Do great work and treat each other right: Ying Comms's Yeap Yin Ching

When Yeap Yin Ching and her husband Allan Tan founded PR firm Ying Communications in 2001, it was a tiny two-person startup without much thought given to organizational culture, people management, or the other considerations that accrete as a company grows. But over the years, as the company got larger, the organizational culture developed—and it turned into a very employee-centric place to work.

People Matters asked Yin Ching about the shape of her company's culture and how it keeps people on and keeps them coming back in an industry with a notoriously high turnover rate. Here are the highlights of the conversation.

As your company grew, what became the key points of your culture?

One of the things that has always been very important to us is how the teams treat each other, how they work together, and the way they treat clients. And this is where the culture comes in. We want to build a great place to work. And we want great people who do great work. I want professionals, yes, people who can do a really good job, but they also have to be people who treat each other right. We can't have it any other way.

What are some of the ways you create a working environment people are happy in?

We do work very hard here, and we spend a lot of time in the office. What that means is that we also spend a lot of time trying to make the office like a second home and finding ways to take good care of our people. We encourage them to work together and support each other. If there's anything their families need that we can help with, we try to be there for them. And we feed them—we're constantly amazed at the amount we spend on groceries and making sure there are snacks to everybody's taste! It's a combination of needing and wanting professional standards, but also providing a home-like environment where people feel cared for.

It's funny, but I think the biggest sign that we've succeeded in creating that environment is, the current work-from-home situation is actually quite hard on a lot of our people. We've been getting complaints that they would prefer to be in the office rather than at home—people are actually asking when they can come back.

Training and development is a huge factor in employee retention these days—what are your thoughts on it?

We do a lot of training. We conducted about 80 internal training sessions last year. Some of it is reinforcing the culture we have here, what we call the Ying Way: the expectations we have, the four rules—work hard and play nice, do the right thing every time, treat your team mates right; and learn like your life depends on it. The rest is industry knowledge and functional skills training: video production, social media, lead generation, B2B writing,and so on. A lot of our clients are in the B2B space, so we handle a lot of technology material, and our people need to have that knowledge. We have larger classes for the more junior people, and personalized one-on-one coaching for the managers. All this is to make sure that they are good people to work with, that clients will be happy working with them.

I once asked the team for feedback on why they stick around, what keeps them here, and almost every single person who responded brought up training as a reason why they stayed. I don't know where our retention rate stands within this industry, but 20 percent of our people have been with us for more than five years, and while I don't think training is the whole story behind that, it's certainly part of the story.

What do you think is the rest of the story?

I think they really do like the people they work with.

We've brought together a group of people with very similar values and a similar approach to life, and we've encouraged them to work together rather than against each other. For instance, we'll ask "Who needs help?" and when someone who needs help puts their hand up, then another person will get up and say "I'll help you with that".

And this is really great, especially during periods of resource crunch when some of the teams are short-handed. I think it gives a lot of people that extra reason to continue working with us.

You have a really diverse team, with people from all around the region. How do you manage to maintain that level of diversity?

I've been asked about this since we started hiring people in 2004: we've always gotten questions about how we manage to get such a diverse team. But really, there's no great secret to it. We look for the people who can do the best job and then we hire them. And somehow, there just hasn't been any friction over different cultures, different languages, different backgrounds. We don't even see people clumping together based on where they're from. Perhaps it's because we hire for their values as well, so they find it easier to get along. Diversity has never been a point of separation for the team—we actually benefit from having so many different viewpoints.