Winning Secrets: Scoot’s leveraging technology to deepen engagements with its highly distributed workforce

Low-cost carrier Scoot was recognised for its passion in technology and innovation by winning gold for 'Best HR Digital Transformation Strategy' at the Employee Experience Awards 2022, Singapore.

On the achievement, we interview Theresa Tan, Vice President, Human Resource, Scoot, on how the focus on automation and technology allowed the team to optimise operational turnaround time and improve organisational performance as well as employee morale.

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

Our passion for technology and innovation means we are always on the lookout for digital solutions to help our employees do meaningful work with increased efficiency. Prior to adopting digital tools, we often conducted business process re-engineering to ensure that we were not simply applying automation to resolve immediate issues. We constantly rethink and redesign how we work to ensure digital platforms do value add to how we engage with our highly distributed workforce and improve efficiencies for administrators.

By building on a strong digital foundation, we hone our strategies further in an agile and iterative way to manage change and ensure strategic alignment to the business. Besides making continuous improvement, we also built the following into our digital transformation strategy.

• Seamless integrations: We made it a priority to create a smooth and seamless digital experience for employees by using solutions which allow for an easy integration with our HR information system.
• Scalable technology stack: This approach offers the flexibility to build our in-house capabilities thus reducing reliance on external providers and lowering costs in the long run.

Having our strategy recognised is a testament to our efforts in keeping the human touch alive with tech, especially in the face of constant change.

Q Understanding and meeting your employees’ needs and expectations is never an easy feat. How did Scoot identify the business & employee needs, and craft out the perfect solution? 

We thrive on our employee suggestions. We recognise the need for regular engagement with employees and provide various channels ranging from town halls to personalised employee experience surveys for them to share their suggestions and concerns.

For instance, we launched a new 'Employee Xperience' (EX) survey using an AI-driven technological platform that turns employees’ feedback into actionable insights for leaders. Its intelligent listening approach allows us to disseminate shorter surveys on a quarterly basis where questions are automatically rotated based on employee’s life stage and recent feedback. The survey is also an interactive one, where employees could provide suggestions via open-ended comments and leaders could respond directly.

By adopting tailored technology powered by data intelligence to promote engagement anytime and anywhere on any device, we create a culture where employees feel connected and empowered, thus bringing more enthusiasm to their roles.

Q How did the strategy add to the overall employee experience in Scoot?

By focusing on automation and technology, we are able to track progress and analyse insights to optimise operational turnaround time and improve organisational performance.

For instance, we have implemented 11 chatbots that are integrated with Workchat to reduce HR’s intervention for straightforward and simpler requests. Our informational bot has helped to resolve close to 4,500 employee-related queries, and our transactional bot has serviced over 95% of employees. Our employee recognition bot has also solicited 5,539 rewards and appreciation messages to-date since its launch in January 2021.

Being nimble and the ability to respond quickly to market changes are vital to drive the business forward, especially at a time when we are accelerating in tandem with growing travel demand. By leveraging technology to complement our work processes and deepen engagements with our highly distributed workforce, we could custom-craft strategies to improve employee morale, motivate changes quicker and rally teams to work towards achieving business goals.

Q Could you offer some recommendations to your peers across industries on implementing something similar for their own EX foundation?  

Beyond just creating a work culture that recognises and celebrates the people, we also need to look at connecting people to their purpose and to our employer brand promise. Acting as a strategic partner to the business, HR needs to bring their expertise and business knowledge together to empower a smart workforce.

At Scoot, our focus on incremental delivery of digital skills and technologies has steered us well in constantly adapting to what truly matters at any one time. By picking the right technology for the business, it offers a clearer and aggregated picture for HR to be more strategic, move fast and be nimbler in making decisions with data that are relevant to context, and not with gut.

Q Looking ahead, how is Scoot going to take this winning strategy higher and further in the coming years?  

The pandemic has spurred an accelerated need for workplace transformation. Moving forward, we will continue using technologies to influence how and where we work, as well as using it to stay connected to employees.

Our focus for the next one-two years will be to drive skill-based talent optimisation focused on both the ‘hardware’ (toolsets) and ‘heartware’ (mindsets).

To achieve this, we will develop an integrated HR system in the cloud to consolidate people data and use it to optimise our workforce and skills planning.

Besides getting the hardware ready, we are also looking to develop changemakers of an agile organisation. We intend to build alignment around our transformation by shifting mindsets through our organisation culture; strengthening skillsets through leadership development and capability building; sharpening toolsets and shaping behaviours through our agile operating model.

We are still paving the digital runway, and bringing everyone along with us on our transformation journey. We hope what we are doing at Scoot will change perceptions on how aviation companies continue to stay relevant, to do meaningful work and thrive in the future of work!

Q 10 years down the line, where do you see the future of HR? 

The pandemic has provided HR an opportunity to lead organisations in navigating through and into the future. The talent war will only be fiercer than ever before and with new roles continue to emerge over the next decade, HR’s role will have to evolve accordingly. It needs to be even more tech-centric with decisions driven mainly by data. It will also have to be nimbler and be able to re-imagine and reboot its strategy to respond to a fast-changing digital economy.

Photo / Provided (featuring the Scoot team)