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"My vision is simple: To build an organisation where every employee can become the best version of themselves while contributing to sustainable business growth," says Bruce Lee, Group CEO of MKA Group.
As MKA Group expanded across nine countries and four business divisions, the organisation learned that employee experience is shaped by far more than engagement programmes and benefits. Employees ultimately experience the business through the clarity, opportunities and support systems available to them every day.
"So I made a decision: employee experience would not sit with HR alone. It would be a business strategy that I lead personally, together with my leadership team," Bruce Lee, Group CEO, MKA Group reflects. And that's where the Group's five-pillar vision was vision was derived: Leadership development, career growth, health & wellbeing, innovation culture, and ownership & accountability.
The Group's approach, driven by these pillars, earned it the bronze award for 'Best Workforce Innovation' at the Employee Experience Awards 2026, Malaysia.
Catching up with HRO, Bruce Lee, Group CEO, MKA Group, shares why aligning organisational design with career development and talent mobility is key to building a future-ready workforce — and how clarity, trust and transparency can help employees embrace change.
Q Tell us about the biggest insight or lesson that influenced your EX approach this past year.
I used to think my job as a CEO was to build a great company. Today, I believe my real job is to build great people who can build a great company.
Over the years, I’ve realised that people don’t stay because of salaries or benefits alone. They stay because they feel trusted, challenged and valued. When people grow, the business grows naturally.
That mindset has completely changed how I look at employee experience. It’s no longer an HR initiative, it’s a leadership responsibility.
Q How did you bring leaders, managers, and employees together to support the execution and success of the initiative?
"I don’t ask people to follow me. I ask them to believe in the same purpose."
I spend a lot of time communicating why we do something before talking about what we need to do. Once people understand the purpose, they don’t need to be pushed, they become self-driven.
I also believe leaders should never ask employees to do something they wouldn’t do themselves. Leadership starts by setting the example.
Q What challenge behind the scenes tested your team the most, and what did it teach you about building stronger employee experience programmes?
The biggest challenge wasn’t business, it was ourselves.
Every organisation reaches a stage where yesterday’s success can become tomorrow’s limitation.
Sometimes, as leaders, we have to let go of ideas that made us successful in order to create space for better ones.
That taught me humility. Employee experience starts when leaders are willing to keep learning, changing and improving themselves first.
Q As you reflect on the journey, what does this recognition at the Employee Experience Awards 2026 mean to you and your team?
Awards are never the destination.
For me, this recognition simply tells us we’re moving in the right direction.
I’m proud of my team because they chose courage over comfort. They embraced change, challenged each other and continued growing together.
If this recognition inspires even one more company to invest more deeply in its people, then I think it’s truly meaningful.
Q As employee expectations continue to evolve, what is one area of EX you believe HR teams will need to rethink in the year ahead?
I think we need to stop asking, “How do we retain people?”
Instead, we should ask, “How do we help people become the best version of themselves?”
The companies that win in the future won’t necessarily offer the highest salaries. They’ll be the ones that develop leaders, create meaningful work and give people a sense of purpose.
Technology will continue to evolve, but people will always remember how a company made them feel.
Vision and goal
I believe businesses don't grow because they have better products, they grow because they develop better people.
As we expanded MKA across nine countries and diversified into four business divisions, Mobility, FMCG, Real Estate and Technology, I could see that employee expectations were changing rapidly. People were no longer looking only for stable employment. They wanted purpose, continuous learning, career growth, wellbeing and leaders they could trust.
So I made a decision: employee experience would not sit with HR alone. It would be a business strategy that I lead personally, together with my leadership team. My vision is simple:
"To build an organisation where every employee can become the best version of themselves while contributing to sustainable business growth."
I built this vision around five pillars, Leadership Development, Career Growth, Health & Wellbeing, Innovation Culture, and Ownership & Accountability. These pillars shaped the way we redesigned our organisation, the learning culture we built around CANI (Continuous And Never-ending Improvement), and the wellbeing initiatives we introduced over the past year.
Business contribution
For me, employee experience is only meaningful when it improves business performance.
Over the past year, I invested heavily, together with my leadership team, in leadership capability, employee wellbeing, internal career development and organisational alignment, reaching approximately 600 employees across the Group through structured learning platforms such as our Life Academy.
These efforts gave us faster decision-making, higher employee engagement, stronger collaboration across countries and divisions, better leadership succession, more cross-functional innovation, stronger employer branding, and a real shift toward ownership across the organisation.
Rather than relying only on recruitment, I chose to develop the talent we already had, so we could support our regional expansion. I wanted my people to see a career pathway inside MKA, not just a headcount number added market by market.
Leadership Impact
I measure leadership by how many leaders we create, not by how many followers we have.
I make it a personal priority to stay close to employee development, through regular conversations, mentorship, strategic sharing sessions and the culture I try to model every day. I've asked my leadership team to become coaches, not supervisors. I expect every leader in MKA to develop their people, create opportunities for them, and remove the barriers standing in their way.
I don't ask anyone to do something I wouldn't do myself. That's how I've tried to build trust across the organisation, a culture where employees feel safe enough to speak up, challenge how we've always done things, and keep improving. To me, that's what turns employee experience from an HR programme into something I'm personally responsible for.
Future initiatives
Looking ahead, I believe the future of employee experience lies in personalisation, not standardisation.
The initiatives I want to bring to life next include AI-powered learning pathways, an internal talent marketplace, a Leadership Academy, more global mobility opportunities, health optimisation programmes, personal development roadmaps for every employee, and better ways to continuously listen to our people.
My long-term ambition is for MKA to become one of Asia's most admired employers, a place where exceptional people choose to build meaningful careers and grow with us. Because I didn't improve employee experience by adding more benefits. I transformed the way our people grow, lead, learn and succeed together.
Read more interviews on why organisations have won trophies for their HR practices - head over to our Winning Secrets section!
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