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Hewitt Quarterly
Asia Pacific
is made possible through the combined skills and experience
of Hewitt consultants from across the Asia-Pacific region.
For further information please
contact:
Hewitt Associates
2601-05 Shell Tower
Times Square
Causeway Bay
Hong Kong
Tel: (852) 2877-8600
Fax: (852) 2877-2701
editor-hqap@hewitt.com
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Spansion China, part of Spansion, the largest company in the world to focus on Flash memory technologies for business and personal computers, was named in Hewitt's recent groundbreaking independent study as the Best Employer in Asia 2007. PC Loh, the company's Vice President and Executive Managing Director, gives HQ his reaction to the accolade, and explains how the firm achieved it. |
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How do you feel about the company being selected as The Best Employer in Asia 2007?
A. First of all, it's an honor for me and for every employee of Spansion that we have been recognized as the Best Employer in Asia 2007. We are feeling very positive and happy about the situation, and see it as recognition of the many years of hard work as a team. The other feeling is one of motivation and challenge for us to continuously move forward and take our company's management standards up to an even higher level so we can continue using the Best Employer in Asia's benchmark criteria as our improvement target.
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What importance do you place on people in your business?
A. Fundamentally, every organization and corporation is about people. It is people who help the company achieve its vision. It's people who help develop its technology to fulfill customers' requirements. It's people who provide service to customers and make sure they keep coming back. It's also people who make sure jobs get done and goods get delivered to customers at the right time and the right price.
If you have a group of people who are very happy, they will be more engaged and more willing to contribute to the job. As an experienced observer, you know straight away when you walk in to a workplace whether people are happy, or whether they are behaving a little stiffly as if not fully engaged.
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Can you explain the specific practices you use to drive engagement?
A. To be engaged, employees must be comfortable and happy. That means they are not coming into the office in a sad mood or feeling they don't want to be there. The trick is how to create an environment that is not only nice to work in, but also is able to motivate people to work hard. The way to do that is to create a company that is moving forward in terms of the scope of the work. This can be through the development of the technology, allowing employees to try new things or expand to a bigger role. You also need to create an environment where people are happy to be with each other. This improves ability levels among
teams and helps them reach common goals because they understand each other and are working together as a team.
You need to provide some other elements such as a very competitive compensation and benefits scheme so employees feel they are valued in the market. You also need a leadership team that is able to articulate a vision that makes employees willing to go forward. It also requires an environment where things get done without a lot of bureaucratic involvement.
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Does being a Best Employer help you be a market leader?
A. A significant part of being a market leader in this field has to do with having the best technology. But in order to come up with new ideas to help the customer innovate, internally we have to create strong development teams, strong manufacturing teams, and strong design teams. By doing this, people feel challenged and feel part of developing something really new,as opposed to working in a sunset industry. Redefining our industry helps us come up with better ideas, and to do that, we need employees to be engaged.
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How much personal interest do you take in people issues within the company?
A. Human resources are an integral part of an organization. I don't see HR as simply an administrative function. My HR department has been organized in such a way that in addition to the administrative function, it helps develop how the leadership teams can translate the company values and vision to the employees. The department is involved in creating team-building events or activities for employees. HR also goes outside the company to create a good relationship with the local community, so that our employees can make a contribution there too.
Communication is also very important. Every two weeks I personally visit the cafeteria and sit down with employees at all levels and just talk. Communication is not just about executives standing behind podiums and giving presentations on business results, although by default it must involve this. It's also about being face-to-face and heart-to-heart with employees in order to listen, to try and educate and to coach them in their roles and explain their value to the business. In 2007 I'm going to try and do this once a week.
When I'm doing this, I make sure that some of the supervisors or someone from management is beside me, so they know what I'm doing, learn what I'm doing, and understand what I'm saying so they can in turn do this on their own with different groups of employees, so that the majority, if not all the employees will get a chance to be face-to-face with the leadership of the company.
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