People are our greatest asset. We recognise the importance of talent to the success of any business enterprise. We also recognise the necessity of subscribing to a set of core values which reflect the basic beliefs that we must embrace as an organisation to sustain our growth and success. Our five core values are depicted below:
Building Relationships
We strive to build mutually beneficial relationships with all our stakeholders
Building strong relationships with our fellow colleagues towards realising company goals and objectives
We have a sense of urgency in our service levels
United to Achieve
We are one organisation and work as a team towards common goals
We encourage information sharing and ideas to achieve our goals
We believe in mutual respect and trust in one another
We are strengthened by our diversity (gender, race, experiences and views)
Responsibility
Honesty and Integrity in our conduct and practices
Trustworthy and genuine in all our dealings
We maintain fair, transparent and orderly markets with prudent risk management
We take charge and are accountable for our own actions
Collectively we look towards building a socially responsible organisation
Simplicity
We strive towards simplicity in processes and structures that enable us to make decisions quickly, rapidly transforming ideas into results
We encourage innovation and promote creative and efficient ways of doing business
Agility
We will accept, as well as respond to, changes as we move along
We are enterprising by proactively identifying and pursuing opportunities for new products, services and business practices
We are results-oriented with the drive and passion to succeed
We are committed to self improvement and personal excellence
Over the years we have continued to embed these core values into Bursa Malaysia by implementing employee-engagement activities around them. Our results are monitored through annual employee-engagement surveys through which we are able to gauge any shifts in awareness and understanding of our values.
While organisational culture and values form an important part of our efforts to nurture a high-performance work environment, in 2011, Bursa Malaysia identified five Strategic Thrusts to reposition the Exchange and to guide our immediate future directions. As the journey begins with internal transformation, the Group Human Resources Division (GHR) has been actively preparing employees to be the enablers of business success through various programmes and initiatives to help our people adapt and succeed in a new high-performance, results-driven work environment.
In this regard, we have also invested in reviewing and redesigning our HR and talent strategies in the year under review, in order to sharpen our focus on acquiring, developing, deploying, engaging and retaining employees with the right attitude, skills and abilities to support our transformation strategies.
Meanwhile, we recognised the need to create an environment where mutually-beneficial relationships thrive. Such an environment requires a business partnership with our people. The creation of an appropriate work culture and ethics to support our vision for a satisfying and enriching work environment is an ongoing process.
PEOPLE DEVELOPMENT
In support of our stated objectives to deploy the right people as enablers of growth, we continued to promote learning and education throughout the organisation in the year under review. Targets have been set for all employees to achieve an average of three learning days per year by attending various courses organised either internally or externally. As of 31 December 2011, the average learning days per staff was 6.25 days. We noted an increased interest in learning activities amongst our employees as a result of our renewed commitment towards skills development.
This took the form of the leadership development framework and the newly-defined Bursa Leadership core competencies which GHR relied upon to plan for the 2011 Learning Calendar to enhance the leadership competencies and capabilities of our employees. Our leadership competencies model has been developed and formalised based on wellresearched prototypes. All our succession management programmes,interventions and other management development courses were based on this model as the basis to develop people effectively and ensure they are fully-aligned to our business needs.
Training continued in the year under review through internal programmes where the focus was on soft skills, and external programmes where the emphasis was on technical and functional skills. An active Learning Calendar ensured staff was able to identify courses to meet their needs. To ensure knowledge transfer post-training, participants who attended training courses overseas were required to conduct knowledge-sharing sessions with their colleagues to share their learnings and experiences within one month of each programme’s completion.
Another key tool was the launch of our learning roadmap which was introduced in 2011 to enable staff and their supervisors to discuss and identify, in consultation with one another, the learning needs of all employees in both functional and leadership skills development.
The above were some of the initiatives taken in the year under review to better manage and develop our people in pursuit of our goal to be a worldclass workforce. Going forward, we will continue to progressively implement our people-development initiatives introduced in 2011 as a foundation on which to develop and manage our talent pool with a focus on both leadership and functional competencies.
CREATING A SUSTAINABLE WORKFORCE
Under our succession and talent management initiatives, a second phase of talent profiling was successfully carried out in 2011. The talents identified have been briefed on their areas of development and strengths that they should leverage on, in order to achieve their maximum potential. Learning programmes for leadership development, in particular, have been earmarked for the talent pipeline.
