaya Swasembada, on how the leadership team has played a significant role to support HR's priority agenda and enabling the team's big win in leadership development.

Taking away the Gold award for Excellence in Leadership Development at the HR Excellence Awards 2020, Indonesia is PT. Erajaya Swasembada Tbk. In this interview, we have Andhi Kurniawan Chandra, Vice President Human Capital, Erajaya Swasembada sharing with us the importance of HR digitalisation and how they cultivate new leaders through their Internal Championship Award.

Q How would you describe your overall HR strategy, and what are some key milestones you’ve accomplished thus far?

Our HR strategy mainly focuses on producing people champions. This means the essence of the role is to ensure the availability of global professional workers who are highly productivity and tech savvy. This is to support our company mission through these cores: hiring the right talent, developing advantageous competencies, and ensuring wellbeing and positive employee experience.

We have been recognised for our achievements in HR Excellence Awards for Excellence in Learning & Development (Gold Winner), Excellence in Business Transformation (Silver Winner), Excellence in HR Innovation (Bronze Winner), as well as Indonesia’s Best Company in Creating Leaders in 2019 and received the 2020 SWA – NBO Indonesia.

In the latest HR Excellence Awards 2020, we won the Excellence in Leadership Development (Gold Winner) and one of the most important milestones is that we have digitalised a HR process that enables speed and quality results, especially in current pandemic era.

Q What role has your leadership team played in supporting your HR priorities? How does your HR team collaborate closely with senior management to achieve business goals?

Our leadership team has played a significant role to support HR's priority agenda. We have shared responsibility and accountability, where they are also involved to drive all squad members and engage with HR end-to-end activities.

The senior management has shown great support from giving their feedback, input, and also budget allocation. HR has a periodic agenda with the leaders to discuss about people and organisation matters.

Q The pandemic has caused many business plans to be upended. What was the greatest challenge you faced this year and how did you manage to pivot your HR model/framework?

The greatest challenge is on how to modify and thrive in the new ways of working, as well as how to quickly sharpen tech-savvy competencies (we have around 10% of professional workers falling under the Baby Boomers cluster).

Our HR framework identified the importance of HR digitalisation a couple of years ago. Therefore, that gives us a ‘high spirit’ mode to bridge rapid changes when the pandemic entered the nation.

Q What was your game plan for measuring ROI in leadership development? What are some proud achievements you can share with us on this front?

Based on our leadership development programme, HR successfully placed most of the new and expanded roles from within. This is one of the greatest evidences to management.

Second, among our Internal Championship Award, these new leaders have produced significantly great impact on their projects, either on innovation or cost effectiveness.

Some proud achievements are HREA Excellence in Learning & Development (Gold Winner), Excellence in Business Transformation (Silver Winner), Excellence in HR Innovation (Bronze Winner), as well as Indonesia Best Company in Creating Leaders in 2019 & 2020 SWA – NBO Indonesia. The latest achievement is from HREA 2020 Excellence in Leadership Development (Gold Winner).

Q What are the biggest business drivers or game changers that have pushed you to constantly come up with new ideas and raise the bar for leadership development?

The biggest business drivers or game changers are digital tools (from manual to tech) and new ways of working (the awareness on new model of coordination, procedures and agile policy). We kept pushing on and worked with the leadership team on how to thrive in the new era (post-COVID) and IOT 5.0. Periodically we renew our values and develop competencies to ensure that the organisation is always agile, has business sustainability and can cope with our competitive advantages.

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