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As Patrick Luah, Managing Director, shares, every major HR initiative should be redesigned around one question: How do we help our people feel seen, supported, and ready to lead?
At PLC Tax Consultants, employee experience is not treated as a campaign or a once-a-year HR activity. It is designed as a daily operating system where people are coached, developed, heard, and empowered to grow with purpose.
This commitment was recognised at the Employee Experience Awards 2026, Malaysia, where PLC received seven honours:
- Gold for Best Management Training Programme,
- Gold for Best Use of Technology to Enhance Employee Engagement,
- Gold for Best Career Development Programme,
- Silver for Best Diversity and Inclusion Strategy,
- Bronze for Best Talent Assessment and Selection Process, and
- Bronze for Most Inspiring Leader (Patrick Luah).
In this interview with HRO, Patrick Luah, Managing Director of PLC Tax Consultant Group and as CEO Coach with Vistage Malaysia, shares how PLC built a scalable employee experience model rooted in a coaching culture, career clarity, trust, technology, and human growth.
Q Tell us about the biggest insight or lesson that influenced your EX approach this past year.
The biggest lesson was that employee experience cannot be built by benefits alone. It must be built through clarity, trust and daily leadership behaviour.
As a professional services firm in tax, audit, company secretarial and HR advisory, our people work in a demanding environment where accuracy, deadlines and client expectations are high. We realised that if we wanted sustainable performance, we could not simply ask people to work harder. We needed to help them grow stronger.
That insight shaped our EX approach. We moved from managing people through instructions to developing people through coaching. Every major HR initiative, from management training to career development, talent assessment, employee engagement and work life harmony, was redesigned around one question: How do we help our people feel seen, supported and ready to lead?
Q How did you bring leaders, managers and employees together to support the execution and success of the initiative?
We treated EX as a shared leadership responsibility, not an HR department project.
Our CEO, COO, and heads of department aligned around a coaching first leadership model. Managers were trained to conduct structured one on one conversations, use supportive communication and connect performance discussions with career growth. Employees were invited to co-own their development through career maps, learning journals, Culture Day reflections and feedback loops.
We also created common platforms for alignment: OGSM reviews, appraisal panels, Culture Day, Supportive Communication sessions, AI learning pods and management training programmes. These created a shared language across departments.
The result was a stronger sense of ownership. Leaders became coaches. Managers became development partners. Employees became active contributors to their own growth journey. That is where execution became sustainable.
Q What challenge behind the scenes tested your team the most, and what did it teach you about building stronger employee experience programmes?
The toughest challenge was shifting mindset.
In a traditional professional services environment, many people are used to technical training, task completion and performance evaluation. Coaching, emotional safety, career dialogue and work life harmony initially felt new to some team members. Some managers [were] worried that coaching would take too much time. Some employees were unsure whether speaking openly would truly lead to change.
We overcame this by making EX practical. Coaching was embedded into existing meetings. AI dashboards helped managers track conversations and learning progress. Culture Days made values experiential rather than theoretical. Appraisal panels made performance discussions more transparent and fair.
"The lesson was clear: strong EX programmes must convert good intentions into repeatable rituals. When people experience consistency, trust grows. When trust grows, participation becomes natural."
Q As you reflect on the journey, what does this recognition at the Employee Experience Awards 2026 mean to you and your team?
This recognition is deeply meaningful because PLC is an SME from Kluang competing on the same stage as large corporations, listed companies and multinational organisations. It reminds our team that world class people practices are not limited by company size, location or industry tradition.
Winning Gold for Best Management Training Programme, Best Use of Technology to Enhance Employee Engagement and Best Career Development Programme affirmed that our investment in people development is not just heartfelt, but strategically sound. The Silver and Bronze recognitions across diversity, talent assessment, work life harmony and inspiring leadership also validated the depth of our employee experience ecosystem.
Most importantly, these awards belong to the team. They represent every coaching conversation, every feedback session, every learning hour and every courageous step our people took to grow together.
Q Finally, as employee expectations continue to evolve, what is one area of EX you believe HR teams will need to rethink in the year ahead?
HR teams must rethink career development as a personalised growth ecosystem.
Employees today do not only ask, “What is my job?”, they ask, “Where am I going? Who is helping me grow? How does my work connect to purpose? Will technology replace me or help me become better?”
At PLC, we believe the next stage of EX must combine human coaching with intelligent technology. AI can help identify learning gaps, track engagement patterns, support feedback quality and personalise development pathways. But the heart of EX must remain human.
The future belongs to organisations that can combine clarity with compassion, data with dialogue and performance with purpose. For PLC, our next focus is to scale our coaching-based people development model into a stronger SME benchmark for HR consulting, leadership development and future ready workforce transformation in Malaysia.
Read more interviews on why organisations have won trophies for their HR practices - head over to our Winning Secrets section!
Photo: Provided
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