In 2011, we further nurtured the growth of the talent pool by embarking on a career conversation programme for talent development, which is an institutionalised approach to encouraging managers to have formal and constructive discussions with their staff on their career aspirations and professional future. GHR facilitated the process by providing managers’ toolkits to guide the discussions and holding townhall sessions to explain the programme and help maximise the opportunities. The tangible output of these career conversations were Individual Development Plans (IDP) which will form the basis for the career development of all our staff over the short and medium term.
The GHR also stepped up its efforts to mobilise internal talents to fill up positions which fell vacant during the year under review. This was a conscious move to advertise key vacancies internally and to deploy talents in suitable positions across the organisation. While some of these movements were lateral transfers, others were promotions and offered growth opportunities to many employees. We believe this initiative to be a valuable part of the broader succession planning effort as several identified talents have moved up to next-level positions that fell vacant in 2011.
Meanwhile, our Trailblazer Programme continued with a fresh batch of nine Management Associates (MA). These comprised graduates from local and foreign universities having CGPA scores of 3.5 and above. The programme consisted of an 18-month job-rotation cycle, which placed the MAs on a "Fast Track" for their career development in Bursa Malaysia. As part of the programme, the MAs are also undergoing the Certificate in Finance, Accounting and Business qualification (CFAB) from the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW). A business qualification under ICAEW, the certificate can be used as an entry route into the ACA programme.
In 2011 we continued with our cross-fertilisation initiative whereby talents were seconded to other relevant organisations to enhance their best practices and expand their skills and knowledge.
We are pleased to report that for the year 2011, Bursa Malaysia’s ranking in Malaysia's Leading 100 Graduate Employers Survey moved up from 41 to 22. This ranking was voted by students and graduates from local and foreign universities who undertook their internships with us. We remain committed to our internship programme as we believe in providing onthe- job training opportunities to undergraduates to facilitate their future employment. A total of 59 students from both local and foreign universities were provided with internships at Bursa Malaysia in the year under review.
EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
Building and sustaining employee engagement takes perseverance and endurance. Nevertheless, GHR continued with these activities in 2011 to create a workplace where our 599 employees consistently go the extra mile and perform beyond expected levels to help the organisation achieve its business goals. We kept our focus on three aspects, mainly to engage our employees, to enable them to perform and also to energise them, as depicted in the chart below.
In November 2011 we completed our fourth Employee Engagement Survey (EES), an annual online poll which gauges employee sentiment as measured by several indicators or dimensions. The response rate of 97% was better than average of companies in Malaysia, and it was also our highest since 2008. The resultant Employee Engagement Index (EEI) has shown that employees feel much more engaged than previously in 2010, with a 12% improvement over the earlier index. The 2011 EEI also shifted positively over last year in various other key dimensions including leadership, career development and empowerment, and internalisation of core values. While the findings reflect the initiatives taken during the year, areas of further development have been noted and will be the basis of ongoing efforts by GHR in 2012. To augment the annual EES, Bursa Malaysia continues to conduct small-group workshops and townhall sessions to address ongoing employee concerns.
REWARDS AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
Bursa Malaysia adopts a pay-for-performance philosophy. Therefore, the rewards structure is designed to recognise contributions towards the achievement of organisational, divisional and individual objectives which correspond to actual performance levels. Our base salary structure is supported by broad salary ranges to allow sufficient pay progression to attract high-calibre employees and retention of our key talents, whilst the competitiveness of our rewards programmes is analysed via benchmark studies and by adopting market best practices which are suited to our environment and needs.
The base salary structure is complemented by a mix of short and longterm incentives to ensure sustainable performance over identified time horizons and to ensure adequate focus on both the immediate and future successes and growth of the organisation. In 2011, a new long-term incentive plan, the Bursa Malaysia Share Grant Plan (SGP), was implemented. The SGP is an incentive tool to reward and recognise eligible employees of Bursa Malaysia and is effective for a period of 10 years from 18 April 2011.
Other forms of reward include formal and informal recognition. These have been put in place to ensure there are sufficient non-monetary related rewards for motivation and sustenance of a harmonious working environment. Formal recognition of employees is conducted annually via the “BURSA@work Awards” programme, whereby deserving employees are recognised for their commitment to the core values introduced in 2009.
