Working with HR to build the employee experience

As the Chief Operating Officer for ANZ’s Corporate and Institutional Banking business, Sreeram Iyer often has multiple hats to wear. But it is his people leadership responsibilities that are fast becoming the drivers for success in the digital age, as he explains to HRM Asia.

What factors help you to build a powerful employee experience, retaining talent as result?

In this age of instant gratification, personal choices and individual aspirations, I feel that the benefits from a proper, deep employee involvement in community projects for broader social good is underestimated.

My team is passionate about the need of education for the underprivileged in the communities that we operate. So, about five years ago, in Vietnam, we established a long-running education project, called Project 3E (Educate, Enrich, Employ), in partnership the Saigon Children’s Charity and the Provincial Government.  The goal was to build ten brick and mortar schools to provide access to quality education to 4,000 kids in four years.  This was admirably achieved in 2018.

Part of this story was the efforts of our staff, from New York to New Zealand, in raising funds and helping in the physical construction of the schools. It did wonders to our staff engagement globally and attracted several awards that we are immensely proud of.

How closely do you work with the traditional HR team at ANZ?

Very closely. My HR Business Partner – Talent and Culture as we call it – is a key part of my leadership team.  She is included in all the business decisions we make, and in our in most of our focus about strategic workforce planning for the function that I manage.

You will be one of the key speakers in the Singapore leg of the CHRO Series for 2019. What can delegates expect to learn from your session?

I will be sharing a little bit about our story in driving improvements to employee experience, carefully balancing this with the future of work and yet, also improving staff engagement. This may appear counter-intuitive, but our experience has been quite positive so far!

To build our team’s capability, we have recently started a new multi-year Digital Literacy Programme designed to create awareness, interest and eventual adoption of digital technologies in everything we do. The second part of the vision is to train enough staff volunteers who are willing to onward impart this learning to willing staff of our corporate clients, in areas such as Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Cloud Computing, and Data Analytics.

CHRO Series across three cities Sreeram Iyer, Chief Operating Officer for ANZ Bank across 20 countries (pictured), will be one of more than 30 presenters across the three legs of CHRO Series in 2019. These single-day, invitation only conferences will give senior HR leaders the exclusive opportunity to come together, learn, develop, and discuss strategies for creating an engaged workforce for business success in an increasingly digital world. Register your interest for each of the Jakarta (October 25), Singapore (November 13), and Kuala Lumpur (December 3) events at www.chroseries.com.