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Winning Secrets: How employee engagement led to high-performing teams at Kraft Heinz ABC Indonesia

Winning Secrets: How employee engagement led to high-performing teams at Kraft Heinz ABC Indonesia

Kraft Heinz ABC Indonesia’s HR strategy is not merely about attracting best talent, but it’s also about creating a great workplace culture to retain the talent, boost, productivity, and enhance innovation, shares Dina Sitopu, People & Performance Director, Kraft Heinz ABC Indonesia.

This secret, in turn, earned the team the Bronze award for Excellence in Employee Engagement at the HR Excellence Awards 2020, Indonesia.

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

Our ambition is to be the top tier employer of choice, with the most engaged team and a leader powerhouse. We created an approach that combines our business objectives and our people’s needs through a data-driven approach so that we can create high performing teams that win in the marketplace, and of course, bring the company to greater heights.

Having a strong and quality HR strategy is as crucial as achieving business goals and other companies' targets as it will create a workplace culture where all employees are feeling valued, supported, and appreciated.

We believe that our people are our greatest asset and therefore, our HR strategy is not merely about attracting best talent, but it’s also about creating a great workplace culture to retain the talent, boost, productivity, and enhance innovation. It is built through a personalised bottom-up approach and based on the evaluation of our regular survey.

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?

We develop a partnership approach and maintain our communication with the top management and line-of-business managers partnering with the HR team to develop the initiatives — pitching our overall programmes, presenting our implementation strategy, and asking for feedback for continuous improvement from them.

Besides partnering with key business leaders, we also invited our employees to be part of the solution; to brainstorm and suggest ideas and to involve them on this journey. With a multi-pronged approach, we set a couple of checkpoints to ensure that we continue to provide support to our stakeholders.

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?

With the COVID-19 outbreak, most of our programmes are impacted. However, the situation doesn’t stop us, it rather motivates us to adapt to changes and create important innovations to support the implementation of our projects. We recalibrated our programmes by transforming them into virtual-based programmes.

As our offices are located in different areas across Indonesia, it becomes a challenge for us to conduct engagement activities for different functions, including office based, plant based and field based employees. However, our virtual-based programmes have successfully unified us as a team to participate in our cross-function engagement programmes.

Moreover, we have also upgraded our wellbeing programmes to help employees to understand and implement the importance of balancing their physical, mental, financial, and emotional health, especially in this current situation. Our Employee Assistant Programme (EAP) helps our employees coping with challenging situations, consulting with professionals (24/7) to achieve mental wellbeing.

Q What was your game plan for measuring ROI in employee engagement?

We administered surveys which contain questions conceived to measure employee satisfaction and engagement. Through our engagement strategy, we were able to create high performing teams who work together, and this was translated into our business performance. Our business performance continues to show a positive trend, growing in top line and bottom-line y-o-y, despite challenges in the market.

Q What are some proud achievements you can share with us on this front?

Our brand equity in the market continues to grow. On innovation, we continue to create breakthroughs, winning awards for our marketing campaigns such as 'Real Husbands Cook'; challenging gender norms in the kitchen and creating purpose-driven brands. Together with the employees, we helped those affected by COVID-19 through our donation programme. One of our CSR programmes was also awarded as Best Corporate Initiatives 2020.

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 employee engagement?

We are in the FMCG industry where continuous improvement is an essential key to winning the market. Bringing the purpose of 'Let’s Make Life Delicious!' as the baseline in all our activities, we are always keen to stimulate innovation and create creativity.


Photo / Provided [Pictured: Dina Sitopu, People & Performance Director, Kraft Heinz ABC Indonesia]

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


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