First step – quick wins
Upon joining Pacnet, Abbas set about going for specific quick wins for both the business and the employees. “On the business side, we focused on supporting the rollout of a new Sales Incentive Plan and putting in place a high-level framework for talent assessment by the CEO team,” Abbas explains.
On the employee front, the first three months saw the rollout of new HR policies to help assure staff that the organisational changes were positive and impacted them in ways they could appreciate.
The first priority was to develop a formal recognition plan. While the company had a recognition plan in place from before, it needed to be reorganised and made more accessible to all levels of employees.
The new recognition plan allowed the CEO and top management to directly provide recognition to staff. Line managers and supervisors were also able to reward their direct reports more easily. A key addition was the peer-to-peer component of the recognition plan. This meant that even colleagues from different departments could nominate one another to be recognised for a job well done.
Where initially, Pacnet was giving out between 25 or so awards per quarter in the form of a letter and bonus, the number soon doubled. Staff were also recognised in front of the whole company on top of receiving the commendation and financial incentive.
“We began showcasing all winners through the company intranet and CEO calls to drum up support for staff who had gone above and beyond their scope of work and demonstrated core values in their actions,” says Abbas.
“We were giving out over 50 awards by the third quarter of 2013,” he adds. “The numbers doubled.”
By mid-2014, HR rolled out an online points-based platform to recognise staff who were aligned with core values. This allowed the recognition mechanism to become truly peer-to-peer, says Abbas.
While there are still some one-off cash bonuses in use, the vast majority of employees are now recognised through points which they can exchange for a host of benefits, including movie tickets, spa treatments and even trips overseas. Rewards are also tailored to suit the needs of staff in different countries across the world.
“The results were phenomenal. Where we were averaging about 50 awards in the third quarter of last year, we hit more than 300 awards within the first quarter of implementing the online platform,” Abbas notes.
Employee engagement levels soared too. Where companies mostly tend to reward sales employees with tangible rewards, Pacnet also successfully recognised non-sales staff with its rewards policy.
Besides recognising staff, a retention plan for key talent and a new exit survey to understand the drivers of employee attrition were also rolled out in the first half of 2013.
The telecom industry has an attrition rate of about 15 to 20%, and Pacnet historically had a high attrition rate of more than 25%. “We rolled out a simple online global survey to find out why employees were leaving,” Abbas explains. “Once we got feedback from there, we started to prioritise HR policies and actions based on our findings.”
Through these initiatives, the attrition rate at Pacnet went down from 25% at the beginning of 2012 to 21% by the end of 2013, and looks set to fall well below 20% by the end of this year.
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