IN FOCUS INTERVIEW: STEPHEN TJOA, GROUP CHIEF PEOPLE OFFICER, BOARDROOM GROUP

By Lucy Haydon, Editor

Let’s start with the initiatives and programmes that your People team use to support the business.

I’ve been working in the human capital space for over 30 years now, having previously been a partner at KPMG. When I was approached with the opportunity to join BoardRoom, the objectives were clear – establish a consistent set of guiding principles, a coherent people philosophy, and help to align strategies across our five geographies.

It was a priority for me to ensure that we had the right sort of developmental and engagement programs in place, and in January 2023 we started with establishing the Boardroom Academy. This was a game changing initiative, providing a structured learning and professional pathway for our people. We had to create leadership learning milestone programs and supercharged our learning ambitions to ensure we have a consistent and meaningful way to develop our people. We also focused a lot on our staff engagement as retention was a priority. A lot went into revisiting our own values, our behaviours, our purpose, and our mission as an organisation.

Through change management we upscaled our business partnering capabilities and invested time in listening to our people throughout the year as part of our overall engagement and retention strategy.

HR professionals tell us that attraction and retention of talent are critical in Singapore’s competitive, smaller, talent pool. What strategies are you leveraging to gain an edge in the market?

I think that the war for talent is not just a Singapore phenomenon, it’s a global one. Yes, we have a much smaller talent pool and with the tightening up of foreign talent policies a lot of these complexities have added to the talent woes. Attracting, developing, and retaining talent will remain critical for any organisation.

The talent crunch is felt everywhere, and at the same time, there are also enormous pressures on businesses to continually reinvent ourselves; how we can provide a compelling value proposition to our existing employees and to people who are interested to join the business.

We needed to look after professional development. First and foremost, through learning, but also through exposure and because we have a young staff population on average, we have to understand that there are certain factors that needs to be there, for instance flexibility, meaningfulness in their work and the opportunities to grow professionally.

In this International Women’s Month, what is Boardroom Group’s approach to gender equality, particularly at senior management levels where issues of inequality tend to be most apparent?

Well, I’m firstly very proud to tell you that our female participation at BoardRoom is 67%, and at the senior leadership level, our participation level is at 35%. That’s a pretty healthy status given that the overall global share of women in leadership roles illustrated by the global gender report from the World Economic Forum was around 31%.

We can always do better. At BoardRoom, we practice a very clear policy on workplace equity and equal opportunity. There are, for instance, no pay inequality issues or lack of developmental or promotional opportunities for females. We support working mothers and we extend the need for flexibility as and when the cases requires it. We provide ample opportunities for individuals to take on leadership roles when their performance and contributions support their individual business cases - the sky’s the limit for everyone.

Are you a supporter of goals and targets within the HR and People function, or do you prefer other forms of measuring success within a business?

I am a clear supporter of targets. I think it’s important to be very transparent and clear on expectations. I practice an open and honest communication culture, having introduced the idea o a balance scorecard, which looks both at the qualitative and the quantitative aspects and matrices to set goals, and measure the achievement of these KPIs.

The key is having these KPIs transparent and open to people, so that they can engage and have meaningful dialogue when they talk about perfor- mance. I engage with our people team leaders on a weekly basis, we do frequent check ins, monthly team huddles, and depending on the season, there are a lot more specific interactions on the priorities of certain parts of the people teams. I also talk to our rewards team around getting the formula right to reward people meaningfully.

The company recently won a Bronze award for Best HR Team (SME) at the HR Excellence Awards, congratulations. What are the highlights from this particular achievement, and goals for the future?

I’ve always believed that it’s important for us to have external validation because it helps us to benchmark ourselves against the best, and in the process of doing so you learn best practices and understand what it means to be a good HR team. But I think more importantly, there are gaps, and so we need to know where the gaps are realistically and where we could do better. I’m delighted for the recognition and this is really a good start for us, building on our value proposition as an employer, but we know that the journey is long. It has motivated us to do better and to achieve excellence in every aspect of our commitment, and how we can support our people agenda. Ultimately, whether we win an award or not, the main beneficiaries should be our people and the focus should be on them.

If we want to continue to build ourselves as a human-centred organisation, which really puts people right at the centre of our success, we need to do better today and for the future.

About the Company

BoardRoom is a leading corporate services provider in the Asia-Pacific region. With over 50 years of proven experience and unrivalled local expertise, we can help you navigate regional complexities to minimise risk and maximise growth opportunities. Visit www.boardroomlimited.com for more information.