Wiwik Wahyuni is the Chief Human Resource Officer of Home Credit Indonesia (Part of Home Credit International), a global player for the technology-driven multipurpose financing company. Prior to this, she worked in various key strategic positions in several Fortune 500 Companies including DuPont, Monsanto, Campbell’s Arnott’s, and LafargeHolcim.

Wiwik has expertise in developing organizational transformation and culture change strategies, as well as executing it through the most effective and efficient manner combining people, process, and technology aspects. Wiwik is based out of Indonesia.

Here are the excerpts.

How is Home Credit Indonesia adapting to the changing business environment amid this uncertainty? What initiatives have you taken to safeguard your stakeholders, including staff and partners?

It’s time you have to revisit our strategy to have more focus on customer intensity – with the output being more product offering not seen before COVID-19. Help our customers to get through these tough times together with prudence (e.g. payment relief program, new channels for customer care handling). Ensure better collaboration on enhancing seamless integration with our funding partners to maintain transparency on both sides. Internally, increase transparency – amid rapidly changing situations like now: communication frequency, using collaboration tools, and to maintain a balance between output and retention efforts.

How do you see the larger picture of L&D and skilling initiatives across organizations and how the employee L&D strategies have evolved in the last few months?

L&D moves closer to the business, along with HRBP, tackling their new needs faster. New insights are also gathered quicker in the process. Better collaboration with functional trainers in different functions is also paramount. Technology is also an important pillar in this lean learning – robust basic LMS, with content-curation platforms also playing a role in providing self-access learning.

Given the accelerated changes at the workplace amid this pandemic, challenging economic conditions, and news related to layoffs, how can employees keep their employee morale and productivity intact?

Provide clarity, with respect: these are two things to always maintain amid chaotic situations.

Provide access to information as wide as possible (frequency in communication above mentioned is one important lever); communicate clear goals and expectations to people managers on their and their teams’ performance.

The second part is maintaining high respect towards employees in the process of any hard decisions (for example, in the event of layoffs, extend medical insurance for 6 months to provide a better sense of safety amid pandemic, outplacement service for those interested to transition to another job in another company). 

There is a significant cultural shift organizations are facing after the crisis. How business leaders and HR can teams work together to create a high-impact learning culture in their organizations?

In lean learning, leaders take a more active role in energizing the organization. Hands-on webinar sessions involving Exco and external subject matter experts are good examples of what we’re doing at the moment.

Agile setup to manage product development and implementation is also becoming more relevant now, to calibrate better and faster to the new customer and market needs and situations. Learning is a direct function of this agility.

What are some key upskilling and reskilling initiatives that you have implemented in your organization and do you ensure a high-impact learning culture?

In our case, eight leadership qualities are introduced timely to re-calibrate our focus as an organization towards the new normal on the following topics:

• Customer obsession – as a change in customers’ expectations and situations is rapid, multiplied by COVID-19
• Thinking big – small pictures in the efficiency field can sometimes easily drag our eyes off the ball
• Entrepreneurship – leadership is no longer about making decisions for the team; the team has the full ownership
• Operational excellence – ensuring zero waste with full internal controls in place of our processes is ever more critical now
• Digital savviness – obvious as a long-running winning theme, hundred times accelerated by the pandemic
• Risk in mind – chaotic environments can never be allowed to result in lapses in risk control in everything we do
• People centricity – development of the team can never stop even in the event of resource restraint; in fact, we need it now more than ever
• Integrity – doing the right things and doing the things right can never shift regardless of the situation

Our aim at better data science to help generate better business results doesn’t stop. The adoption of new risk models in the Underwriting team is becoming one key aspect now. Data Science Academy is also set to continue.