Leading and Shaping Through People

Our people form the engine that drives our transformation into the region’s leading multimedia and ICT solutions company.

We believe that workforce diversity is essential to building and sustaining our competitive advantage through the fostering of innovative solutions, and greater flexibility and responsiveness to business needs.

Diversity at the Group refers to the ways in which we differ, including gender, age, ethnicity, language, cultural background, physical ability and lifestyle choice. We accept and respect these differences, and leverage the richness of our varied backgrounds, ideas and perspectives to support the Group in realising our potential in a global market.

As a leading employer, we are committed to developing and maintaining an inclusive and collaborative workplace and culture. Through our values, policies and behaviours, we aim to promote an environment where individual differences are recognised and valued. All employees have the opportunity to realise their potential and contribute to our overall success.

This commitment includes establishing measurable diversity objectives, beginning with gender diversity in our main employee populations in Australia and Singapore. We will continuously improve the proportion of women across all levels of our workforce, ensuring that female voices are well-represented across the Group throughout our pipeline of talent.

Engaging Our People

Our core values of Customer Focus, Challenger Spirit, Teamwork, Integrity and Personal Excellence provide a common foundation for how we work with each other, our customers and other stakeholders.

Our “Connect & Grow” employee value proposition underscores our commitment to building strong relationships among our people and developing talent across the company. We tailor this value proposition to keep up with changing times and varying needs across different employee segments. Our enterprise social network, Singtel ESPRESSO was launched on 11 November 2011 in Singapore as a platform to engage with each other and share ideas, and will be rolled out to the rest of the Group. We also introduced further automation to improve employee experience and increase productivity, such as enabling employee transactions through mobile device applications.

We continued with our relentless focus on employee engagement, a key component of the People Plan which is integral to our strategic business planning process. Our global engagement framework facilitates the analysis of direct employee feedback to help garner insights into the drivers of employee engagement, motivation and retention across the Group.

Attracting and Developing Talent

Our ability to attract capable and talented candidates – from emerging young talent to strategic senior-level hires – is imperative to strengthening existing expertise and building new capabilities. We have been expanding recruitment channels into various educational, networking and social media platforms to better engage with and attract such talent.

Scholarship programmes help us identify young talent while strategic internships and cadetship programmes offer direct exposure to the dynamic environment, people and work of the Group.

Since its inception in 2009, the Singtel Group Undergraduate Scholarship programme has awarded 16 scholarships and 15 book prizes to students in Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. The book prizes are awarded to outstanding students who reach the final selection interview.

In addition to full scholarships at top local universities, the scholars also enjoy mentoring and internship opportunities at the Singtel Group of companies locally and overseas.

We attract new graduate talent through our special graduate recruitment initiatives and graduate programmes which provide accelerated learning and development opportunities across the Group.

We also equip our people to be the best they can be, through holistic training tailored to the needs of different employee segments, at different stages of their careers. We deploy a multi-faceted approach to learning and development through experience, relationship and education-based interventions.

A highly interactive and comprehensive programme is in place to welcome new hires and help them integrate into the organisation. Employees are encouraged to take charge of their careers, with guidance from their managers. Tools such as individual development plans, competency frameworks and career roadmaps as well as online resources enable employees to understand their career options and ways to achieve their career objectives.

We continually enhance our management and technical capabilities via specialised technical training and leadership programmes. Our annual Learning Fiestas and Career Expos offer an engaging forum for employees to take part in bite-sized, targeted learning on a variety of strategic, technical, personal development and lifestyle topics. eLearning and mLearning modules have been deployed to align with how people learn in this digital age while regular forums featuring globally renowned thought leaders feed innovative strategic thinking.

The Group’s scope and diversity across different businesses and geographies enable us to offer exciting and challenging career growth and development opportunities while enhancing the combined capabilities of the Group. Job rotations, regional talent exchange programmes and secondments, including cross-affiliate assignments, provide rich experiences and abundant opportunities to develop cross-market and cross-functional excellence.

Grooming Leaders

A strong and competent leadership bench is essential for sustainable business success. We invest heavily in leadership development to ensure our current and future leaders can lead effectively and shape a culture of empowerment, collaboration and excellence to deliver on our objectives.

During the year, we continued to enhance our Group-wide leadership development programmes. The curriculum for our Game for Global Growth programme was refined to enhance collaboration and knowledge sharing among leaders from the Group and regional mobile associates who prepare to take on more significant roles. Our Regional Leadership in Action programme, which grooms high-potential emerging leaders to manage business operations in a multi-national and multi-organisational context, was revamped to increase exposure to a larger group of emerging leaders.

Driving and Rewarding Performance

We are proud of our high performance culture, and ensure each employee understands the company’s strategic direction and the part they play in contributing to our vision and mission. Corporate strategies are translated into actionable objectives and cascaded throughout the organisation.

Our philosophy is to align employee rewards with performance, whether that be team or individual performance, as well as the embodiment of our core values. People managers are measured on and rewarded for not only the achievement of business results but also how well they engage, lead and develop their teams. Incentives are designed to motivate continued excellence while ensuring ongoing relevance to evolving business and market contexts.

Safe and Healthy Work Environment

Singtel is committed to providing a healthy, positive and conducive work environment for all employees, and ensuring the safety of employees, business partners and the public.

Supporting health and well-being – physical, mental and social – is a key component of our people management strategy. We actively promote employee wellness and encourage employees to take control of their health. Health clubs and gymnasiums are available onsite across various locations, while healthier food options are made available at all staff cafeterias. Talks, health screenings and external professional counselling services on work-life issues through our employee assistance programmes are some examples of health management tools made widely available to our people. Family-friendly policies, including flexible work and leave arrangements, are also offered, as are onsite childcare facilities at some locations.

Workplace Safety and Health (WSH) information is easily accessible online and at all our premises. WSH briefings are conducted during new employee orientation, and we ensure that fire wardens and health managers are appointed and equipped throughout our locations. We have also established a set of guidelines for vendor selection, which is especially critical for vendors performing physical work in our workplace or worksites.

Employee Relations

We foster a strong proactive and collaborative partnership with employees directly as well as through the Union of Telecoms Employees of Singapore, with whom a new collective agreement was successfully concluded in January 2012. Our Employment Partnership Agreement in Australia, a collective agreement made directly between Optus and employees since 1994, was renewed in late 2009 for a further three years.

Our proactive approach to employee relations was demonstrated by our implementation of re-employment at age 62 in September 2011, ahead of Singapore legislation which took effect on 1 January 2012.

Gender Distribution

SINGAPORE AUSTRALIA

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