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TALENT MANAGEMENT at Maybank Berhad

Source : http://www.bf.umich.edu/docs/KeyReferenceArticles.pdf

Talent Management : Driver for Business Sustainability In a competitive global market, talent management is a primary driver for business sustainability. The role of Human Resource Department has changed dramatically over the years, from focused solely on personnel functions such as hiring, payroll, and benefits, moving to involve in overall business strategy involvement such as organisational development through training, leading corporate communications, and developing total compensation systems in 1980s. While HR department continues to focus on these strategic goals, there has been a recent shift towards "talent management”.

With regards to this new philosophy, HR department plays bigger roles to guide employees through each stage of their career strategy from competency-based recruitment to career development through promotion/transition/termination. During each phase, HR strives to measure and manage employee performance via training, feedback and support. Thus, talent management is a key component to business success and sustain in the current economy as it allows companies to retain top talent while increasing productivity.

Talent Management Process

Broadly defined, talent management is the implementation of integrated strategies or systems which cover HR activities for attracting, developing, retaining and utilising people with the required skills and aptitude to meet current and future business needs. The following chart indicates the complete process of talent management.

1. Workforce Planning: Integrated with the business plan, this process establishes workforce plans, hiring plans, compensation budgets, and hiring targets for the year. 2. Recruiting: Through an integrated process of recruiting, assessment, evaluation, and hiring the new people into the organisation. 3. Onboarding: Train and enable employees to become productive and integrated into the company more quickly. 4. Performance Management: By using the business plan, the organisation establishes processes to measure and manage employees. 5. Training and Performance Support: Provide learning and development programs to all levels of the organisation. 6. Succession Planning: As the organisation evolves and changes, there is a continuous need to move people into new positions. Succession planning, a very important function, enables managers and individuals to identify the right candidates for a position. This function also must be aligned with the business plan 7. Compensation and Benefits: It is an integral part of people management. Most of the organisations try to tie the compensation plan directly to performance management so that compensation, incentives, and benefits align with business goals and business execution. 8. Critical Skills Gap Analysis: This is an important process to identify skill gap of the existing employees.

A Visit to Study on Talent Management at Maybank Berhad

Learning from the best-in-class organisation through study visit is a platform that MPC is actively organised to expedite the process of exposing our local companies to the best practices that have been proven to achieve certain level of excellence locally as well as internationally. A visit to study on talent management at Maybank Berhad was successfully conducted and it was attended by 28 participants from 11 organisations of CoP and MPIC members. This programme was the second best practices visit in year 2014 under the phase 2 of benchmarking project. The main objective of this visit is to learn and share thoughts and experiences with Maybank pertaining to talent management strategy, implementation and its implication towards business sustainability.

The visit started with the opening remarks by Pn. Nora Abd Manaf, Group Chief Human Capital Officer of Maybank, who highlighted her appreciation to the group for their enthusiasm and spirit of sharing. Participants were briefed on the importance of HR roles in Maybank and example of the best practices in terms of employee engagement, retaining top key talent, training and development, performance, reward and recognition and initiatives in promoting flexibility and work-life balance among the Maybankers.

Maybank Profile Malayan Banking Berhad (known as Maybank) is the largest bank and financial group in Malaysia. It has an international network of over 2,200 branches and offices in 20 countries, employing 47,000 Maybankers who serve more than 30 million customers.

As a leading financial services provider in Malaysia, the bank has an extensive curriculum that provides its talents with many learning and development opportunities required to accelerate their careers into management and leadership roles.

“Employee engagement is the art and science of engaging people in authentic and recognised connections to strategy, roles, performance, organisation, community, relationship, customers, development, energy, and happiness to leverage, sustain, and transform work into results.”

-David Zinger

Maybank ways in creating Employee Engagement The Annual Employee Engagement Survey (EES) and Internal Customer Effectiveness

Survey (ICES) are important channels to capture employees’ feedback. For the EES, Maybank has adopted the Saratoga Institute metrics approach that evaluates talent and people practices and they benchmarked globally in terms of Talent Management, Talent Acquisition and Talent Development and Engagement.

The ICES is conducted every year for Maybankers to issue recommendations of improvement pertaining to services provided by each department to their employees. The internal feedback from this survey as well as the external feedback from the Customer Survey Index (CSI) are being utilised to assist Maybank in serving their customers for a better approach towards business sustainability.

As effective communication is the vital element of employee engagement, Maybank has extensively developed a communication strategy for transmitting specific messages which had successfully transformed Maybank from “Start Up, Create Momentum” in 2008-2009, into “Converge on Shared Aspirations and Accelerate Performance” in 2010-2011 and follows by the final phase of “Transformation to the next level : Regionalisation” in 2012-2015. The HR staff played a major role in bringing up the philosophy of this transformation to each Maybank branch by developing the right mindset from the beginning of this challenging journey.

