A wholly-owned subsidiary of United Technologies Corporation, Otis has approximately 63,000 employees worldwide, with some 54,000 outside the US alone. In Malaysia itself, the workforce of 250 people comprises some eleven direct reports and the Managing Director. Serene is supported by an Assistant HR Manager, a Communication/Training Executive and an HR Assistant. In this capacity, she oversees human resources, administration, communication, training and learning/development. Serene spent a good hour and a half with us, discussing how Otis takes its people seriously.

Can you tell us a little about your Employee Scholar Programme (ESP)?
Well, our employees can undertake degree-equivalent or MBA programmes, the only pre-requisite being that they are confirmed staff. We don’t really place any bonding requirement to undertake such study and there’s no budgetary limit on these programmes, its complete sponsorship. This has been a feature at the company since it was first established here some 34 years ago.

We don’t place any limit on the number of staff who can undertake these programmes. This year itself, ten people have started on these programmes. Frankly, we really do see the value in undertaking such initiatives - staff retention is high and more importantly, the pool of talented scholars is increasing. We’ve also started the Employee Refund Programme. It’s essentially about refunding to the employees, the cost of the education programmes that they decide to undertake. So far, this has been mainly at the diploma level and certificate level programmes.

You mentioned that you have been engaging in a raft of company-wide staff engagement activities. Can you outline a couple of these initiatives?
We’ve been big supporters of developing the reading habit and we support this in two ways. Firstly, we send an article to everyone on a monthly basis. Our Communication Executive researches appropriate topics online, picks one and disseminates this article to all employees. Secondly, we started a library. We buy management books every month, which we then publicise to staff and encourage book loans. There’s also the monthly lunch talks. Lunch packs are provided and its really about getting our people to develop some work-life balance. And, they’ve proven to be quite popular.

Another initiative is the Long Service Awards. Depending on the length of service, a monetary award is provided. For example, ten years’ service generates a RM200 payment; the long-service award range is pretty much between 10-35 years of service. I would say that, a fair amount of the workforce population is an aging one. While we do provide retirement benefits, we have also been looking at elements of succession planning being conducted every year.

Anything planned around leadership development?
Yes, there is . A leadership development review (LDR) is held with the management team every year. This year, we had it off-site in a hotel. It’s a full-day meeting where we go through the organisation chart and review what we call ‘hot jobs’. These hot jobs are classified as jobs that fulfill a number of criteria. For example, firstly, the talent position is expected to be well paid. Secondly, it’s an emerging specialty. Thirdly, it appears to be unique to our company and fourthly, its about profit and loss accountability. We look at things like when would X be retiring? What if she were to leave us now? And in that process, we identify potential successors, a group of A-list performers or high achievers, of which we have approximately eight right now.

We’ve also gone on to establish a mentor- mentee programme. Got it started just this year and with this, we’ve created a set of mentoring guidelines. We’re looking to be able to create a situation where these mentors provide guidance on both work and personal issues.

Are there any aspects of HR recruitment or general HR which are outsourced? Does this even work for you?
None. Even payroll is done inhouse. We can cope with it, although we may consider it later.

How do you go about attracting good talent?
Well, we are in the midst of building our pool of talent. We have an internship programme wherein we attract final-year students; its a relatively new initiative though. Our pre-requisites are for a minimum second class uppers only and the internships could be for either two, three or up to four month slots. I would say that we tend to focus on the really good universities. We’ve shortlisted about 20 such universities, the University of Nottingham being one such example.

One of the issues we face is that processes may not necessarily be documented in the respective departments. Sometimes, people can be pretty involved in what they’re attending to at the moment or perhaps even, a little set in their ways. But we still need our SOPs or our standard operating procedures captured. So, we started this project whereby we get the interns to come in and start documenting these SOPs. I mean, they’re new and enthusiastic; they find out what processes are in place and how to manage them. This way, we establish consistency and structure. We get these newbies familar with the job and simultaneously, get these important processes and methodology documented and this certainly makes it easier when new employees are inducted. We’re also tying up with technical schools, we’re looking into career fairs in these technical schools to build our talent pipeline. Perhaps another thing we may explore is management trainee programmes.

If you had to choose between a person demonstrating the key skills or experience required for the position but whose values or behaviour were not completely aligned with your corporate goals and a person who didn’t have so much experience but possessed the right attitude or character, which person would you favour more?
I would say, go with the right attitude. I’d choose this because experience and know-how comes with training but attitude doesn’t and the right attitude usually results in the right level of commitment. Anyway, I believe given the right training, people will be able to come up to speed. Frankly, I employ the “tough to hire but easy to manage” philosophy which is really about letting the initial process of getting the right person on board be a little hard if it needs to be. Once they’re on board, this pays off in an easy-to-manage employee. Behavioural interviewing is also something we are adopting in our recruitment process; a set of competencies for the job is outlined at the interview stage and we look to only hire candidates that meet our pre-defined competencies for each of the job categories.

How do you prioritise between developing the hard and soft skills of your talent?
Well, for the technical skills, we have this thing called On-The-Job-Training (OTJ). Training is provided by a field supervisor and certain key performance indicators (KPIs) have to be met. We round it off with some training analysis. Each member of staff is given a minimum of three KPIs and a minimum of three competencies. At the end of the year, a performance appraisal is conducted and each person will be rated accordingly. The HR department will look into the skill-set of each person and training will be recommended by the head of department accordingly . In short, a training master plan is in place.

What would you consider some of the more up-to-date concepts relating to leadership nowadays?
I’d like to quote Jim Collins who said that, “...people are not your most important assets. The right people are. Manage your talent before someone else manages them”. I believe, in this era of globalisation, that managing talent is a challenge and that all effort must be geared towards building the talent pipeline as resources are scarce .

Do you consider yourself to be a key stakeholder and how have you been able to position yourself in this regard?
At Otis, management plays a vital role and HR has always been regarded as key to the
business. As our Managing Director, Chong Wee Meng puts it, “Management needs to walk the talk when it comes to people development. Talent and leadership development is not just the responsibility of the HR Department but a key responsibility of the management team....”