Q: How has your group helped staff overcome the fallout from the protracted curfew?

Total wellness, including the emotional wellbeing of employees, has always been of paramount importance to the group.

Our pre-pandemic lunch hour programmes that took place monthly, as well as digital webinars during the curfew, continued to educate and create awareness of various aspects of health, safety and emotional wellbeing among staff with the support of best in class medical professionals.

Therefore, we are confident that our assistance to employees has been holistic in terms of health, safety and wellbeing.

From a cultural and change management perspective, having ventured on this journey for over 150 years, we have come to learn that resilience is one of our most prominent traits.

Capitalising on this, our main change management programme throughout the curfew focussed on retrospective and progressive reflection on overcoming the unprecedented challenges posed by the pandemic with resilience.

Accordingly, an integrated internal communication and employee engagement campaign was launched in April under the tagline #ResilientWeConquer.

Complementing this main theme, we also launched #ResilientSpensonians – a campaign during which employees were given an opportunity and a platform to share their productive and resilient acts during the curfew.

Many employees submitted videos and photographs, which were shared among all members of staff periodically.

Q: As far as the workforce is concerned, how did your organisation assist people during the extended curfew?

As a diversified conglomerate with 16 industry segments operating globally, most of our frontline Spensonians and businesses continued to operate, providing essential services around the clock at this critical juncture.

Similarly, our technological infrastructure and organisational capabilities enabled a swift transition of our corporate functions and executive cadre employees to being virtually mobile – and this in turn ensured business continuity through remote working.

From a corporate governance and risk management perspective, we assisted our business leaders and employees with benchmarks covering conduct and ethics, uniform operational standards and procedures, as well as common digital platforms to engage and share their ideas and feedback to overcome challenges.

Additionally, we continued to engage with and assist employees in key areas such as health, safety and verified precautionary information, to maintain their physical, emotional and motivational wellbeing.

We also took this opportunity to leverage our online self-learning platform, which continued to offer various courses to keep employees focused and engaged.

Capitalising on our group’s logistical capabilities, we extended the doorstep delivery of selected FMCG products to our employees to support their household needs.

Some of our forward-thinking strategies for wellbeing – such as our telemedicine mobile application, which was introduced to our employees last year – were also highly effective in enabling them to consult specialist consultants and doctors during the curfew.