Best Practices
TALENT
MANAGEMENT
at Maybank Berhad
Talent Management : Driver for Business Sustainability
In a competitive global market, talent management is a primary driver for business
sustainability. The role of Human Resource Department has changed dramatically over the
years, from focused solely on personnel functions such as hiring, payroll, and benefits,
moving to involve in overall business strategy involvement such as organisational
development through training, leading corporate communications, and developing total
compensation systems in 1980s. While HR department continues to focus on these strategic
goals, there has been a recent shift towards "talent management”.
With regards to this new philosophy, HR department plays bigger roles to guide employees
through each stage of their career strategy from competency-based recruitment to career
development through promotion/transition/termination. During each phase, HR strives to
measure and manage employee performance via training, feedback and support. Thus,
talent management is a key component to business success and sustain in the current
economy as it allows companies to retain top talent while increasing productivity.
Talent Management Process
Broadly defined, talent management is the
implementation of integrated strategies or
systems which cover HR activities for attracting,
developing, retaining and utilising people with
the required skills and aptitude to meet
current and future business needs. The
following chart indicates the complete process
of talent management.
Source : http://www.bf.umich.edu/docs/KeyReferenceArticles.pdf
1. Workforce Planning: Integrated with the
business plan, this process establishes workforce
plans, hiring plans, compensation budgets, and
hiring targets for the year.
2. Recruiting: Through an integrated process of
recruiting, assessment, evaluation, and hiring the
new people into the organisation.
3. Onboarding: Train and enable employees to
become productive and integrated into the
company more quickly.
4. Performance Management: By using the
business plan, the organisation establishes
processes to measure and manage employees.
5. Training and Performance Support: Provide
learning and development programs to all levels
of the organisation.
6. Succession Planning: As the organisation
evolves and changes, there is a continuous need
to move people into new positions. Succession
planning, a very important function, enables
managers and
individuals to identify the right
candidates for a position. This function also must
be aligned with the business plan
7. Compensation and Benefits: It is an integral
part of people management. Most of the
organisations try to tie the compensation plan
directly to performance management so that
compensation, incentives, and benefits align with
business goals and business execution.
8. Critical Skills Gap Analysis: This is an important
process to identify skill gap of the existing
employees.
A Visit to Study on Talent Management
at Maybank Berhad
Learning from the best-in-class organisation through study visit is a platform that MPC is
actively organised to expedite the process of exposing our local companies to the best
practices that have been proven to achieve certain level of excellence locally as well as
internationally. A visit to study on talent management at Maybank Berhad was successfully
conducted and it was attended by 28 participants from 11 organisations of CoP and MPIC
members. This programme was the second best practices visit in year 2014 under the phase
2 of benchmarking project. The main objective of this visit is to learn and share thoughts
and experiences with Maybank pertaining to talent management strategy,
implementation and its implication towards business sustainability.
The visit started with the opening remarks by Pn. Nora Abd Manaf, Group Chief Human
Capital Officer of Maybank, who highlighted her appreciation to the group for their
enthusiasm and spirit of sharing. Participants were briefed on the importance of HR roles in
Maybank and example of the best practices in terms of employee engagement, retaining
top key talent, training and development, performance, reward and recognition and
initiatives in promoting flexibility and work-life balance among the Maybankers.
Maybank Profile
Malayan Banking Berhad (known as
Maybank) is the largest bank and financial
group in Malaysia. It has an international
network of over 2,200 branches and
offices in 20 countries, employing 47,000
Maybankers who serve more than 30
million customers.
As a leading financial services provider in
Malaysia, the bank has an extensive
curriculum that provides its talents with
many
learning
and
development
opportunities required to accelerate their
careers into management and leadership
roles.
“Employee engagement is the art and
science of engaging people in authentic
and recognised connections to
strategy,
roles,
performance,
organisation, community, relationship,
customers, development, energy, and
happiness to leverage, sustain, and
transform work into results.”
-David Zinger
Maybank ways in creating Employee Engagement

The Annual Employee Engagement Survey (EES) and Internal Customer Effectiveness
Survey (ICES) are important channels to capture employees’ feedback. For the EES,
Maybank has adopted the Saratoga Institute metrics approach that evaluates talent and
people practices and they benchmarked globally in terms of Talent Management, Talent
Acquisition and Talent Development and Engagement.

The ICES is conducted every year for Maybankers to issue recommendations of
improvement pertaining to services provided by each department to their employees. The
internal feedback from this survey as well as the external feedback from the Customer
Survey Index (CSI) are being utilised to assist Maybank in serving their customers for a
better approach towards business sustainability.

As effective communication is the vital element of employee engagement, Maybank has
extensively developed a communication strategy for transmitting specific messages which
had successfully transformed Maybank from “Start Up, Create Momentum” in 2008-2009,
into “Converge on Shared Aspirations and Accelerate Performance” in 2010-2011 and
follows by the final phase of “Transformation to the next level : Regionalisation” in 20122015. The HR staff played a major role in bringing up the philosophy of this transformation
to each Maybank branch by developing the right mindset from the beginning of this
challenging journey.

