Winning Secrets: How Prudential Vietnam developed ‘PruAmbassadors’ to lead the culture movement at divisional and departmental levels

CHRO Bui Thi Thanh Thuy on the initiatives that have helped drive culture transformation by role-modelling values and ensuring their integration into daily actions.

Prudential Vietnam is proud to be a member of the Prudential Group, a leading financial group founded in 1848, with a long history of business, sustainable development, and commitment to long-term, safe and effective investment.

The 11^th edition of the HR Excellence Awards, Singapore (2023) saw Prudential Vietnam winning the gold award for 'Excellence in Workplace Culture'.

On this milestone, HRO catches up with Bui Thi Thanh Thuy, Chief Human Resources Officer, Prudential Vietnam, on the various initiatives that have helped drive culture transformation by role-modelling values and ensuring their integration into daily actions.

Q Congratulations on your top performance at the HR Excellence Awards! How has your HR and people strategy contributed to your success this year?

In this VUCA world, our organisation used to struggle to maintain the business while our employees were immersed in uncertainty. People worried about the mental health & wellbeing of themselves, and at the same time were disoriented on how to perform their work as usual when the world was changing significantly, especially in Vietnam during the industry crisis at the beginning of 2023.

In such an event, the role of HR was even more crucial, we were agile enough to drive the resilience of our people to deliver the business via different proactive initiatives.

By implementing a holistic culture transformation approach, involving top-down, middle-out, and bottom-up approaches, we have ensured that everyone feels involved and contributes to the culture change movement. This inclusive approach has fostered engagement and commitment among employees, leading to their top performance.

Q Looking back at your achievements, what aspect of your HR initiatives are you most proud of and why?

Prudential Vietnam takes pride in several aspects of our HR initiatives.

One key achievement is the development of a 'culture champion' team who we call "PruAmbassadors", that implements the culture movement at divisional and departmental levels.

This team helps drive culture transformation by role-modelling the defined values and ensuring their integration into daily actions.

Putting people at heart of everything we do, Prudential Vietnam aspires to provide an agile learning culture, one of which is a digital coaching programme for everyone to be coached by internal certified coaches. Within one month of launching our Digital Coaching Hub from April 2023, the programme received nearly 100 coaching requests via the digital platform, with 14 existing coaches.

The latest initiative was the introduction of Gratitude House – a campaign to let employees show gratitude and appreciation to one another via an in-house technology platform. It has successfully attracted more than 500 appreciation messages exchanged, not only shifting our employees’ habit of expressing thanks, but also supporting employees to be prouder of their work.

Q During your HR journey, what were some significant obstacles you faced, and how did you overcome them to achieve excellence?

The first crucial thing is to get buy-in from all stakeholders as we apply the co-creation approach. Stakeholders are defined as critical focused groups, and we have segmented and engaged different groups along the way.

• For EXCO (Top-down): We gained their perspective for the desired culture, which is sense-checked every quarter on both expectations and progress. Hence, our top management proactively aligns on our People strategy – which accounts for 7.5% of our company KPI.
• For middle management (Middle-out), we involve them as culture champions (PruAmbassadors) from the co-design stages, to deployment, and until the impact evaluations stages.
• For mass employees (Bottom-up), we ensure bottom-up voices are well listened to via bi-annual people and wellbeing surveys, with serious actions post-survey throughout the years.

Secondly, we must well communicate to all stakeholders via different channels to ensure everyone is on the same page.

• Embedding our 'values' into leadership messages to ensure employees aware of values and implications.
• Visualising 'values symbols' and embedding them into a reflections guide.
• Engaging staff in all senses via continuous communications and activities in all channels.
• Engaging people to co-create and co-deploy via forums and surveys for all staff, and focused interviews.

Keeping people updated, along with a timeline, is committed to as a high priority.

Q How does your organisation measure the success and impact of your HR initiatives?

On the business side, PVA committed to build future-ready agency, accelerate corporate sales and digital partnership, develop health strategy with modular products. These key business transformations required a collective growth mindset and new way of working to drive the organisation forward.

The synergies in employee mindset and behaviours are translated into better collaboration and business performance, leading to Prudential Vietnam possessing highest market share won among the top five in 2022. By 2022, our agency channel was a great success as the only among top five to record significant growth while other degrow, our banca channel remained number one. Not only that, but we also witnessed strong agile performance in terms of operations (achieved 4.2/5.0 on the Global Agility Index).

The high people advocacy will assure people's belief in terms of business success, and drive their engagement and collaboration, which is especially crucial in the current state of the economy. Our People survey in Jan’23 (total 1,500+ responses) shared an increase of 1-3% per year for each statement, comprising ‘Recommend Prudential as the great place to work’, ‘proud to work’, ‘belief in company success’, ‘diversity & inclusion’, and more.

Q In what direction do you see the HR/people function evolving in the future, considering the emerging trends?

We foresee a more inclusive workplace in the future, as this is the same belief from Gen Z who are gradually present in all organisations.

Thus, our current culture initiatives are setting the ground for us to be successful and able to cope with future challenges.

Secondly, the use of data analytics would be in full swing in the near future, assisting us on how we interpret data, make decisions, and create impact. The insights drawn from this analysis are crucial in predicting and shaping a better way of communication and collaboration in the workplace.

The awareness of digitalisation and technology should be put into high consideration as we seek to elevate the employee experience and create a modernised working environment, together with our solutions to customers in the market.

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

Lead image / Provided by Prudential Vietnam