Winning Secrets: How Telkom Indonesia is transforming its corporate direction under a CSR and ESG purpose

Telkom Indonesia won the silver award at the HR Excellence Awards 2021, Indonesia (HREA), for the category, 'Excellence in CSR Strategy'.

In this interview, we speak to Hery Susanto, Senior General Manager, Community Development Centre, Telkom Indonesia to learn how the organisation is helping to build a competitive nation to deliver the best value to stakeholders and society.

Q Tell us a little bit about your journey reaching here – how did you get here and what was most important to you during this process?

The pandemic has driven global companies to undergo a massive transformation, and so did Telkom. With a complacent expression on its façade, Telkom has been successfully adapting and transforming it’s corporate direction under the purpose: “to build a more prosperous and competitive nation as well as deliver the best value to our stakeholders”, which naturally engendered a diverse focus on shifting the core business and sharpening social empowerment programmes through community development initiatives.

The 'Sustainable Development Goals' (SDGs) and 'Creating Shared Values' (CSV), two mandatory underlying frameworks from the Ministry of SOE, have played a major role in shaping our firm's community development programmes including the economic, education, and ESG sector. With a strong governance, commitment, and implementation of digital resources, we have distributed US$15mn of working capital as well as organised some education, training, certification and courses to more than 5,300 fostered-SMEs throughout 2021 which helped 11% of them to level-up their business scale in terms of revenue, asset and employees.

Not to forget, some immersive education and environmental based CSR programmes have proven to be the perfect drivers to lead Telkom to soar upwards and contribute to the prosperity of the nation.

Q What would you list as your company’s most meaningful contribution to employees in the last 12-18 months?

Ensuring health and flexibility are the key factors on how employees may work comfortably in this difficult time. Telkom understands and has formulated holistic implementation of flexible working arrangements (FWA), which enable employees to work-from-home or office according to their preference. The performance measurements are still possible to be done effectively by utilising our digital applications for accessing objective key results (OKR). In accordance with healthcare, Telkom also secured our employees' vaccination programme by involving corporate medical institutions as the vaccination centre.

Apart from that, we took Maslow's hierarchy of needs as a priority by allocating our resources to enable employees to actualise their idea in a start-up and business model environment through our 'Amoeba' and 'Hack Idea' platform, while our employee volunteer programme and 'AyoBikinNyata' ('let’s make it real') are platforms for social & environmental project ideas and involvement.

On the other hand, Telkom has the necessity to absorb a high number of digital talents who are capable of accelerating the transition process of the company's core business. To meet these needs, we organise a programme called 'Innovillage', which incubates ideas from students regarding digital innovation for social empowerment, and funds the three best ideas to actualise the programme. Moreover, the innovators also obtain a special channel to participate in our recruitment as a Telkom employee.

Q What are some challenges you've had to overcome, both as a CHRO and as a people leader, and how did you get past them? What was your biggest learning?

The major shift in our CSR to ESG programme and the internalisation of SDGs & CSV needs incisive strategic leadership to ensure everything proceeded smoothly. Considering those factors, we developed a scenario called '3P':

Q Onwards and upwards! Can you share some highlights of your year ahead in 2022, and what your workforce can look forward to?

The year 2022 will be a big leap for our CSR/ESG programmes. With a big emphasis on sustainability and implementation of digital aspects of the programmes, Telkom is confident on executing the S-U-S-T-A-I-N strategy which contains certain eminent innovation and initiatives particularly around environmental programmes.

Q Bring out your crystal ball - 10 years down the line, where do you see the future of HR?

From now on, the stakeholders are going to consider the social contribution aspect of the corporation as important as net income. That can definitely answer how ESG programmes should be the key concern as much as the core business, so that the profit and non-profit purpose might run convergently to meet the level of one another.

In the near future, corporations through their HR/CSR programmes, will play a key role, hand-in-hand with other counterparts, to address, notably, climate issues as well as social & economic equalities. Thus, Telkom Indonesia, at least for up to 2024, has firmly put our commitment to this colossal work through the framework of SDGs and CSV, and allocating enormous funding in order to improve the quality of human life, particularly in Indonesia.

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