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As Patrick Luah, Managing Director, shares, retention is more than just a programme; it is the outcome of how people feel at work, all through the philosophy of making the employee experience as intentional as the clients' experience.
Having a strong retention strategy in this era of work is no easy feat. Beyond competitive pay, it looks at what truly makes employees stay — career growth, meaningful work, strong leadership, and a supportive culture.
When done right, a well-crafted retention strategy can reduce turnover, and preserve institutional knowledge, while also helping businesses build a stable and high-performing workforce in an increasingly competitive talent market.
On company that can attest to this is PLC Tax Consultants. At the HR Excellence Awards 2025, Malaysia, PLC Tax Consultants took home the following awards:
- Gold for 'Excellence in Retention Strategy', and
- Silver for 'Most People-Focused CEO' (Patrick Luah).
As Patrick Luah, Managing Director, shares with HRO, this was only possible by making the employee experience as intentional as the clients' experience.
In this interview, Luah discusses how PLC’s retention strategy goes beyond perks and policies by redesigning work so that people experience better clarity, greater growth and collaborative trust every day.
Q Congratulations on the double win. What is the core philosophy behind PLC’s retention strategy?
Retention is not "a programme we run". It’s the outcome of how people feel at work, how much they can grow, and whether they trust the organisation’s decisions. Our philosophy is simple: make the employee experience as intentional as the client experience.
That means we design retention around three things:
- Make work easier by removing friction, reducing unnecessary admin and helping people focus on value-creating work.
- Make growth visible by turning performance conversations into solution focused coaching and make career development measurable and personalised.
- Make culture safe through building psychological safety through supportive communication, clear values and a coaching culture.
We don’t treat "people outcomes" and "business outcomes" separately. We deliberately built a system where they reinforce each other.
Q What challenge were you solving and how did shape your strategy?
Similarly to many growing firms, our challenge was scale. As we expanded, we saw how manual HR processes could quietly become a risk: hiring slowed down, skill gaps were harder to spot and succession planning became too anecdotal.
Instead of buying an off-the-shelf solution and forcing the business to adapt to it, we chose a different route: we embedded finance-grade thinking into HR and combined it with a solution-focused coaching approach.
That decision led to our internal framework with HR-Fin Growth 2.0 which reimagines HR as an AI-enabled, data-rich growth engine that fuses coaching culture, ESG metrics and real-time financial intelligence. The goal was never “tech for tech’s sake.” It was about making decisions fairer, faster and more human centric by ensuring our people could thrive as we scale.
Q What makes your retention strategy different from a typical “engagement-and-benefits” approach?
Traditional retention strategies often focus on what HR gives to employees. We focus on what the organisation builds with our people.
A few elements that made the difference:
- "Coaching-first" performance: We shifted performance reviews from "judgement" to "growth". Our Performance × Reward approach pairs live business KPIs with coaching nudges, so performance discussions become more objective, conversational and more developmental.
- Retention by foresight, not firefighting: Our AI-assisted selection and talent tools help us detect risk early so leaders can have better conversations sooner, not later. We focus not on right or wrong. Instead, we focus on 'What’s Effective and what’s productive?'
- Culture-as-sandbox: Instead of rolling out change top-down, we run gamified culture labs (Monopoly, Auction House and other workshops) where employees test prototypes, vote with “value coins” and co-create improvements. When people have ownership, adoption becomes intrinsic and retention follows naturally.
- Supportive communication as a leadership muscle: We developed supportive communication capability so managers can translate data into empathetic, high-quality one-to-ones.
"In short, we build retention as our system and not as a campaign."
Q How did you ensure technology felt human, not transactional?
We made one decision early: every tech solution must become more human when implemented not less.
We did this in several ways:
- Supportive communication circles trained line managers to translate analytics into empathetic one-to-ones. The insight is only useful if a leader can use it with care.
- We simplified complexity with human-centred design such as visual cues and dashboard signals that help people understand “where they are” without being intimidated by numbers.
- We built feedback loops into implementation through Culture Day labs, playbooks Strength Scope Leadership programmes and consistent celebration of quick wins.
One of the best signals that we got this right was what our people told us afterward: our pulse polls showed that the majority felt the tools made work easier and leadership felt more transparent.
Q Your Silver win recognised you as a Most People-Focused CEO. What does “people-focused leadership” look like in practice at PLC?
"People-focused" doesn’t mean being soft. It means being and practice context conversational, be presence as well as honour our words.
For us, it shows up in three commitments:
- Coaching is not an HR initiative, it's a leadership standard. We embed coaching practices in how leaders listen, give feedback and grow others.
- Culture is not posters. It's behaviour. We anchor our culture on three core values: professionalism, learnability and credibility and we translate them into clear behavioural expectations; not vague slogans.
- We measure what matters. We don’t rely on sentiment alone. We look at wellbeing indicators, engagement signals and business outcomes side-by-side because people and performance must align to grow together.
Ultimately, our duty is to remove barriers so our people can do meaningful work and to ensure they feel respected and supported while doing it.
Q What impact have you seen from this approach both for people and the business?
We’ve seen outcomes that matter to both employees and the organisation.
On the engagement with our community process, we experienced strong benefits such as effective hiring and onboarding, higher productivity and greater client confidence.
Our performance engine linked to live business numbers helped improve productivity outcomes and our bias-checking approach strengthened open culture.
On the people and culture side, we saw positive secondary wins: better cross-team collaborative communication, stronger employer branding momentum and greater trust with clients about how we manage our organisational process.
When clients start asking us to “install the system you use internally”, you know you’ve built something credible because our culture has become visible in our execution.
Q How do you keep the momentum going and make sure it doesn’t fade after the awards?
We treat culture and retention as continuous improvement, not a one-time push. We relate the system directly to corporate goals and review progress consistently.
When people see that leadership is serious and resources are actually allocated, trust is strengthened.
We continuously improve based on what we were challenged and learnt. Our next stage includes strengthening the tech deployment foundation, enhancing governance and expanding how we build capability so that what works internally can scale sustainably with our community.
Q What advice would you give to leaders who want to build a stronger retention strategy?
Don’t start with "what benefits should we add?”
Instead, start with: What friction should we remove? What growth should we unlock? And how can we build trust together?
If we could begin with integrating:
- A culture with clarity built on behaviours,
- Leaders trained to coach and communicate supportively, and
- Data used as a tool for transparency, retention becomes a natural outcome and not a constant struggle.
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