Winning Secrets: UOB Thailand's head office embodies a high-performance culture

Featuring a four-zone workplace, UOB Plaza Bangkok encourages closer collaboration, enables greater mobility, and promotes employee wellbeing, Sasiwimol Arayawattanapong, Head of HR, shares.

Located on Sukhumvit Road in the heart of Bangkok's lifestyle district, the 30-floor building pictured above now serves as UOB Thailand's head office, as of July 2022. Named UOB Plaza Bangkok, it is also home to the UOB Plaza Bangkok main branch, built using a design-thinking approach to enrich the banking experience by drawing on insights and understanding of its customers.

The office space centres around the 'high-performance workplace' philosophy, which promotes high performance, collaboration, togetherness, and sustainability, as Sasiwimol Arayawattanapong, Head of Human Resources, UOB Thailand, tells HRO. 

In this interview, the leader shares the journey to bringing this new space to life – why the concept came about, the change management process, and more, which earned the new office the silver award for Most Innovative and Sustainable Office Design at the Employee Experience Awards 2023, Singapore.

Q How do you ensure your employee experience initiatives are aligned with your business objectives? 

At UOB Thailand, we strive to become the number one in employee pride. With our continuous improvement efforts and dedication to our services and performance, we are confident that UOB Thailand would be the number one in employee pride while striving towards a better tomorrow.

As a responsible employer, we are committed to providing a safe and healthy work environment where our colleagues can perform at their best. We believe that taking care of their wellbeing also helps improve our overall productivity and drives our performance.

In July 2022, UOB Thailand moved its head office to the new 30-floor building, UOB Plaza Bangkok, located in the heart of Bangkok. The new head office is built around the 'high-performance workplace (HPW)' philosophy, which promotes high performance, collaboration, togetherness, and sustainability. Every zone's space planning considers the evolving way of life and work procedures, and we strive to make the workplace as pleasant as possible.

Q Can you provide examples of how UOB Thailand has invested in the employee experience? 

UOB Plaza Bangkok is located in the heart of Bangkok’s lifestyle district, on Sukhumvit Road. The environmentally friendly building was designed under the 'smart building high performance workplace' concept. The technologies we have invested in include face scan, touchless-access entries, auto dim lighting and air temperature adjustment, QR code scanning for reserving seats/meeting room, and auto parking lifts. We also focus on employees’ wellness by providing ergonomic furniture, apart from other facilities in the building.

The design also encourages closer collaboration, improves technologies that enable greater mobility, and enhances work-life facilities that promote the wellbeing of our people. The building features a four-zone workplace:

1. Team Zone: Designed as an open space area with unassigned seating to encourage collaboration, sharing, and agility.
2. Flex Zone: Open breakout area for colleagues to come together quickly for group discussions to deliver solutions at speed.
3. Central Zone: Work context clusters that support about four to six smaller collaborative teams and meetings.
4. Convenient Zone: Community feeling; social spots and a work bistro for colleagues to network, have a short break and to interact in a more relaxed setting. We also have a communal floor with a fitness room, lockers, sports and games facilities, a massage room, and a mother room that is available for all employees.

Q What are some of the key challenges that you faced in implementing your EX initiatives, and how did you overcome them? 

Moving to the new head office was not just a physical move. It also concerned overall changes that impacted employees. We set up the Change Management Workstream to smoothen this transition. During the process, we set up top-down communications via a senior management workshop, middle management workshops for department and division heads, and change champion workshops. These workshops, together with series of communications and walking tour sessions, aimed to prepare our employees for change, to help them become familiarised with the facilities and achieve higher productivity once we moved to the new building.

Q Do you have processes to measure the effectiveness of your EX initiatives, and what metrics do you use to evaluate success? 

There were the KPIs of change management for the new head office project. These include:

1. Employee engagement survey – Physical working environment question,
2. Workplace experience gaps, and
3. Employee satisfaction.

The post-survey results showed that all three were achieved or beyond the target.

Q Finally, what role do leaders and managers play in driving a beautiful employee experience, and how are they held accountable for the success of these initiatives? 

The key success factors of this transformation project were communication, senior management, and change champions. With senior management support, the change management workstream was set in the early stage to foresee the impacts and prepare the actions regarding different function contexts.

Moving to the new building was also the key agenda that the leaders needed to update their team on regularly in the quarterly townhall meeting, so that employees could be aware of the impact and prepare for the change effectively.

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

Photos / Provided