When the Situation Changes our Way of Working

Disruptions to the financial industry has forced banks to evolve their services to a more digital and mobile-friendly environment. Additionally, unpredictable factors like natural disasters and pandemics have also forced changes that affect individuals, organisations, countries, and the world.

UOB employees have been working under new conditions since the start of the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Job security, health and peaceful mind of each individual employee are the critical factors to ensure productivity and business continuity. Moreover, the other 2 critical factors ensure business direction and technology & process are aligned and work effectively. Even with most colleagues working from home or in different locations, we have put the highest effort in keeping up levels of employee engagement through creating a better (virtual) place to work.

The UOB (Thai) engagement results of 2021 shows an overall 82% engagement score, which proves our success in maintaining employee engagement in the top quartile (77% - 100%). Moreover, our engagement results were higher than that of several leading industry benchmarks, including:

• Global Engagement Score Q2 2021: 65%*
• Asia Pacific Bank Engagement Score 2021: 68%*
• UOB Group Engagement Score 2021: 73%*

* sources: Kincentric Whitepapers, (1) 2020 Trends in Employee Engagement (2) How Engagement Shifted in 2020 and What It Means for 2021.

When our people are highly engaged, it also directly results in better business performance achievements. We have improved immensely compared to last year (As of now, we cannot share the specific digit as it has not publicly announced yet). Moreover, in 2021, the great resignation happened around the world. The ‘intent to stay’ rate declined from 80% in July 2020 to 75% in July 2021, according to a report from Quantum Workplace. However, our ‘intent to stay’ rate was 80%, which showed 5% better than benchmark.

Right actions begin with listening to employees

In order to design the right actions, we have adopted a human-centred design approach and engaged senior management, function engagement champions, and selected talents. These selected groups have worked together to analyse feedback and design applicable solutions that blend culture within the focused engagement dimensions.

For employees, the COVID-19 situation has impacted both their work and personal lives. Referring to Kincentric’s whitepapers, global trends shows employees are concerned about their job security and pay cut. Working from home might also cause ineffective manageable working times and longer work hours. Many employees have stated an escalation of back-to-back meetings and late night / weekend meetings. Also, employees have had to adapt their working style by learning to use remote technologies such as virtual conference tools, learning platforms and specific work systems. Learning how to use their technologies might cause some difficulty for Gen X and Baby Boom employees.

Moreover, many employees working from home are sharing their space with children and family members. Many children learning from home require parent support with learning facilities and tools as well as additional support for providing meals and other activities.

These changes in the work and personal lives of employees have had an impact on their mental and physical health.

The above global trends also align with employee feedback in our 2021 employee engagement survey. There were three main topics that employees would like to see improvement as a priority: Work/Life Harmony, Performance Management, and Technology & Work Process.