ABANS

As a company, we believe that diversity promotes the individuality of an organisation while shaping its character

Q: What factors contributed the most to your organisation being recognised at the recently concluded People Development Awards 2023/24?

A: Achieving goals is all about having the right approach and mindset. In terms of development, there’s a fitting metaphor: it’s like sweeping the floor – a task that needs to be done daily as the dust keeps accumulating.

Similarly, people development is an ongoing process that requires consistent effort. However, it’s essential that these initiatives are meaningful and not merely a box ticking exercise aimed at meeting short-term targets.

A critical success factor for any organisation is its talent pool. It’s important to assess the organisation’s capabilities to meet business needs while ensuring future readiness with people capabilities.

At a time when brain drain remains a pressing issue and the local talent pool is shrinking, rebuilding that capacity becomes increasingly difficult. Organisations can either acquire external talent as a short-term strategy or develop internal talent, which is a long-term approach.

Nurturing and building an internal talent pool is a more sustainable and strategic approach for organisations. To support this, we have intensified our focus on learning and development (L&D), and are committed to accelerating capacity building efforts. This year, we’ve significantly increased resources towards people development to ensure our workforce is future ready.

Q: And what does it mean to be a champion in people development?

A: At Abans, we have designed our employee value propositions considering various elements including maximising human potential, driving performance, focussing on employee wellbeing and promoting diverse careers.

Maximising human potential is about building people capacity, which focusses on unlocking the true potential of our teams and helping them unleash their inner passions towards their career goals.

We focus heavily on reskilling and upskilling employees with an emphasis on developing the core competencies essential for the organisation. We also look at internal mobility, utilising internal resources through redesigning or enriching jobs. Certain employees have been provided horizontal career moves so that they can adapt to different careers and explore new areas.

Another area is leadership capacity building to ensure we retain a strong leadership bench for current and future leadership requirements, which is crucial for the organisation’s sustainability and growth. We have multiple leadership pools, facilitating their capacity building in a more focussed and structured approach.

Q: How would you describe your organisational culture?

A: Our organisational culture is evolving towards a more collaborative, innovative, results driven and diverse culture. Abans’ premise continues to revolve around fostering the brand’s legacy of innovation.

Innovation ensures that a business stays relevant, drives growth, improves efficiency and meets customers’ changing needs, thereby maintaining competitiveness. Multiple initiatives have been introduced to ignite a culture of innovation within Abans.

Each business and functional unit has leads that drive innovation through their teams. At any given time, there are multiple ongoing innovation projects that incorporate diverse perspectives.

As with any other corporate, we strive for excellence, performance and a high-performance culture. Through key performance indicators (KPIs) and goal cascading, we ensure that people at all levels have clarity on our expectations. We make every effort to recognise and reward high performers to drive a high-performance culture at Abans.

We promote collaboration and have multiple cross-functional teams working together on diverse projects. We’ve also established several hobby clubs for employees who share similar interests to connect and collaborate when working together.

As a company, we believe that diversity promotes the individuality of an organisation while shaping its character. Ours is a company that respects people, individualities, and differences of faith and opinions in an inclusive, welcoming work environment. These elements contribute towards becoming a more advanced and progressive company.

Q: Can you cite a few examples of how your group aligns its HR processes with staff development?

A: Most processes aligned under the talent management vertical are connected to staff development. Performance management, succession planning and key talent management, and managing people’s productivity among others are directly connected to learning and development interventions.

A main source in identifying development requirements is the line feedback we receive, which is an outcome of their observations and performance review conversations with their teams.

Our competency framework is designed based on the group’s core competencies and it’s an integral part of the performance management framework, which contributes immensely to identifying behavioural gaps and helps us align with diverse development interventions.

In recent years, our service culture programme, designed around the service profit chain model, has proven to be highly beneficial in improving customer service levels on the sales front. The feedback we obtain from customers on multiple platforms helps shape our development agenda in customer service.

Succession planning has identified potential leaders within the company and outlined steps needed to prepare them for future responsibilities. Abans has various talent pools to groom individuals for leadership roles at different levels.

Human resources’ priority has and will be to help people, teams and the organisation to become better. We are focussed on fostering growth for both individuals and organisations by creating a well-balanced ecosystem, and empowering the organisation and its people to achieve sustainable growth, and be agile to change.

 

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Telephone: 2275000 | Email: info@abansgroup.com | Website: www.abansgroup.com