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Genie Nguyen, Head of HR & Training

Genie Nguyen currently serves as an HR director at Orient Commercial Joint Stock Bank (OCB) and handles about 7000 employees nationwide. With a team of nearly fifty, she is responsible for providing updated strategic and operational HR support for the organization. She has over decades of experience and skills in HR operations working in several countries from Singapore to Vietnam. She was promoted four times to National HR Manager responsible for managing 27 HR colleagues nationwide for her excellent work performance and leadership capability. Being a dedicated and creative HR professional, she is passionate about talent management, people development and business.

As the Head of HR & Training, what major developments in the employee benefits space can play a crucial role in ensuring employee satisfaction in a post-pandemic world?

The pandemic has brought a massive transformation in the workplace, so the traditional HR model is no longer efficient. Employers are looking for more meaningful work and also with better deals on pay and benefits. In terms of benefits, they are forced to have an overall individual consideration when a company designs manifest strategies like the well-being of mental, physical and financial benefits. Talking about flexibility, we need to emphasize where employees are more comfortable working and how they can get things done. Especially in the banking sector, where there are a lot of security regulations, we need to have a safe infrastructure so that employees can work remotely from anywhere as per their needs, and we need to adapt to that as an employer. In terms of employees' well-being, employers need to focus more on being more empathetic with the employees and engaging more with them. Hence we have a lot of engagement benefits like organizing events and connecting with people within the community where we try to connect and share more about what's happening in the organization and also create opportunities and channels for the employees to share more with the line manager.

With the accelerating focus on digital transformation, what are the significant changes the banking sector has witnessed in the recent past?

For the last few years, I have seen a solid way to apply digital transformation in how we do business in the banking sector alone. There has been more emphasis on customer- and employee-centric to make them adapt to the new HR system and digital transformation. For the last few years, we have been successfully digitizing our process and improving our employee experience by encouraging them to share how they can manage their career paths in our banking system. For the last two years, we have been trying to integrate these systems so that it takes less time to run reports and use analytics. At the same time, employees can inquire about their benefits and navigate their career or their next career steps and courses, experiences, and competencies needed to progress to the next level. We try to simplify our process to have both sides interact.

"At OCB, we are adopting e-learning platforms so trainers and employees can easily access the learning platform from anywhere. Almost 80% of our training is conducted remotely through webinars on online platforms, creating a more engaging and comfortable learning experience for our learners".

Moreover, with the rapid adoption of remote working, we need to transform the learning system. At OCB, we are adopting e-learning platforms so trainers and employees can easily access the learning platform from anywhere. Almost 80% of our training is conducted remotely through webinars on online platforms, creating a more engaging and comfortable learning experience for our learners. We are also implementing a new recruitment system that will provide tools we can leverage on the data analytics that will help us attract talent and optimize their recruitment costs. So that's some of the changes I have seen in the HR system.

In a world that is permeated with nascent startups focused on creating a range of new employee benefits, what are some promising services that can add value to this evolving employee benefits landscape?

With the growing competition among startups and fintech, there is a need to create a better office environment and be aware of the benefits of creating an office environment. We need to introduce a better way of looking for people to collaborate and discuss various matters with the employees. Upgrading the office environment can add more value to employee benefits. We must focus on creating a benefit structure that gives employees more flexibility in terms of chances. Various pension or recruitment schemes may provide better benefits to attract and retain talent in the long run. Not just rewards and benefits, employers must look for a way to provide better opportunities for employees to grow in their careers while being in an organization.