VaynerMedia's Dawn Wong believes in a culture that is built on diversity of all things

Diversity of thought, socioeconomic background, self-identified gender, self-identified ethnicity, religion, disability, and more encourages employees to bring their whole selves to work, she affirms.

Meet Dawn Wong, Head of People & Experience APAC, VaynerMedia, who has over 20 years of professional experience across sectors such as technology, internet, e-commerce, manufacturing & retail to the recent venture into the advertising, creative & media space.

She is passionate about leading HR teams in startups and global MNCs to achieve the goal of building the greatest human organisation of all time through culture & empathy, as well as is a strong advocate for building exceptional HR teams and giving back to the HR community.

At HRO's Accelerate HR 2023 conference, taking place on 21-22 March 2023, you can look forward to hearing Wong speak on the topic 'Elevating workplace experience: Building a forward-thinking dynamic, desirable, destination workplace'.

Ahead of the conference, she pens her thoughts on the key talent opportunities she is focusing on for the contemporary global creative and media agency, VaynerMedia.

At VaynerMedia, we believe in a culture that is built on diversity of all things: diversity of thought, socioeconomic background, self-identified gender, self-identified ethnicity, religion, work experience, disability, diversity of experience, etc. We encourage employees to bring their whole selves to work each day.

Being on a massive growth journey in the past three years, we have built our business virtually in the pandemic. We believe brands are built in socials and the importance of building a different kind of agency, based on diversity of people, ideas, and empathy.

Cultural relevance, integration, innovation, diversity, agility, and speed are part of our DNA. We take pride in being different and believe that finding right is more important than being right, and we apply the same concept to how we support our people and their experiences in VaynerMedia as well.

We create a safe environment for people to experiment and we believe in continuously finding ways to elevate our people, to allow them to be the best version of themselves here.

Although the advertising industry has a reputation of being very challenging, we are able to differentiate ourselves from others as we are people first and when we focus on the people, the rest will follow.

Two key opportunities we focus on are diversity of talents and manager effectiveness.

We focus on diversity of talents. Being in an organisation of 250+ with 20 nationalities, 50% of women leadership representation, and over 60% of team members identify as female, we are taking steps towards DE&I. We removed university requirements to expand talent pipelines & opportunities for diverse talents to apply. We do not track any data on LGBTQIA+ employees and offer a safe and inclusive work environment for all to come as they are, hiring for skill set fit and culture to expand the talent pool, and bringing in members of diverse backgrounds and not just from the advertising industry.

Focusing on manager effectiveness has enabled us to scale our efforts as we have a very young workforce who is new to being a people manager or managing a diverse team.

As an organisation, we champion leading with kindness; delivering with candour, and an environment that believes in ‘feedback is a gift’ by introducing structured check-ins and feedback cadence. The People and Experience team continuously strives to scale our efforts through people managers and focus on the kind of support that we can provide them so that they can embark and discover their very own people manager’s journey and lead their teams to scale the business.

We care and support our people’s wellbeing by introducing hybrid work, unlimited paid time off, agency-wide off days, and a remote work programme.

We also have learning & wellness benefit programme that is designed to create a culture of learning and wellbeing because both are of paramount importance to us as an organisation.

Despite our rapid growth, we keep the spirit of a small team by organising short calls with the whole APAC team twice a week, we start the week focusing on business, and end the week with all things fun and creative. It is all about relationship building and team bonding regardless where we are. All these are driven by our very own 'culture club' which is made up of likeminded members who believe in working together with the rest of VaynerMedia to achieve the mission to be the greatest human organisation of all time.

Back, bigger and better – Accelerate HR brought to you by Human Resources Online is a prominent HR event you can’t miss. Over 30 deep-dive sessions by leading workplace trailblazers and HR innovators via informative keynotes and case study-driven breakout sessions, interactive panels and debates, fireside chats, and high-value discussions with over 250 people leaders in the region. Contact us for group discounts or download the event brochure for more details.

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