Winning Secrets: How DANA Indonesia's People team keeps DANAM8s performing at their fullest potential

The DANA retention strategy involves healthy working culture, personal development, leaders as mentors, competitive rewards, holistic workplace wellbeing, and people risk management, says Agustina Samara, Chief People Officer, DANA Indonesia.

Agustina Samara, Chief People Officer, DANA Indonesia shares the organisation’s strategy to ensure the HR team can evolve to meet the needs of the business. DANA Indonesia won the following awards at HR Excellence Awards 2020, Indonesia:

• Excellence in Diversity & Inclusion - Gold
• Employer of the Year - Gold
• Most People-Focused CEO (Vince Iswara) - Gold
• Excellence in HR Team Collaboration - Silver

Interview excerpts follow: 

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

DANA People team believes in our vision to put 'People First, People Matter'. We understand that keeping or retaining our talent doesn’t only mean keeping them staying physically in the company but also keeping them engaged, productive, and performing at their fullest potential. We also redefine our talent to not only DANA employee/DANAM8s but also our high performing DANA alumni.

The DANA retention strategy models involves the following: healthy working culture, personal development & career growth, leaders as mentors, competitive rewards, holistic workplace wellbeing, and people risk management.

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?

Leadership and team collaboration play a big role in our retention programme and in achieving our business goals. We put the expectation for all leaders in DANA that their main goal is to create the next leaders.

For our online mentoring programme, we select 13% of our employee population based on their performance, potency, and critical position to get cross-function mentoring. We deploy 30 senior mentors from our executive committee, VPs, and managers. The execution rate as of today is 70% and we aim to close and evaluate it by the end of 2020. Also we created an exclusive leadership community called DANA Transformers that gathers once a month to get updates from our management and deliver open communication to their downline.

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?

As for others, the pandemic has changed the course of how we do business, which basically caused by (1) changes in consumer behaviour, (2) change of attitude towards health, (3) understanding the paradox of caring to our employees, remaining competitive and balancing two.

All these phenomena need to be anticipated & strategised for. Partnering with the executive management team, we see the implication from macro-economic to market changes, business continuity, and also employee wellbeing.

We articulate our crisis management strategy as DANA 3S which stands for:

1. Social Distancing – The goal is to ensure safety-first actions for our employee (we call them DANAM8s) & their families.
2. Survival – With the spirit of 'Gotong Royong' we intend to ensure our business not only survives during the pandemic but also sustains in the future. So we can keep the mission to build Indonesia’s digital economy.
3. Solutions for people – How we make sure DANAM8s are able to work productively and creatively since we need to force our operations into working from home (WFH).

Our HR framework has considered the nature of agility in our organisation, i.e. in DANA, WFH has always been an option from day one. Even so, the pandemic has pushed us to be extra alert and relook at the strategy even closer. When the pandemic hit, our HR framework, in principle, remained the same, the core values remained as DANA guiding principles in behaviour & operations; as well in driving our leaders' capability in bridging the communication from management, honing their empathetic leadership skills, and managing productivity in accordance to the company code of conduct.

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

After a D&I culture has been created, we must then figure out what improvements can be made. Our D&I aspects focus on providing an inclusive work environment, fostering an openness culture, fair career opportunities, respect, and celebration of diversity. These aspects aim to cultivate innovation, teamwork and engagement.

We cultivate an innovation culture by ensuring employees are well involved in product development. Indeed, not all employees are product developers, but we are all users of our products.

We have the DANA Idea Box programme, which allows employees to pitch in ideas for DANA product development. By involving our employees, we have 700+ potential ideas in product development.

We measure the impact of diversity & inclusion by looking at DANA teamwork. Teamwork is an important aspect in DANA DNA, an aspect that we check on a regular basis through the employee survey. We ensure good quality teamwork in areas such as the availability of team support, team collaboration to achieve common goals, team alignment and team communication.

Q Given that the world of work has essentially been overturned, how will your HR team evolve to meet the needs and continue to deliver to the business?

The people division plays an important role in maintaining holistic workplace wellbeing, in the whole lifecycle starting from onboarding stage to offboarding. Maintaining focus on essential functions of the people division, yet still having agility and flexibility in implementation have been the aims in order to ensure a smooth and meaningful employee journey to enable the business in achieving growth.

With people acquisition & employer branding as the gatekeeper, they are responsible for the recruitment process and delivering our EVP to potential candidates. In terms of learning, the people team facilitates training & development by ensuring we have an effective learning agenda which is supportive of equipping employees to strive, stay relevant and stay engaged in the new-normal era. People operations focus on maintaining excellent people service to people in DANA.

Paying attention to new joiners and those in probation has become critical, with the new norm of WFH as the default setting. Our 90s Club programme (referring to three months’ probation period) is a programme with specific milestones and regular progress as a part of our integration programme. As their very first 90 days is very critical to make them understand and feel the organisation's culture, we pair the 90s Club members with our Buddy Programme, selected by managers, where we encourage them to do regular one-on-ones whilst educating them on our DANA Performance Management called ROAD. Investing in all this during onboarding, we aim to achieve social and cultural integration for DANA new joiners.

On top of that, we are championing the internal talent mobility programme, as a career development strategy to fulfil talent internally. It can comprise permanent mobility or temporary on-the-job training. We believe as People division, we have equipped ourselves with a strong customer-first focus which is a key ingredient to be successful at any role within the organisation. It’s about how we create internal opportunities for people to expand their role.

Photo / Provided 

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