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During his Southeast Asia visit, Ronnie Felder, Global Chief People Officer, VMLY&R speaks to Arina Sofiah on his personal EX philosophy and how to translate a global strategy for an Asia market.
VMLY&R is committed to mapping out its employee experience journey every step of the way.
In doing so, Ronnie Felder, Global Chief People Officer, VMLY&R believes that the most important thing is to leverage the full expertise and specialisms of the agency to craft authentic and meaningful employee journeys to engage its teams and give them a sense of shared purpose, drive and belonging. As part of this, Felder and his team have rolled out several programmes to bring additional value to employees, continuously soliciting regular feedback to understand how it is doing, and areas for improvements.
With a current global remit covering Asia, Felder is passionate about making sure the team cares, and that it is focused on the things that matter, while also being transparent about what matters to clients — what the leader and his team believe makes conversations much more of a two-way thing.
While the leader was on a trip to Asia in September, Arina Sofiah had a chance to catch up with him to find out more about his personal employee experience philosophy, the passion he has for his role, and more. Read on for the interview excerpts.
Q What is your personal employee experience philosophy?
It’s really focused on a culture of inclusivity, innovation, and continuous growth, and it's been this way for a long time.
At the heart of it, we believe in nurturing talent and making sure that employees at VMLY&R feel part of the family, where they can thrive personally, and professionally evolve constantly to meet the dynamic needs of this evolving industry.
I can sum it up by saying it really is meant to be a place of true belonging where employees can be both passionate about their professional ambitions and their personal interests, and where those two things can meet day-to-day.
Q How are you bringing this to life at VMLY&R? Can you share some initiatives that you've implemented to drive this philosophy?
We are committed to mapping out our employee experience journey every step of the way. This involves being cognisant of what matters most to our people and what their experience looks like with us from the very first ‘hello’ and beyond. It includes how we bring value to their lives and time with us – and how we celebrate their achievements and milestones in ways that are thoughtful, coherent and consistent across our entire network.
To do this effectively, we rolled out several programmes to bring additional value to our employees, continuously soliciting their regular feedback to understand how we are doing, and where improvements can be made.
One such initiative which has helped us to do this is our Human Centred Design (HCD) Programme, which was started in Asia as a test case, and due to its success, is now being rolled out across the globe.
HCD is now part of VMLY&R’s DNA, and something we have diligently rolled out at every level of our network in Asia. It’s a people-driven approach to problem-solving and product development which centres around putting yourself in the customer’s shoes. With over 800 employees trained around the world, we’re working to ensure that as many folks as possible can leverage this incredible, proprietary program to help build their careers.
Another initiative which we are excited about is something we are calling ‘CX for EX” – that is, customer experience for employee experience. Still in its early stages, within this initiative, we are applying the same principles we apply to client work to our own employee experience journey.
Our teams are experts in customer experience, so it makes sense that by applying their knowledge and expertise to our employee experience we should be able to deliver significant value to our entire network. By treating ourselves as ‘the client,’ we are currently deploying our strategists, creatives and designers to look at the full life cycle of VMLY&R’s EX through a CX lens.
This means working from beginning to end and looking at things like, how did employees find out about us in the first place, what did they learn, and what did their recruitment experience look like? What did their first day at work look like, their first week, their first year? How do we celebrate their achievements and milestones in a way that makes them feel seen and valued in the company? What does the exit process look like, the handover, the exit interview, and how do we stay in touch and retain a relationship beyond this?
I think the most important thing here is that we are leveraging the full expertise and specialisms of our agency to craft authentic and meaningful employee journeys to engage our teams and give them a sense of shared purpose, drive and belonging.
This is no longer just an HR conversation, it’s a C-suite conversation and something our whole organisation is committing to, so I’m very excited to see where it will take us!
Q How have you seen employee engagement and retention evolve since implementing these initiatives? At the same time, how are they helping solidify your employer branding?
Initiatives like these have been fundamental in building our own awareness of what is important to our people across the globe, helping us to empower our teams to champion our values, purpose and vision in ways that are authentic and helpful to them in their day-to-day work delivering for clients. This engagement is what ultimately builds retention, helping to solidify our positioning as an agency which thrives by creating work that brings people together, united by the power of human connection.
We harness creativity, technology, and culture to create connected brands that drive value for our clients and impact the world, and these initiatives have and continue to be fundamental in helping our teams to live this idea.
Q Coming to another topic that you are, no doubt, passionate about: Having been in a global role for years, with your current global remit covering Asia, what are some key differences you’ve observed between people management practices in the East and the West? could you provide examples of cultural people management practices from the East that you believe could be integrated into Western operations for a more holistic people management strategy across the board?
What I love so much about being able to be in a global role is really seeing how cultures are so vastly different. At the end of the day, I think the part that I'm so passionate to talk about is that it really gets down to being human to our people.
This means just making sure that we care, and that we are focused on the things that matter for them, while also being transparent about what matters to our clients so that we can continue to do the wonderful things that we do.
From that, I would say some of the learnings that I can take back is that there is such a passion for feedback and transparency of overall company performance, and how employees can impact online.
Q In that vein, could you provide examples of cultural people management practices from the East that you believe could be integrated into Western operations for a more holistic people management strategy across the board?
Earlier, when I mentioned performance management, I appreciate that in many parts of the Asia region, there does seem to be more of an appreciation for the rigor and consistency of performance feedback. There seems to be consistency in how that is delivered. What I'm thrilled in being able to do is to make sure that, globally, not only are we now rolling this out to be a consistent part of employee feedback — it's not just about performance reviews as a rating, but it is also a check in and an opportunity to ask our employees how they're doing.
A lot of times, these conversations become one directional. We're making it much more of a two-way conversation, to not only talk about how you are as an individual and how they are feeling, but any of the things that anyone wants to talk about there.
Of course, we do regular check-ins on the things that continued to drive engagement and personal growth for our employees. I appreciate that because of the consistency in the way that many Asian regions have been rolling this out, we were able to adopt some of that globally in our framework.
Q Being responsible for strategic leadership and workforce planning across the agency's global offices, what are some specific challenges you've encountered while translating a global strategy for an Asia market and how have you overcome it?
I think the main challenge when it comes to translating a global strategy for Asia, is that (like most other parts of the world), it’s not one size fits all.
Localisation is extremely important in making sure our values and vision make sense in a particular market and within a culture.
For many years, we did not have the right people in the room for a true sense and understanding of what it means to be global. Our lives, experiences, and cultures are so vastly different, so as a global organisation attempting to share values and vision, we quickly realised the importance of giving regional leads from every region in our network a voice and a seat at the table to contribute to the conversation and feedback on the best ways of translating our global strategy for their individual markets.
In many markets, we also have very strong employee resource groups (ERGs) that we partner with, which have not only helped us to understand and connect with our employees but have also proven fundamental in helping us to build out our initiatives. To do this well, we need to ensure that the ERGs are inclusive and diverse – representing specific populations and interests in their office or region.
We’ve learned our lesson to make sure that we don't take any of that for granted, and want to make sure that every voice, and every intersection can be explored so that it makes sense before we roll something out. This is an on-going process, but a process that I’m confident will lead to better strategies, better execution and better results for our teams and clients in Asia and beyond.
Lead image / Provided
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