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Delta Electronics (Thailand) took home the Gold award for Excellence in Total Rewards Strategy and the Bronze for Excellence in Graduate Recruitment & Development at the inaugural HR Excellence Awards 2021, Thailand.
In this interview, Vichai Saksuriya, VP of Administration and HR, Delta Electronics (Thailand), shares the secrets behind this win – how the team has been investing in technology and applying it to every touchpoint to enrich the employee experience.
Q What is your organisation’s winning HR strategy, and what are some milestones you’ve accomplished along this journey?
Our HR strategy at Delta is to keep enriching our employee experience. We invest in technology and apply it to every touchpoint in our employees’ experience.
One huge milestone for us is the formalisation and strengthening of our company-wide internal communications.
This helps us reduce communication gaps between employees and the company, improves online learning platform engagement, and enhances employee wellbeing in every aspect.
This year, we saw dramatic growth in our engagement survey results, which is our greatest accomplishment so far.
Q How has this strategy helped you achieve your HR priorities, and what role has the leadership played in helping make this a reality?
We have been implementing our strategy for over a year and this has included digitising and transforming our working process to achieve better employee experience on every level of our organisation. Our new HR mobile communication channel is one example of successful implementation. We can use this mobile platform to convey our messages directly to every member of staff in seconds and avoid miscommunicating via word-of-mouth transmission.
Online learning platforms are also essential during this time that our staff still needs to work from home due to COVID. As an electronics company, we consider learning new technology to be a key to our success story. Even during the COVID-19 situation, we can ensure that employees are still able to access new knowledge and improve themselves through their own devices like mobile phones or personal laptops. This type of learning can be done anywhere and anytime.
Our success is due to the vision of our company leadership who proactively initiates actions according to our mission which is: “To provide innovative, clean and energy-efficient solutions for a better tomorrow.”
Delta’s HR leaders also apply the mission to our HR team’s responsibilities. We always ask: What initiative best improves our employee experience? Our leadership fully supports us to make our strategy become effective across the organisation.
Q Unexpected roadblocks are part and parcel of executing any initiative. What were some of the barriers that you and your team experienced while rolling this out, and how did you successfully get past them?
Our main business operation in Thailand is electronics manufacturing. We need to keep our production operations running 24/7, which means employees still need to come to work even amidst the COVID-19 global pandemic. The greatest roadblock in this time was the challenge of maintaining continuous operations while putting the safety of our employees first.
The next challenge we faced was how to maintain or increase employee morale throughout the pandemic, which has lasted almost two years.
Our digital transformation, launched in the past few years, is helping employees to continue working smoothly but it also reduces physical engagement.
As the situation improved, we increased CSR projects to uplift our communities. We joined the SCGP project called 'United to Fight Against Covid: Transform Used Paper Into SCGP Paper Field Hospital Bed'. This project aims to educate the public about using and managing leftover paper materials for reuse while helping those afflicted with COVID-19 in Thailand.
By encouraging our employees to take part in a mix of online and offline activities to support our communities, we can foster a sense of unity and purpose among our employees.
Q This initiative clearly delivered some amazing results. What was your gameplan for measuring ROI? What are some proud achievements you can share with us on this front?
As an innovation provider and sustainable industry leader in Thailand, Delta is always developing opportunities for interns, recruits, and employees to expand their skill-sets in real working experiences while building soft skills in a multi-cultural global workplace. We have made major improvements in optimising our employee engagement leading to great achievements including:
- Volunteer activities to help our communities have over 90% employee attendance
- Employee turnover rate decreased 9%
- Company e-learning resources on our online learning platform increased 126%
- Productivity increased 17%
- Our employee engagement score increased 15 points
- Online learning platform participation was 6,760 hours, a 229% increase from the previous year
These results tell us that many projects that we implemented are successful. Our goal is to make Delta a top employer brand in Thailand and our HR department leverages digital platforms to recruit and develop local talent while amplifying our employer brand.
Q We’re now seeing HR manage portfolios that were previously considered far from their job description. In your view, what are the top three skills and attributes of today’s successful CHRO?
1. Effective supervisory skills: A CHRO must know exactly how to demonstrate and communicate HR’s contributions to the organisation. Supervising is all about guiding and leading others to not only enable them to do their jobs well, but also help them move forward in their career. Of course, good communication involves good listening.
Successful CHROs need to foster an environment of open communication, active listening, and giving constructive feedback or encouraging colleagues to achieve their goals.
2. Mindfulness: A CHRO must possess the capability of thinking and operating strategically and determining how current actions will impact the future. This means driving organisational culture by cultivating and championing the overall digital transformation trend. A successful CHRO adopts a global, forward-thinking perspective and effectively integrates various considerations to arrive at wise decisions. A CHRO possessing this role is an influential and inspiring leader who effectively builds relationships and engages with all kinds of stakeholders within and beyond the organisation.
3. Integrity: A CHRO must demonstrate sound moral and ethical principles and do the right thing, no matter who's watching. Integrity is the foundation on which colleagues build relationships and trust, and it is one of the fundamental values that employers seek in the employees that they hire. To have integrity means that a CHRO is self-aware, accountable, responsible, and truthful and that their actions are internally consistent.
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