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PTTEP took home the following awards at the inaugural HR Excellence Awards 2021, Thailand:
- Bronze for Excellence in Workplace Culture,
- Gold for Excellence in Talent Acquisition.
In this interview, Adisorn Smathimanant, Senior Vice President, Human Resources Division, PTTEP, shares the strategy behind this win – and how the company works together to drive achievement and celebrate as a team.
Q What is your organisation’s winning HR strategy, and what are some milestones you’ve accomplished along this journey?
The key winning strategy for PTTEP in everything we do, including the HR perspective, is to always seek to become the energy partner of choice, with the aim to create shared values for all our stakeholders. Employees are among the key stakeholders in the pursuit of our mission to provide reliable energy supply and sustainable values for all parties. As a means to achieve this, every employee in PTTEP follows 'one team, one goal' principle as a common approach in the way we work together.
To drive PTTEP forward, HR continuously transforms in three different dimensions:
- Organisation transformation (OT)
- Digital transformation (DT), and
- New normal transformation (NT)
This is done to motivate our employees to reach their maximum potential. We provide career advancement opportunities, various competency development approaches, engagement activities, and fair performance management systems.
PTTEP has earned numerous awards and recognitions, including HR-related, throughout the years, which we proudly display on our website.
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?
Our CEO and senior leadership set up frequent 'one team, one goal' communication sessions, utilising technology to ensure that staff working from home or from operation sites received the same message, to convey about our objectives, transformation progress, project milestones, business progress, key concerns & feedback, and support needed from team members and management, including small win celebrations.
Again, this shows the way we work together in PTTEP to drive achievement and celebrate together as a team.
The award we've won for Excellence in Talent Acquisition is another evidence of the success of 'one team, one goal' approach through digital transformation. In our recruitment process, stakeholders usually come from different departments, backgrounds, and locations, but we still share the same goal.
We work together as a team to formulate alternative solutions, listen to and support each other, and reach our target together for the benefit of PTTEP.
The project has been launched successfully and received positive feedback from both internal and external users.
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?
During our 'recruitment portal' project, we ran into an unexpected roadblock during the user acceptance testing (UAT) phase, which was already towards the end of the project. There were some difficulties in utilising off-the-shelf analytics dashboards because they could not cover all the required aspects critical to our users. In addition, the system provider insisted that any further adjustments to the system were not included in the initial scope and budget.
The working team brainstormed and came up with an alternative solution, with support from PTTEP digital team, by developing an in-house dashboard to solve the problem to ensure that we can ultimately meet all the requirements of the users.
The key for us to overcome this situation was by being resilient as a team. In doing so, we were able to counter the unexpected situation and provide alternative solutions to solve the issue while maintaining milestone commitment alongwith target efficiency.
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?
Measuring return on investment (ROI) of HR activities/projects has always been a challenging question as it’s normally not easy to calculate the actual impact in monetary terms. Therefore, at PTTEP, we tend to measure effectiveness against other HR benchmarking indexes.
For example, when we rolled out the culture cultivation programme, we measured the effectiveness through contribution to employee engagement scores. When we achieved 93% from the specific question in the employee engagement survey relating to culture, we can safely assume that our employees truly understand PTTEP core values and expected behaviours.
Moreover, our voluntary turnover rate has always been a single-digit percentage, which is much lower than the market average, for many consecutive years.
These are industry-accepted standards that prove the successful achievements and implementations of our HR initiatives.
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?
By realising the constant changes in technology, innovations, society standards, and workforce generation requirements, the top three attributes in my view that contribute to a successful CHRO are the abilities to include diversity & inclusion (D&I) mandate, embrace transformational leadership, and being resilient.
Diversity & inclusion: Promote HR policies & activities to make employees feel more connected at work, share more ideas, and create more innovation. This is a critical driver to successful business results.
Transformational leadership: Formulate HR strategy in alignment with business directions and embrace new challenges. Develop multiple skillsets for organisation transformation, digital transformation, and new normal transformation, as required.
Be resilient: Adapt to business situation changes and maintain momentum among teams to overcome unexpected challenges during this fast-changing environment. This ability is not limited to HR personnel, but also critical for all successful leaders as well.
Photo / Provided (Adisorn Smanthimanant, SVP HRD, PTTEP)
Read more interviews on why organisations have won trophies for their HR practices - head over to our Winning Secrets' section!
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