There are various channels of fruitful Employee Engagement sessions for effective communication had been organised such as Teh Tarik with President and CeO, Townhalls, Ask Senior Management (ASM) and Maybank Group and Employee Engagement (MGEE) session that allow two-way communication between top management and all levels of Maybankers. This will ultimately close the loophole of information dissemination and lead them to move forward in the same direction for the purpose of achieving same mission of bank’s sustainability in the future.

The Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programme is another initiative that Maybank has embarked actively which goes beyond pure philanthropy in delivering meaningful programmes with ever lasting impact, focusing on the areas of community and environment. These programmes have not only benefited to the targeted receivers, but it also contributes to the increase in employee engagement in Maybank. The CSR programmes have bring togetherness and inclusiveness to the employees in creating

better lives for the society. Due to these positive impacts gained from the programme, Maybank has increased the hours per staff involvement in CSR programme to 80 hours per year in order to organise a total of 2,920 CSR programmes in a year. It is expected that more CSR programmes will be launched each year to strengthen Maybank’s brand and position in creating shared social value.

“Great investors need to have the right combination of intuition, business sense and investment talents.”

- Andrew Lo

Maybank viewpoint in developing its succession planning, defining and retaining top talents

Retaining the best talent in Maybank has emerged as an important issue to be addressed due to high employee mobility in financial industry. Maybank has always strengthened its succession planning and succession realiasation to accommodate all sort of their talent expectations. The robust succession plan has allowed Maybank to transform its people to be world class employees.

At Maybank, people are encouraged to contribute ideas for improvement in HR policies and practices in ensuring any changes in business planning is aligned with the succession planning as well as bringing the opportunity to grow their talent in the long run.

It started the process of reviewing and developing HR Policy and Planning since 2008 as Maybank needs to catch up with the international financial institute benchmark performance of RM1.74 million for revenue per head count. This shows that there are lots of potential rooms for Maybank to move forward in attaining the global achievement.

Job vacancies are required to be advertised internally and it shows that Maybank provides opportunity for their staff to plan for future personal development. Currently, 7 out of 8 vacancies are filled by internal talents.

Over the year, Maybank’s workforce at the age of below 30 and served more than 5 years has constituted almost double as compared to other categories.

The career path and structured development framework have been published clearly where potential Maybankers are rated by 4 types of categories which include :

Associate / Entry Level Manager (BG 50, 51 & 52)

Specialist / Middle Manager (Band F & G)

Expert / Senior Manager (Band D & E)

Technical Advisor / Top Manager (Band C above)

Maybank conducts the Talent Review Forum in 3 levels of assessment for the purpose of reviewing their potential talents to be promoted yearly. The first level involves Sector Talent Review (STR), followed by Country Talent Review (CTR) and the final level of assessment is through Group Talent Review Session (GTR). The execution of these 3 levels of forums shows that Maybank has implemented holistic mechanism and equal platform while choosing the right talents to be future leaders.

These high potential talents are monitored and communicated regularly in order to ensure that their performance have achieved certain level of excellence continuously.

In terms of developing their talent to be leader in future, the potential performance leaders also have been segregated into 3 types of leaders :

Middle Management Potential (BG 50, 51, 52, Band G & F)

Succession Potential (Band E, D & C)

EXCO Potential (Band B, A & Special Grade)

Each pillar of leader has its own training development that follow SEARCH philosophy of :

Strategic Visioning

Engaging & Developing Talent

Spirit of Achievement

Cultivating Relationship

Customer Centricity

Innovation & CHange

Currently, Maybank has enrolled a total number of 73 staff in the Leaders to CeO programme and more than 600 talents identified for future manager positions. A pool of future leaders to be groomed to fill critical roles in Maybank is another important issue that has been addressed in their succession planning. They have also extended the future leaders identification from Gen-Y and talent below 45 years. This approach shows how Maybank creates a skills/capabilities database that will ensure Maybank to remain competitive for the next of 20 years.

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”

- Gandhi

Training and development of the staff is essential to grow Maybank in future Previously, Maybank Training Centre acted as the place for Maybank to conduct internal

training to Maybankers. Due to the needs of providing more multi-skill training that match with current industry requirement, Maybank has transformed the role of its training centre becoming a skilling factory and has symbolically rebranded it as Maybank Academy. In terms of training budget, they had allocated about RM100 million per year for developing 47,000 staff in 20 countries.

