Our People
Our people make Maxis what it is. And to be the best at what we do, we need our passionate leaders to lead with impact. In early 2016, we launched the Maxis Leadership Expectations. These are qualities that we believe a good leader at Maxis must have. We want the Maxis leadership pool of over 400 managers to live up to these expectations and demonstrate the true attributes of a leader.
The Maxis Leadership Expectations are:
To drive home the importance of these behaviours, we rolled out a customised leadership programme for all our managers. Through a series of blended learning sessions – classroom, online content and workshop – our managers are taught how to fully realise the Leadership Expectations in the workplace and are also given the right tools to succeed as leaders in Maxis.
Our leaders’ performance is measured through Quarterly Leadership Surveys as well as the Voice of Maxis annual engagement survey which allow employees to give feedback about their managers. The results are used to find ways to improve our leadership pool in Maxis, as well as other aspects of life at Maxis.
We brand our broad and comprehensive initiatives to grow and develop people as ‘I Grow’. The contents of ‘I Grow’ are consistently communicated through various channels to ensure all employees understand both what Maxis is doing to help them grow, as well as what is expected of them to grow themselves. We call this the “Maxis Handshake” – Maxis offering tools, systems and encouragement for employees to grow, coupled with employees being pro-active and forward-leaning in wanting to grow and develop themselves.
One of the pillars under ‘I Grow’ is called ‘Learn Anytime, Anywhere’. This is making use of technology together with building a desire for employees to learn anytime and anywhere, and not just learning through the traditional channels. We are seeing a marked increase in usage of our online learning tools such as Lynda.com, Harvard Manage Mentor and SmartUp. For content that requires face-to-face interaction, we have our newly renovated Maxis Academy. Training and development of employees is managed through our brand new cloud-based learning management system (“LMS”), which keeps our efforts and initiatives cohesive and integrated.
We continue to nurture and give opportunities to young talents. This year, we revamped and rebranded our Maxis scholarship programme as Maxis What’s Next Scholarship, which now offers postgraduate studies to employees and external candidates. On top of this, we are also now offering interest-free education loans to Maxis employees who are interested in furthering their studies or earning certifications or simply to gain more knowledge.
Our revamped Maxis Management Associate Programme now includes a customised rotation during the candidate’s final nine months in the programme. This allows the associate to focus the second half of the programme in the area that he or she will permanently be attached to. This means by the time they “graduate” to the designated function, they are almost “up to speed” with what would be expected of them in that particular role or area. We also organise Young Talent Engagement Sessions with universities, youth organisations and various technopreneur communities. We use these sessions to introduce Maxis as the exciting, forward-leaning digital organisation that we are.
Job rotation is becoming one of the key tools with which our people develop themselves. Earlier this year, we challenged our people with the idea of taking up another responsibility after a few years of being in the same role. The aim was to stretch their capabilities and invigorate their working journey within Maxis. We drive job rotation by encouraging employees to go for opportunities. We also drive it from the top by pushing managers to regularly rotate their employees into new roles.
In 2016, we introduced the MaxisONE Employee Plan to all employees. This is a more streamlined phone and data plan which is aligned to what we offer our customers. Apart from simplifying our processes and policies, this also allows our employees to have the same experience as our customers. We have also improved our parental leave policy, allowing fathers to take up to seven days of paternity leave and mothers to take additional maternity leave of up to three months on top of the first fully-paid three months.
In line with our ‘I Know’ philosophy of ensuring our people always have the right information and tools at their fingertips, we launched the individual Total Rewards Statement (“TRS”) which lets all employees view their total rewards for the year. The information gathered on total rewards allows us to do in-depth analysis of staff costs and rewards competitiveness.
We are the first in Malaysia to go with a cloud-base tool to drive digital recruitment interviews. Aside from eliminating the processing time of initial interviews, this tool allows us to find candidates who are aligned with our ambition of going digital. It also improves our processes and recruitment experience and takes us further on our journey of digitalising Maxis’ processes.
From the performance management aspect, our monthly Pit Stop dialogues continue to be one of the main communication platforms for managers to discuss performance and development with individual team members. This year marks the first time that we have conducted year-end performance calibration via our cloud-based HR system.
We are committed to delivering the best employee experience to our people and we do this through constant engagement. We conduct regular surveys and feedback sessions to gauge employee satisfaction and develop action plans based on them. Our recent survey saw an all-time high Employee Engagement index. We are now clearly one of the few global high-performing companies in terms of employee engagement amongst the vast worldwide samples of over 4,000 companies in the survey. We are well above the benchmarks for Malaysian companies as well as all global telcos. Every single part of the company has improved compared to last year, and the key areas we worked on, such as employee career development and managerial effectiveness, showed tremendous improvement.
Over the past year, we have continued to build and acquire new capabilities, created a new employment and engagement structure and taken on a more digital mindset. We are in a good position to forge ahead and achieve Maxis’ ambition of becoming a true digital enabler.
