HSBC Bank Taiwan Ltd (匯豐台灣商銀) plans to adopt several approaches to build a happy workplace for its employees, chief executive officer Adam Chen (陳志堅) said yesterday.
Chen’s comment came after the bank ranked first among all domestic companies to win Chinese-language Global Views Monthly magazine’s Happy Enterprise Award on Monday.
“We can only be cheerful about winning the prize for a short moment, as creating a pleasant work environment is an ongoing journey and we cannot relax and stop,” Chen told the Taipei Times in a telephone interview yesterday.
Photo courtesy of HSBC
The magazine said that HSBC Bank Taiwan’s flexible working arrangements was one of the reasons it was a happy enterprise.
Chen said that the bank would continue its flexible working arrangement even after the COVID-19 pandemic ends.
FLEXIBILITY
“We allow employees great flexibility on where and when they want to do their jobs; they can start working early to get off early or choose to work from home. It is the quality of output that we focus on, not the process,” Chen said.
Although some entrepreneurs think flexitime reduces productivity, Chen disagreed, saying it is important to believe in the good of human nature.
“We have demands about the quality of their work, but we also offer business tools such as a computer for each employee so that they can reach each other using computer software, not phones. The staff has no problem in maintaining their productivity,” Chen said.
Another approach to creating a happy workplace is to make improvements based on staff proposals, so the bank has a staff engagement club and Chen routinely meets with employees to listen to their voices, he said.
Staff proposals range from the light-hearted ones, such as birthday celebrations for colleagues and snack choices for Friday afternoon, to serious ones, such as the need for office computer updates, Chen said.
To ensure that employees are satisfied with the bank’s policies, Chen also asks all section managers to find out if staff have any issues, and if they do, managers must report to him to discuss what can be done, he said.
The bank’s parent company, HSBC Holdings PLC, asks all of its units’ staff to file an anonymous employee survey once every six months, and compares the results across different countries and continents, Chen said.
The survey questions cannot be disclosed, but are mainly used to measure whether staff are confident or happy with the company’s policy and strategy, he said.
DIVERSITY
HSBC values its employees’ differences regarding their age, gender and cultural background, Chen said, adding that the bank aims to boost its LGBT-friendly policies.
The bank offers spouse benefits to employees’ partners and would be relaxing some basic rules to benefit staff more, he added.
To many, Tatu City on the outskirts of Nairobi looks like a success. The first city entirely built by a private company to be operational in east Africa, with about 25,000 people living and working there, it accounts for about two-thirds of all foreign investment in Kenya. Its low-tax status has attracted more than 100 businesses including Heineken, coffee brand Dormans, and the biggest call-center and cold-chain transport firms in the region. However, to some local politicians, Tatu City has looked more like a target for extortion. A parade of governors have demanded land worth millions of dollars in exchange
An Indonesian animated movie is smashing regional box office records and could be set for wider success as it prepares to open beyond the Southeast Asian archipelago’s silver screens. Jumbo — a film based on the adventures of main character, Don, a large orphaned Indonesian boy facing bullying at school — last month became the highest-grossing Southeast Asian animated film, raking in more than US$8 million. Released at the end of March to coincide with the Eid holidays after the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan, the movie has hit 8 million ticket sales, the third-highest in Indonesian cinema history, Film
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) revenue jumped 48 percent last month, underscoring how electronics firms scrambled to acquire essential components before global tariffs took effect. The main chipmaker for Apple Inc and Nvidia Corp reported monthly sales of NT$349.6 billion (US$11.6 billion). That compares with the average analysts’ estimate for a 38 percent rise in second-quarter revenue. US President Donald Trump’s trade war is prompting economists to retool GDP forecasts worldwide, casting doubt over the outlook for everything from iPhone demand to computing and datacenter construction. However, TSMC — a barometer for global tech spending given its central role in the
Alchip Technologies Ltd (世芯), an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designer specializing in server chips, expects revenue to decline this year due to sagging demand for 5-nanometer artificial intelligence (AI) chips from a North America-based major customer, a company executive said yesterday. That would be the first contraction in revenue for Alchip as it has been enjoying strong revenue growth over the past few years, benefiting from cloud-service providers’ moves to reduce dependence on Nvidia Corp’s expensive AI chips by building their own AI accelerator by outsourcing chip design. The 5-nanometer chip was supposed to be a new growth engine as the lifecycle
RSS