All training programmes conducted in Maybank Academy are related with the job scope of Maybankers that cover Technical/Functional, Personal, Managerial & Leadership skills, Customer Service, Credit, Risk, and Sales.

Each staff is responsible to develop their own Personal Development Planning (PDP) in order to identify training needs and requirements. The PDP is then being forwarded to the respective supervisors to be deliberated during the career conversation session for gap identification between the current job performance and training needs analysis. This will ultimately ensure that the PDP will align with career path journey in Maybank.

In terms of staff development, Maybank has adopted the concept of mentor-mentee programme to speed-up the learning process among the staff. Maybank has expanded

the existing centres of expertise to support all departments. They do welcome retirees who are expert in certain areas to work in contract basis for the purpose of capturing and transferring the tacit and explicit knowledge to the staff.

Another approach that Maybank also has embarked in is re-shuffling, cross-regional and sectoral rotational programmes to ensure all staff are equipped with more than three Maybank’s technical functions/processes. They do also stress on teamwork for synergising new ideas that will ultimately generate more income in the future.

More sophisticated international assignments and regional projects have been introduced to build up the capabilities of the staff and to further equip the talents with regional knowledge and skill. Maybank also applies a mixed of nationality in a team that will leverage the process of developing Maybank’s talents. Out of 10 Maybankers in a team, there will be two from outside country member. Currently, there are more than 100 talents involved in these assignments.

Maybank does encourage the staff to be innovative and creative in creating ever lasting service impact to the customers. Go Ahead Challenge is an example of talent development project for Gen-Y workers that allows them to express their innovation and creativity through tele-casting programme. Recently, there are about 10,000 applicants who are interested to participate in this programme.

Maybank allows the U-turn policy, whereby within 2 years of resigning, the ex-staff are welcome to work back in Maybank and will hold the same position before he/she decided to resign. This is another approach of giving opportunity to the staff to gain work experience externally.

“People leave when they don’t feel appreciated. That’s why we’ve made recognition a really high value. Our business is people-capability first; then you satisfy customers; then you make money.” - David Novak

Extraordinary Performance for Reward and Recognition at Maybank

Fairness and transparency in assessments are being practiced through compulsory mid and year-end performance conversation between the staff and managers. During the conversation, staff is informed and supported on close performance and behavioral gaps.

The performances are then linked with bonuses, wage increment and opportunity to be promoted or further study for those who have obtained extraordinary achievement throughout the year as the reward and recognition promised by Maybank.

Maybank believes in discipline of tracking, whereby they have an array of KPIs for monitoring staff performance. These set of KPIs are developed in such way it complements with the right behaviors and the future culture of Maybank.

The performance appraisal is based on the targeted values of department performance indicators that have been determined at the beginning of the year. The staff will be evaluated by the reporting manager and matrix manager. Instead of department indicators, staff are also been assessed based on the core values of Maybank such as how they demonstrated their attitude towards Teamwork, Integrity, Growth, Excellence & Efficiency and Relationship Building.

“It’s all about quality of life and finding a happy balance between work and friends and family.”

- Philip Green

Humanising Workplace at Maybank

Their flexible Work-life balance in Maybank is case-to-case basis and it depends on the criticalness of the personal matter in order to allow staff to take an emergency leave during the peak seasons.

In promoting health and work-life balance environment, facilities such as fantastic Gymnasium, Steam Room for sauna, Home Theater, Indoor Court for futsal & badminton tournament, Foosball Table & Indoor Game Room, and Aerobic Classes are available at Maybank Menara. They do hire permanent instructors in helping Maybankers to maintain healthy work-life, especially in the midst of their hectic schedule.

The other privilege that is also being provided by Maybank to the staff is the Childcare Centre at Menara Maybank. This centre is served as the temporary place for their children to stay during the unexpected absent of the babysitter. Currently, Maybank has employed 3 permanent staff to manage the centre.

Leading the Way As one of the successful financial institution in Malaysia, Maybank has proactively and systematically take actions to ensure that they have the human resource capability to meet their current and future business requirements. Maybank has made talent management a critical force in their drive for excellence.

The journey of Maybank transformation in developing it staff to become a world class employee had started in year 2008. Aggressive communication is made at that time to expedite the mindset change towards inculcated the new culture of Maybank.

It has been proven that within 5 years, Maybank has achieved targeted performance speedily with strong support contributed by all Maybankers. These tremendous achievements has led Maybank to receive numerous recognitions locally as well as internationally. This journey has illustrated that, it is important to manage and retain best talent for achieving the best possible results in the future. It is just a matter of embedding the right energy and atmosphere that can strengthen the existing capability of the employees.