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Winning Secrets: How Majorel Malaysia achieved a below-market attrition rate, while increasing employee satisfaction

Winning Secrets: How Majorel Malaysia achieved a below-market attrition rate, while increasing employee satisfaction

Through its efforts, in under five years, the HR team has seen more than 24 employees stepping forward to volunteer as the company’s Feel-Good Ambassadors, Wendy Khek, HR Manager, Majorel Malaysia, tells HRO.

Majorel designs, builds, and delivers next-generation end-to-end customer experience (CX) solutions for digital-native and vertical leading brands, through its global footprint in 45 countries across five continents, with more than 82,000 team members and 60 languages.

Together with its expertise in tech-augmented front-to-back-office CX, the group offers digital consumer engagement, CX consulting, and a suite of proprietary digital solutions for industry verticals. 

In 2022, the team at Majorel's Kuala Lumpur-based arm, Majorel Malaysia, took home two awards at the HR Excellence Awards in Malaysia:

  • Bronze for Excellence in Employer Branding
  • Bronze for Young HR Talent of the Year: won by Halimatul Saadiah Fahmi

In this interview, Wendy Khek, HR Manager, Majorel Malaysia, tells us about the company's growth since its beginnings in 2018, steps taken to tackle employees' concerns, and more, leading to a rise in employee satisfaction scores and below-market attrition rate.

Q Congratulations on the achievement! Could you take us through the highs and lows of your people strategy?

Majorel Malaysia is a spinoff of Arvato Systems CRM business unit. Starting with a mere headcount of 50 in 2018, our first task was to scale and grow the company to meet the business demand. By 2020, we had grown four-fold, and with the mandate to grow five-fold by 2022. With a brand name that is relatively new in the market, it became clear that we needed a strong employer branding strategy to cater to this growth demand. In 2018, we also experienced a higher-than-market turnover rate in the company.

As the sole HR person hired in 2020, we then quickly identified the needs of the company and embarked on a two-year-long employee engagement and employer branding strategy to improve the trust and engagement of the workforce and set the building blocks to be able to outperform our competitors by recruiting key personnel needed to meet the company growth demand.

Q How did the HR team identify and align the business & employee needs, and craft this perfect solution?

Identification of the problem began with an open door to the voice of the employees. It became noticeably clear that employees needed to be heard and their concerns addressed. Instead of avoiding employee problems, I embraced them – I began to tackle all issues and problems directed to HR and tried hard to understand the root cause of these problems.

While building the HR team, I set clear expectations that HR team members needed to address all employee concerns on time and take the extra step to solve their issues.

An understanding of business needs was sought through the leadership team and stakeholders of the company. We are uniquely positioned as HR, to craft the perfect solution to move the company to the next level, merging the needs of both the business and our people.

Q Could you share the results that your strategy has delivered – be it on the business, HR, or people side?

By 2022, we saw the company grow exponentially, meeting and even exceeding the manpower demand of the business.

Employee satisfaction scores increased greatly, and we witnessed more than 24 employees stepping forward to volunteer as the company’s Feel-Good Ambassadors. The attrition rate decreased to below-market benchmark and we witnessed high enthusiasm and productivity from most departments. In a few of our business units, we were the top-performing BPO to our clients.

Q What is your message to all the stakeholders who have supported you in this journey?

From the local, regional, and global leadership stakeholders, the local HR team has received immense support, encouragement, and freedom to develop and propose strategic HR programmes that will benefit our operations. The stakeholders are the key players in the success of all HR programs. Hence, only with a strong partnership between operations and HR, could programmes such as employer branding, retention, career development, and other HR programmes, be executed successfully.

It is truly gratifying to know that the stakeholders and leaders of Majorel Malaysia recognise the importance of HR as a strategic partner towards the success of our business and bottom line.

Q What are you most excited about when you think about the future of HR?

HR should be a strong strategic business partner to the operations in any industry and business. Manpower costs stand as the biggest operating costs in most organisations.

In Majorel, we witnessed 2020 to 2022 as a period of sturdy growth coupled with mitigation of losses by focusing on our people, understanding their needs vs. business needs, consequently deploying a robust and customised People Plan, which in turn lowered our attrition rates while meeting and exceeding business needs.

I am extremely excited to know that the future of HR stands bright as a strategic business partner that can help grow the business and mitigate potential losses.


Photo / Shutterstock

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

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