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The start to making this a reality is for every individual leader to buy into the value of belonging — both intellectually and emotionally, say our interviewees.
HP Inc. recently took home the silver award for Best Diversity and Inclusion Strategy, at the inaugural Employee Experience Awards 2021, Singapore.
In this interview, Ming, Talent Acquisition Manager, Southeast Asia and Talleah Teo, Talent Acquisition Director, Greater Asia, Greater China and India, tell us what brought about this win - from implementing an all-rounded DEI framework, to ensuring every leader bought into the value of belonging, which overall earned the firm its highest diversity score of 95%.
Q Congratulations on bagging this award! What is your award-winning employee experience strategy that led to this win?
Thank you! We are thrilled and honoured to receive Silver in Best Diversity and Inclusion Strategy. We believe that putting our employee needs at the forefront of everything we do was the reason we won.
This includes an all-rounded diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) framework from pre-hire, sourcing, and recruiting to hiring, strengthening the women leadership pipeline, and providing a collaborative environment for employees to apply diverse thought leadership; and insights to building an inclusive workplace where all employees can 'belong, innovate and grow' (BIG).
Bringing our BIG strategy to life through defining, designing and delivering a workplace where employees belong, find meaning, and create astonishing human achievements is what we are focused on at HP.
Q How did you and your team conceptualise and adapt this strategy to suit evolving workforce needs in the past year?
With the prospect of remote working on the horizon for over a year and with Zoom fatigue fast setting in, we took an integrated focus on the entire employee experience prioritising creating memorable experience points at critical stages of the employee lifecycle. Diversity and inclusion are often treated as a single initiative owned exclusively by HR. With a strong business leader at the top of that, the experience is being positioned as a strategic imperative.
For real change to happen, every individual leader needs to buy into the value of belonging — both intellectually and emotionally. Part of this process requires tuning in to empathy; we encourage the conversation, educating on unconscious bias, cultural competence, and diversity topics across the company where it’s our way of working and interacting each day.
Then, we incorporated these ideas and beliefs into our daily lives to help champion change within the teams and working groups.
Q What challenges did you face along the way, and how did you overcome them?
Let’s just say, we’ve come a long way. There were times where our proposals were rejected but we took each of them as learnings and reflected. Creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture where every individual can contribute their full potential requires investigating the systems and processes in our organisation to uncover sore spots and blind spots, and then finding ways to reimagine them.
Emphasising culture fit when hiring can result in an unhealthy monoculture if we aren’t taking steps to foster diversity and inclusion. Making sure that recruiters, hiring managers, and internal stakeholders represent diverse groups and diversity of thought ensures a more effective hiring process.
Part of that inclusive methodology is that we have a diverse panel of interviewers, and balance that with diverse candidates.
Q How did the strategy add to the overall employee experience in your organisation, in terms of ROI? Any achievements you’d like to show off?
HP Singapore won an award as one of the top 10 Best Places to Work in Singapore in the year 2020.
And in the recent Voice, Insight, Actions (VIA) employee survey, the engagement score has risen 6% and diversity has scored 95%, which is the highest - as employees feel that their voices are heard and they can be themselves at work!
Q What is the most exciting and valuable thing about being part of (and winning at!) the debut Employee Experience Awards?
Winning the award further accredited our efforts in the DEI space and is a fantastic external acknowledgment of the work we do daily for creating values that matter to employees. Our greatest asset has always been our people, and this win affirms our commitment to them. HP will continue to look for new ways to uplift our employees and enhance our overall employee experience.
Q Looking ahead, what else do you have planned as you continue to enhance the overall employee experience?
The COVID-19 pandemic has been disruptive for our people and organisation. It is, therefore, crucial for us to focus on our people's wellbeing and this includes physical, emotional, social, spiritual, and financial wellbeing. Our competitive edge stems largely from investment in our people.
We aim to amplify an ecosystem that empowers. We will nurture and support our employees through blended learning and development opportunities to learn, network, gain visibility and work on cross-functional programmes to help them succeed, and feel a sense of connection and belonging.
Q Do share tips to inspire your peers who are working on their EX strategies and would love to participate in the awards next year.
Three Cs. As we look back on our entry submission, we strive to be clear, concise and compelling, and substantiate this with illustrations such as charts, tables, and statistics to show how our programmes have impacted our people by using data and relevant metrics. Good luck!
Q Lastly, to end on a fun note – if you could describe the employee experience at HP in one sentence, what would that be?
HP also stands for Happy People, where employees can bring their whole self to work! :)
Seeing is believing, find out more about HP here, enjoy the video!
Read more interviews on why organisations have won trophies for their HR practices - head over to our Winning Secrets' section!
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