Our journey of transformation

Jaspreet Kakar, CHRO, AXA Philippines

When I was first asked to write about HR Transformation, instead of writing something generic, I decided to tell our story of HR Transformation in AXA Philippines. I hope readers will find this relatable and this will give them some food for thought.

When I first arrived in the Philippines in late 2016 as CHRO for AXA, I was excited - this was the break I was looking for. The challenges were numerous and complex. I was nervous but determined.

In the first 4 – 6 months, together with the CEO and the leadership team, we built a strong vision and strategy for the company. Incidentally, the CEO was also new at that time, and after the strategy refresh, we embarked on roadshows to take the vision and strategy to the people.

The beginning of our Transformation

Food, and the sharing of it, is an essential part of work culture in the Philippines. So 2016-17, we launched what we then called “Breakfast connect” - sharing breakfast with teams, and having mini town halls off the back of it. The objective was to share with them the refreshed strategy, and seek feedback on how we can make AXA Philippines a better place to work. We got great response to the strategy and the engagement to the vision was clearly palpable from the excitement of teams across the board.

The employee feedback from Breakfast Connect was almost all about their experiences with operational HR matters.

I often say to my teams that we in HR earn the right to do sexy stuff, only if we can fix the basics - pay people on time and accurately, make sure their benefits are updated and available when due, answer their basic queries in time etc.

I was convinced that we needed to answer atleast the following questions:

- How do we alleviate the pain points articulated by employees about their experience with HR?

- How do we build on top of that and transform this experience to a “wow”

- How do we build the right practices for sustainable growth of the business?

Here are a few things we focused on to begin with:

Ensure the right capacity and operating model for the HR function –

I made sure to get the right people on board – quickly as a priority. You cannot achieve anything alone, it’s the team that must achieve the turnaround. I tapped into my AXA network, engaged a Head Hunter and asked references from my existing team. As a result we got someone on board from a Bank, someone from a FMCG company and someone from within AXA in another part of the world.

HR Business partners, COEs, HR Operations - all teams were revamped. Each of the teams either had a new leader or some new team members. In our operating model, the Business partners would be the primary liaisons to employees. HR would not be an email ID, or a phone number, but a living experience for employee’s “real” issues. For everything operational and routine, we would automate.

Fix Accountabilities and performance issues with in the team–

Everybody would like a collaborative work environment, but it is a very underappreciated fact that fixing accountabilities and dealing with non-performance objectively, takes the collaboration up automatically.

We dealt with a couple of cases of low performance and set clear accountabilities. I had to put someone who was not pulling their weight, on a performance recovery plan, and in another case had to have a career conversation to change the role they were in.

The new leaders who joined the team also brought great best practices, for example, for mass recruitment events, we introduced something called “recruitment days” where we would conduct end to end recruitment process for several job positions on the same day.

It was visible that the team had already started the turnaround. It is always  the team above any individual. Someone asked me last year, are you willing to pitch your HR team against the best of HR teams in the world – and my answer was a resounding YES

Ensuring the right team in place, fixing accountabilities, and automating our services has helped us answer the first question and alleviate pain points of employee experience.

Dream big to Transform Employee Experience –

Our definition of employee experience is what an employee feels on a day-to-day basis –As a candidate, as a new joiner, as a manager, as an internal customer to HR. How are they experiencing performance management, what is their learning and growth experience, what is their exit experience?

We set our goals to be ambitious, our vision quite grand - aspiring to be the most preferred employer across industries, providing world class experience to our people.

Together with a renewed and refreshed team, we mapped out the employee life journey. From recruitment to exit across all employee touch points, envisioned what would be the future experience we wished for people to have at each stage. This is what became the raw material for us to chalk out our agenda for the next several years. I will highlight a few here:

Revamp, Digitize& Automate HR Processes:

In collaboration with process engineers, we reviewed all our key HR processes to eliminate waste, put resources online, introduced an online helpline for all basic query resolutions, introduced Robotic Process Automation for several HR processes to release capacity and increase accuracy of service delivery.

First time ever, we declared TATs for HR services back in 2017. Establishing clear expectation setting with the employees. At the same time, introduction of  this initiatives also required behaviour change from employees –  For example, for the online helpline to be successful, they needed to ask questions ONLY using this helpline. We piloted this in 2 departments, took the learnings and then launched to the whole company in January 2018. We continued to answer queries on email for 1 quarter, before switching off the email channel.

Since then, we have consistently delivered and continued to enhance our services and TATs resulting in some excellent employee feedback, consistently scoring 3/ 4 on quality on a 4 point rating scale.

After 3+ years, now we are on the next phase of this journey – digitizing onboarding, digitizing and customizing learning experience, chatbot to resolve routine HR policy related queries. This is and will continue to move the needle in our quest of bringing “wow” experience to life.

Performance Management, Learning and Growth:

Something that I believe quite strongly, that if in a company, we can do Performance Management well, we don’t need to have any other value-added HR functions. Performance management should be all encompassing. However, we are far from it. As such ,we have worked a lot to enhance manager capability to manage teams on a day to day basis.

Capability building of managers in key moments of Performance Management has always been a priority for us. To enhance that, we launched other initiatives to give hyper care to the teams and managers who scored low on employee engagement and performance management surveys.

We made employees accountable for their learning and growth– with great success. All employees without fail have learning goals, because evolving and learning in this age is not a choice. And more than 70% of our people met their learning goals in 2020.

Our internal mobility process that we launched 3 years ago, is our second biggest source of filling our vacancies – clearly establishing employee interest and growth opportunities.

Long term, Short term and critical Talent Pipeline:

We introduced high touch talent management for our top leaders and successors. Each of them having objective development plans after a robust assessment, key projects to lead and make an impact on the company goals. For example, one of our key leaders is leading our foray and expansion into Health Business, another one is responsible for transitioning our sales function from Physical to Phygital (hybrid or Physical and Digital), yet another one is championing the use of Emma, our customer facing mobile app delivering our products and services to our customers. 

For building along term pipeline, with great success, we launched our Graduate Management Trainee program. This remains one of our flagship programs and continues to be very popular with young graduates from top universities.

And in 2020, we launched a unique talent development program called SEEDS for niche functions and skills – like actuarial, investments, digital and data. The program focuses on attraction and development of these talents, community building and technical skills enhancement.

These are the areas that are clearly helping us answer the third key question, build right practices for a sustainable business growth.

In conclusion, our story of transformation is ongoing and continuously evolving. It has taught me a lot, and am sure will continue to do so. Here are my top three learnings from this journey so far:

- Your vision and agenda are as strong as your team, so choose wisely

- Use business strategy and / or employee experience to derive HR priorities, it becomes so much simpler to rally troops and budgets

- Dream big because you achieve the moon only by shooting for the stars.

Robotic Process Automation

Process Automation