Winning Secrets: How HP reviewed and anticipated varied cultural perceptions of 'wellbeing' to provide a personalised experience

This is exactly how HP Inc solved one of its biggest challenges in ensuring its programmes cater to the needs of diverse nationalities of its employees, affirm Total Rewards Lead for Singapore, John Chua, and HR Business Partner, Shanice Loo.

With a silver win for Excellence in Corporate Wellness at HR Excellence Awards 2020, Singapore, HP Inc’s Total Rewards Lead for Singapore, John Chua, and HR Business Partner, Shanice Loo reveal the three ways in transitioning the workforce towards the growth mindset, strong engagement results from its new brand, and the overall business transformation plans amidst the pandemic.

Q What is your organisation’s winning HR strategy, and what are some milestones you’ve accomplished along this journey?

HP’s winning HR strategy lies at the core of our foundation of putting the employee experience in the front and center of everything we do. We do this by making HP an inclusive environment where diverse, bright talent comes, thrives, and continuously innovates.

We are focused on cultivating a Growth Mindset culture that drives innovation and high performance. Fundamentally, our employees will become more innovative, creative, and resilient. That’s our goal.

Here are some of the ways we’re helping employees and managers make the shift:

1. Foster continuous learning
We tap on HP’s Brain Candy, which is an online learning platform that hosts videos, articles, courses, and other content. It’s searchable, easy-to-use, and full of information that can build an employee’s skills or knowledge any time.

2. Have meaningful conversations
We’re also reinventing how we evaluate and reward performance. We’ve eliminated performance ratings in favour of more frequent, meaningful conversations focused on learning and growth in service of individual and company goals.

3. Guide how work gets done
Building on our culture of 'The HP Way', we have defined Growth Mindset practices and principles to guide employees as they go about their work:
• Anticipate, learn, adapt: Don’t become stagnate.
• Make bold moves: Take informed risks and dare to disrupt.
• Connect, coach, empower: It’s about believing in the potential of our team and colleagues, and helping them learn and succeed, too.

Q How has this strategy helped you achieve your HR priorities, and what role has the leadership played in helping make this initiative a reality?

Let’s focus on our winning category of Excellence in Corporate Wellness in answering the next three questions.

We envisioned wellbeing as a personal experience, not a company-driven initiative. We encourage our employees to try new things, to continually work towards becoming their best selves, and to celebrate progress, not perfection that is rooted in Growth Mindset.

These principles led us to identify Virgin Pulse as our wellness partner to help employees take daily action to maintain and improve the following three focus areas of our wellbeing strategy:

• Physical health
• Financial health and
• Pursue work/life balance

We also developed a new brand to visually signal to employees our desire to create and support a culture of health — Well Beyond

Our leaders have always provided their strong support and focus on employee’s wellbeing. They are taking initiative themselves to promote wellbeing programmes to our employees. We are really fortunate to have our leaders behind us on all programmes we are introducing.

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?

One of the biggest challenges is to ensure how our programmes are able to cater to and meet the needs of our diverse nationalities of our employees. Taking into considerations of the different culture and perceptions , we reviewed and anticipated in advance on such varied cultural perceptions around the terms and meaning of 'wellbeing' and to provide personalised experience, which aided in positioning it for our newly launch wellbeing programmes.

Q As evidenced by the win, 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?

HP’s gameplan for measuring wellness ROI is not about focusing solely on reducing health care cost, improvement of productivity but also take into consideration the below factors:

1. Driving and increasing employee’s participation rate and engagement by introducing new and innovative programmes
2. We create awareness of our wellness programme through effective communication
3. Educate our employees on various topics around the three main pillars of wellness (emotional/mental, physical & financial)
4. Lastly, we make sure that our employees are having fun while participating in our wellness programmes.

The dual-phase launch of the Well Beyond programme generated strong engagement, excitement, and registrations on Virgin Pulse.

Key highlights include:

• 1,500+ employees joined the launch events to learn more about Well Beyond.
• 50% of employees/spouses/domestic partners connected a physical activity tracker to their Virgin Pulse profiles.
• 2.1 billion steps were tracked globally.
• As at June 2020, 57% of our Singapore employees are Virgin Pulse members.
• HP’s results were higher than other Virgin Pulse clients, which is 37% globally.
• Participation continues to be strong with the constant promotion of Well Beyond programmes.

In addition to participation data, our wellness programme has has significant positive impact on employees’ health outcome, which is, declining medical claims loss ratio. We found that the healthcare claims from employees who are 'highly engaged' in our wellbeing programme are lesser than non-engaged employees.

Another major achievement was our HP Global Wellness Challenge was a resounding success with Singapore being ranked 2^nd with a total of 422 million cumulative steps.

Q Given just how quickly the external business environment is adapting, how do you ensure that your HR team keeps pace in business transformation and is constantly upskilled to manage newer HR scenarios?

In recent years, HR digitalisation has taken a huge leap forward at HP. Our latest HR transformation comes in the way of introducing HP Way Finder. It is a complete digital onboarding experience that helps build network and discover tips that will help new joiners during their first few weeks. We also have Charli, HP’s first HR chatbot to get answers to their HR questions quicker.

Our new programme, Speak Digital, aims to build a common language at HP around five topics that are key to HP’s success: artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, big data, virtual reality, and cybersecurity. Our HR team builds our digital literacy through this programme to equip us in accelerating HP’s digital transformation. We get to discuss with our manager about how digital literacy fits into our development plan.

We also have a great opportunity to keep learning with our newly launched Digital Fitness App, for easy on-the-go mobile learning. It is a continuing digital learning journey for us at HR. 

Photo / Provided

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

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