There are various channels of fruitful Employee Engagement sessions for effective
communication had been organised such as Teh Tarik with President and CeO, Townhalls,
Ask Senior Management (ASM) and Maybank Group and Employee Engagement (MGEE)
session that allow two-way communication between top management and all levels of
Maybankers. This will ultimately close the loophole of information dissemination and lead
them to move forward in the same direction for the purpose of achieving same mission of
bank’s sustainability in the future.

The Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programme is another initiative that Maybank
has embarked actively which goes beyond pure philanthropy in delivering meaningful
programmes with ever lasting impact, focusing on the areas of community and
environment. These programmes have not only benefited to the targeted receivers, but it
also contributes to the increase in employee engagement in Maybank. The CSR
programmes have bring togetherness and inclusiveness to the employees in creating
better lives for the society. Due to these
positive impacts gained from the programme,
Maybank has increased the hours per staff
involvement in CSR programme to 80 hours
per year in order to organise a total of 2,920
CSR programmes in a year. It is expected that
more CSR programmes will be launched each
year to strengthen Maybank’s brand and
position in creating shared social value.
Maybank
viewpoint
in
developing
its
succession
planning, defining and retaining
top talents

Retaining the best talent in Maybank has
emerged as an important issue to be addressed
due to high employee mobility in financial
industry. Maybank has always strengthened its
succession
planning
and
succession
realiasation to accommodate all sort of their
talent expectations. The robust succession plan
has allowed Maybank to transform its people to
be world class employees.

At Maybank, people are encouraged to
contribute ideas for improvement in HR
policies and practices in ensuring any changes in
business planning is aligned with the succession
planning as well as bringing the opportunity to
grow their talent in the long run.

It started the process of reviewing and
developing HR Policy and Planning since 2008 as
Maybank needs to catch up with the
international financial institute benchmark
performance of RM1.74 million for revenue per
head count. This shows that there are lots of
potential rooms for Maybank to move forward in
attaining the global achievement.

Job vacancies are required to be advertised
internally and it shows that Maybank
provides opportunity for their staff to plan for
future personal development. Currently, 7 out of
8 vacancies are filled by internal talents.
“Great investors need to have the right
combination of intuition, business sense
and investment talents.”
- Andrew Lo

Over the year, Maybank’s workforce at the age of
below 30 and served more than 5 years has
constituted almost double as compared to
other categories.




Middle Management Potential (BG 50,
51, 52, Band G & F)
Succession Potential (Band E, D & C)
EXCO Potential (Band B, A & Special
Grade)
The career path and structured development
framework have been published clearly where  Each pillar of leader has its own training
potential Maybankers are rated by 4 types of
development
that
follow
SEARCH
categories which include :
philosophy of :

Associate / Entry Level Manager
 Strategic Visioning
(BG 50, 51 & 52)
 Engaging & Developing Talent
 Specialist / Middle Manager
(Band
 Spirit of Achievement
F & G)
 Cultivating Relationship
 Expert / Senior Manager (Band D & E)
 Customer Centricity
 Technical Advisor / Top Manager (Band C
 Innovation & CHange
above)
 Maybank conducts the Talent Review Forum in 3  Currently, Maybank has enrolled a total
number of 73 staff in the Leaders to CeO
levels of assessment for the purpose of
programme and more than 600 talents
reviewing their potential talents to be
identified for future manager positions. A
promoted yearly. The first level involves
pool of future leaders to be groomed to fill
Sector Talent Review (STR), followed by
critical roles in Maybank is another
Country Talent Review (CTR) and the final level
important issue that has been addressed in
of assessment is through Group Talent Review
their succession planning. They have also
Session (GTR). The execution of these 3 levels of
extended
the
future
leaders
forums shows that Maybank has implemented
identification from Gen-Y and talent below
holistic mechanism and equal platform while
45 years. This approach shows how
choosing the right talents to be future leaders.
Maybank creates a skills/capabilities
 These high potential talents are monitored and
database that will ensure Maybank to
communicated regularly in order to ensure that
remain competitive for the next of 20 years.
their performance have achieved certain level of
excellence continuously.

In terms of developing their talent to be leader
in future, the potential performance leaders
also have been segregated into 3 types of
leaders :
Training and development of the staff is essential to
grow Maybank in future

Previously, Maybank Training Centre acted as the place for Maybank to conduct internal
training to Maybankers. Due to the needs of providing more multi-skill training that match
with current industry requirement, Maybank has transformed the role of its training
centre becoming a skilling factory and has symbolically rebranded it as Maybank
Academy. In terms of training budget, they had allocated about RM100 million per year
for developing 47,000 staff in 20 countries.

