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It all has to do with authenticity, empowerment, and a growth mindset, shares Krid Suwanwalaikorn, Head of People Growth & Experience, Learn Corporation.
Learn Corporation took home the Bronze award for Best in HR Communication in October, at the inaugural HR Excellence Awards 2021, Thailand.
In this interview, Krid Suwanwalaikorn, People Growth & Experience, Learn Corporation, shares the secrets behind this win - from completely changing the firm's internal communication platform, to embracing a growth mindset, and more.
Q What is your organisation’s winning HR strategy, and what are some milestones you’ve accomplished along this journey?
To achieve the Best in HR Communication Strategy (Bronze Winner), we have stepped forward for few phases which are:
- Completely changing the communication platform - At first we minimised communication channels and used the least number of channels to avoid the confusion or out-of-dated information. We decided to reduce the number of communication channels from around three to four channels to use only one new internal social media channel (excluding email).
- Building community in communication - The key of effective internal communication is to build the community in that channel. With the community, employees use the channel for real-time updates with high responsive conversation. Moreover, the source of contents is not only from HR, but from other related teams with good dynamics.
- Engaging all employees online - To ensure that every important message reaches out to everyone. We need to build and maintain the high rate of engaging users in the system all the time by turning a communication tool into an online workplace where people work together there.
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?
As people's experience is our first priority, HR communication is the key to ensure everyone knows about what experiences are occurring and available for them. It is important that team members and communication influencers in our company need to initiate contents such as activities, articles, knowledge sharing, etc. and keep the momentum of events going.
In terms of leadership, leaders are expected to show authenticity, empower employees, and be a role model in having growth mindset. Authenticity makes the working team trust and encouraged to keep initiating. They can implement initiatives with empowerment and confidence leading to success with uniqueness.
What if we fail? A growth mindset of learning helps us to reframe failure as lessons learnt and improve for the better.
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?
Of course, all change must come with unexpected obstacles. At the beginning of transformation, the usage rate of this application - our main communication tool - was around 50% after launch because many people got used to communicating through the previous chat applications even though this new channel could be utilised as more than a chat tool. The new platform is much more advanced, in that it allows employees to do so many things such as send messages to each other, post comments, live streaming, create surveys, ask questions to the chatbot, etc.
In addition, there were some comments on this change, because of frustration and confusion on what the main channel is. What we did to address this was to “learn” and “empathise” with our employees, leading to four steps of actions:
- Build the community of personal interest - we started off with this application as a channel for leisure purposes to let them get used to the features of the application.
- Change from the top - C-level team must communicate through this application, then others will follow.
- Real-time communication - we change quarterly offline townhalls to monthly online live townhall by using this application.
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?
Referring to online monthly townhalls via the new channel, it proves that we save resources for arranging events by THB0.1mn each time, and decrease 78 man hours. It means we annually reduce spending of around THB1.2mn a year and almost 1,000 man hours.
This transformation does not only help in resource saving, but also increases active communication among employees to about 98.19%.
Moreover, referring to engagement in communication, Learn Corporation has hit the top of engagement rate with 96.77% engaged users. For example, at the latest monthly townhall, this live streaming was watched by around 89.63% including sharing devices to watch together and watch the rerun with twice as much responsive comments when compared to the total number of employees.
Moreover, the percentage of communication shows that key messages and business direction are reached out to most employees. Obviously, it is not a one-way communication according to the high responsive rates and engagement in the application.
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?
As mentioned, our key success factors in this story are authenticity, empowerment, and growth mindset. Our working atmosphere is an authentic environment in which everyone is encouraged to be themselves with joy to work. Certainly, if we need to create an authentic environment, we need to empower and trust our people. We trust on their capabilities and believe that they will succeed.
When they fail, we also trust that they will learn something. Thus, a growth mindset is also prioritised as among the top three ways to encourage teams to learn when team members initiate new things, because we believe in: “Today learner, tomorrow leader.”
Image / 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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