Inspire The World, Create The Future

WITH 220 operations in 80 countries, the Samsung brand has made its way around the world and is currently one of the top multinational conglomerates. Equally important, Samsung is guided by its vision to “Inspire the World, Create the Future”.

Well aligned with its core values of people, excellence, change, integrity, and co-prosperity, the company’s excellence with handling both its customers and employees has accorded it many awards.

This year marked Samsung Electronics’ 45 years of establishment. To add to the celebratory mood, Samsung Malaysia Electronics was recognised in this year’s Malaysian Institute of Human Resource Management HR Awards, winning gold under the employer of choice category.

It’s all in the strategy

To achieve its vision, the human resources (HR) team in Samsung has set three main strategies:

1 ROBUST TALENT MANAGEMENT

Samsung’s rigorous and organised hiring process ensures that the company is able to engage the cream of the crop in the industry while ensuring a good fit to company aspirations and culture.

Initiatives to drive future leaders of Samsung and to build a young talent pool include the SMART Scholarship programme, Samsung Asia Elite Programme, Structured Internship Programme, and Samsung career initiatives including career talks and fairs.

Beyond that, Samsung also ensures that top talents are nurtured, engaged, and retained through a planned career progression and development for its employees, which involves career mapping and job rotation.

The Samsung Cultural Index (SCI) a.k.a. Employee Cultural Survey is conducted annually to keep track and review the vigour of the company culture.

In an effort to continuously build a creative corporate culture, this annual review enables Samsung to address gaps in its “work smart, think hard, and build trust” initiatives.

2 HIGH PERFORMING ORGANISATION

Samsung is known for GROWTH Leadership with deliberate investment into people development.

Through its global leadership and local growth leadership training programmes, leaders are prepared to face challenges even in competitive market situations.

The core of Samsung’s success: People

All employees are trained on the company’s core competencies of creativity, challenge, strategic focus, speed, simplicity, self-control/empowerment, customer focus, crisis awareness, and continuous innovation.

Ultimately, Samsung seeks to reinforce three key behaviours in their workforce – speed, passion and ownership.

This is achieved by a leadership competencies training development roadmap and a learning academy which follows a 70/20/10 learning model.

As a result, employees are groomed to become people-focused and results-driven leaders.

Performance-driven company culture

To become a truly high performing organisation, Samsung has devoted resources to recognising good performance through a robust evaluation process, as well as recognising the leaders who continue to grow the company.

A good integrated performance management system has also been deployed to monitor individual performance.

Samsung believes in recognising the best performers.In addition to the formal performance review, the company acknowledges employees through an internal nomination and review process.

During monthly townhall meetings, the employee of the month award is given to those who demonstrate outstanding performance.

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, but expecting different results.”
– Favourite quote of Law Pik San, 2013 employee of the year.

THERE was a time when the concept of creativity was only associated with writers, painters, musicians and similar people in artistic professions.

But with the ever-increasing necessity of cultivating a unique brand personality, the need for creative thinking, along with access to valuable startup resources, has transitioned from the arts into everyday business.

Samsung Malaysia has begun an aggressive drive in making the work environment into a creative workplace.

As creative employees are tasked with exploring the profitable outcome of an existing or potential endeavour, which typically involves generating and applying alternative options to a company’s products, services and procedures through the use of conscious or unconscious insight.

This creative insight is the direct result of team diversity-specifically, individuals who possess different attributes and perspectives.

Establishing a creative environment takes more than just giving them free reign in the hope they would hit the bulls eye.

In Samsung, the process of creativity has a proper framework lying under the following examples:

1 Stimulating environment; many “Que” words that remind employees about “Work Smart” and “Think Hard”. Samsung email login page is prompted with different wisdom quotes that serve as inspiration.

2 The human resources department organises creative workshop, and employees are rewarded for creative ideas. Even when ideas fail, there is no penalty. In doing so, it enables employees to more readily take on assignments that stretch their potential, and that would translate into the organisation improvement.

3 The creative idea box that encourages employees at all levels to contribute suggestions for improving current business operations. Significantly, with the walk the talk from the top management to all employees, employees are driven to question the “What-if”.
“Samsung employees are given opportunities to practise creativity in bringing in positive innovation.

The creative working environment allows me to develop myself and others by having the opportunities to implement new ideas.

I encouraged my team members to take a day and explore their creativity.
We would gather and do something out from the workroutine to spark new ideas.This is really good for the soul.