All training programmes conducted in Maybank Academy are related with the job scope
of Maybankers that cover Technical/Functional, Personal, Managerial & Leadership skills,
Customer Service, Credit, Risk, and Sales.

Each staff is responsible to develop their own Personal Development Planning (PDP) in
order to identify training needs and requirements. The PDP is then being forwarded to the
respective supervisors to be deliberated during the career conversation session for gap
identification between the current job performance and training needs analysis. This will
ultimately ensure that the PDP will align with career path journey in Maybank.

In terms of staff development, Maybank has adopted the concept of mentor-mentee
programme to speed-up the learning process among the staff. Maybank has expanded
“Live as if you were to die
tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live
forever.”
- Gandhi
the existing centres of expertise to support all departments. They do welcome retirees
who are expert in certain areas to work in contract basis for the purpose of capturing and
transferring the tacit and explicit knowledge to the staff.

Another approach that Maybank also has embarked in is re-shuffling, cross-regional and
sectoral rotational programmes to ensure all staff are equipped with more than three
Maybank’s technical functions/processes. They do also stress on teamwork for synergising
new ideas that will ultimately generate more income in the future.

More sophisticated international assignments and regional projects have been introduced
to build up the capabilities of the staff and to further equip the talents with regional
knowledge and skill. Maybank also applies a mixed of nationality in a team that will
leverage the process of developing Maybank’s talents. Out of 10 Maybankers in a team,
there will be two from outside country member. Currently, there are more than 100
talents involved in these assignments.

Maybank does encourage the staff to be innovative and creative in creating ever lasting
service impact to the customers. Go Ahead Challenge is an example of talent development
project for Gen-Y workers that allows them to express their innovation and creativity
through tele-casting programme. Recently, there are about 10,000 applicants who are
interested to participate in this programme.

Maybank allows the U-turn policy, whereby within 2 years of resigning, the ex-staff are
welcome to work back in Maybank and will hold the same position before he/she
decided to resign. This is another approach of giving opportunity to the staff to gain work
experience externally.
“People leave when they don’t feel
appreciated. That’s why we’ve made
recognition a really high value. Our
business is people-capability first; then
you satisfy customers; then you make
money.”
- David Novak
Extraordinary Performance for Reward and Recognition
at Maybank

Maybank believes in discipline of tracking,
whereby they have an array of KPIs for
monitoring staff performance. These set of
KPIs are developed in such way it complements
with the right behaviors and the future culture
of Maybank.

The performance appraisal is based on the
targeted values of department performance
indicators that have been determined at the
beginning of the year. The staff will be
evaluated by the reporting manager and matrix
manager. Instead of department indicators,
staff are also been assessed based on the core
values of Maybank such as how they
demonstrated
their
attitude
towards
Teamwork, Integrity, Growth, Excellence &
Efficiency and Relationship Building.

Fairness
and
transparency
in
assessments are being practiced through
compulsory
mid
and
year-end
performance conversation between the
staff and managers. During the
conversation, staff is informed and
supported on close performance and
behavioral gaps.

The performances are then linked with
bonuses,
wage
increment
and
opportunity to be promoted or further
study for those who have obtained
extraordinary achievement throughout
the year as the reward and recognition
promised by Maybank.
“It’s all about quality of life and finding a
happy balance between work and
friends and family.”
- Philip Green
Humanising Workplace at Maybank

Their flexible Work-life balance in Maybank is case-to-case basis and it depends on the
criticalness of the personal matter in order to allow staff to take an emergency leave
during the peak seasons.

In promoting health and work-life balance environment, facilities such as fantastic
Gymnasium, Steam Room for sauna, Home Theater, Indoor Court for futsal & badminton
tournament, Foosball Table & Indoor Game Room, and Aerobic Classes are available at
Maybank Menara. They do hire permanent instructors in helping Maybankers to maintain
healthy work-life, especially in the midst of their hectic schedule.

The other privilege that is also being provided by Maybank to the staff is the Childcare
Centre at Menara Maybank. This centre is served as the temporary place for their children
to stay during the unexpected absent of the babysitter. Currently, Maybank has employed
3 permanent staff to manage the centre.
Leading the Way
As one of the successful financial
institution in Malaysia, Maybank has
proactively and systematically take
actions to ensure that they have the
human resource capability to meet
their current and future business
requirements. Maybank has made
talent management a critical force in
their drive for excellence.
The
journey
of
Maybank
transformation in developing it staff
to become a world class employee
had started in year 2008. Aggressive
communication is made at that time
to expedite the mindset change
towards inculcated the new culture of
Maybank.
It has been proven that within 5 years, Maybank has achieved targeted performance
speedily with strong support contributed by all Maybankers. These tremendous
achievements has led Maybank to receive numerous recognitions locally as well as
internationally. This journey has illustrated that, it is important to manage and retain best
talent for achieving the best possible results in the future. It is just a matter of embedding
the right energy and atmosphere that can strengthen the existing capability of the
employees.