I am now able to take a different approach to problems, by sharing my experiences and providing support and having patience with my team members and peers.” says Law

3 GREAT WORK PLACE (GWP)

To complement its strategy of robust talent management and retention of top talents, Samsung looks to create a Great Work Place (GWP) by cultivating a “work smart, think hard, and build trust” mindset in their employees.

Work smart

Samsung practises “Work Smart” by establishing an efficient management system and organisational culture that allows the best people to work creatively so that every individual can concentrate on meaningful work as experts in their respective fields.

One of the efficient management objectives is to continuously improve work processes; it is constantly taking essence of work, core management, restructuring, timing and risk management into consideration.

Under Samsung’s new management – 25 years of reformation, Samsung leaders provide services of the highest quality based on quality driven management and in the work smart context part of quality management. In implementing IT based reorganisation, globalisation and multifaceted Integration, Samsung bolstered its speed and competitiveness.

The management’s objective to “develop technology capabilities for value creation in diverse business areas” will ultimately support growth in global competition for Samsung to be a first-class company in the 21st century.

For example, Samsung has an in-house HR system that measures the entire HR’s performance from core staff retention to core staff hiring, from headcount growth to productivity and revenue, and training hours to SCI; all these are being used as part of the decision-making process.

With all manual and work processes streamlined, the core values of the “Work Smart” campaign will be realised and continuously improved. Employees will then take a balanced and smart approach to managing work and life to become motivated individuals.

Think hard

It is no secret that one of the key attributes to Samsung’s success is creativity and innovation. Samsung seeks to create new values with new perspective that go beyond conventional practices.

Employees are encouraged to come up with creative ideas and solutions to meet fast-changing market demands.

This is supported by a work environment that promotes opportunities for employees to develop their creativity and a reward system to recognise “wow” ideas (see Graphic 1).

Initiatives taken include:
1 Employee Ideas Box
– Boxes are placed at strategic areas to allow employees to drop in their ideas.
2 The Medici Methodology
– This unique process trained business leaders to generate creative business solutions.
3 Creative Boot Camp
– Employees are challenged to develop creative ideas to address specific business issues at the end of creative workshops.

Build trust

Trust, like respect, is earned. Samsung recognises that without the trust of its people, there will never be an ideal workplace where all individuals can unleash their creativity and perform at their best.

Under the “Build Trust” core value, there are two aspects: employee grievances and business presentations.

At Samsung, there is an employee grievance/suggestion box for employees to make submissions through the company intranet and portals run by the HR department.

For business presentations, Samsung senior executive (president) shares business updates and strategy with employees through the monthly townhall.

A great place

At the same time, Samsung has gone ahead to create a fun environment for its employees – a beautiful sky lounge for recreational purposes. Samsung emphasises a healthy lifestyle through sports activities and wellness programmes.

The company also holds many other annual and monthly GWP activities, such as:

• Festival celebrations
• Annual sports days
• Annual bowling days
• Monthly townhall
• Birthday lunches
• Movie days
• Weekly badminton and basketball games
• Gym facilities

Corporate Citizenship

Over and beyond a great workplace, employees are also part of something larger than the organisation. Samsung emphasises the building of trust and affinity with local communities, and invests resources and time in implementing initiatives that respond to the national agenda and social needs.

In this realm, Samsung also demonstrates its creativity in developing effective solutions, by engaging relevant stakeholders to deliver customised content using appropriate technology via Samsung devices.

Through unique partnerships with the Malaysian government and NGOs, Samsung has implemented strategic and sustainable initiatives like the first SMART Library with digitised content at National Library in Kuala Lumpur launched in 2014 by the Minister of Culture and Tourism Malaysia.

The year 2014 also saw the establishment of the first TECH Academy at the Industrial Training Institute Kuala Lumpur, the first SONO School at University Malaya Medical Centre, and the first SMART Classroom in Jeli, Kelantan.

The Tuanku Ja’afar Royal Gallery in Seremban is another prime example of how Samsung practised creativity by exploring the use of interactive content, software and applications to preserve culture and heritage in digital form.

Enter the future

Aiming to inspire the world with innovative technologies, products, and designs that contribute to a socially responsible, sustainable tomorrow, Samsung is determined to being a creative leader in new markets and becoming a No. 1 business, leading the future.

For any inquiries, you can contact Samsung Malaysia Electronics at www.samsung.com/my