As Thai Wah celebrated its 75th year milestone in 2022, Thai Wah continues to strengthen its extensive Asia-Pacific network and capabilities across 16 operations in 7 countries, developing a global sales and marketing strategy from a uniquely Southeast Asia production base across tapioca, modified starch, rice flour, syrup, food product and bioplastic product. The strategy Thai Wah embarked upon 3 years ago – to improve and increase the Asia Pacific network of sales and marketing offices, to balance the portfolio of new products across B2B and B2C channels and to accelerate businesses into bioplastics and new geographies - have helped scale Thai Wah in a sustainable, meaningful, and profitable way. Thai Wah’s deep commitment to develop a full range of tapioca solutions resulted in a strong performance growth of more 14% in revenue in 2022.
The transformation journey that began in 2015 will continue well into this decade. The focus of the continuous transformation is to be a higher valued-added player in the agri-food space, now with a much deeper and broader network of offices and extensive go-to-market capabilities in Thailand, Vietnam, China, Cambodia, and Indonesia. The company has become far more customer-centric than ever before – enabled by COVID-19 to lay in place strong digital, supply chain and distribution capabilities. With our employees at the heart of the business and people strategy, the Thai Wah family remains focused and committed to catalyze and drive change with a renewed vision to create sustainability and innovation from farm to shelf.
After conducting employee experience surveys internally, the Thai Wah team decided to seek out a credible external partner in 2022. After a thorough search, WTW was selected due to the robust employee experience framework, ability to benchmark, a software that seamlessly supports the employee listening strategy, and most importantly, an advisory team that truly brings their insights and expertise to the table.
The Employee Experience Survey (called Associate Engagement Survey internally) is an annual survey open to all Thai Wah employees across 5 countries. Thai Wah’s Employee Experience Survey plays a key role in measuring where the business is on their transformation journey and in informing the next steps. 96% of employees participated in the 2022 survey. Thai Wah used detailed employee demographic information, pre-coded through their HR Information System data, to enable detailed results analysis and targeted follow-up actions, whilst guaranteeing confidentiality throughout.
The survey content was carefully designed in partnership between the WTW and Thai Wah teams, merging the robust EX framework of WTW and contextualizing it to what matters most to Thai Wah to drive change towards a positive employee experience.
By comparing the scores to WTW’s Global High-Performance norm, APAC Manufacturing Industry norm, and national norms (for Thailand, Indonesia, China, Vietnam, and Cambodia), Thai Wah was able to see how their employees’ perception compared to over 150,000 employees working for other companies in the industry and across the world. The 2022 scorecard results showed that Thai Wah generally scored well above the benchmark norms on WTW’s employee experience framework, indicating they are on the right track for the transformation.
“Our Executive Team takes survey results very seriously. It was very valuable for us to have discussions with WTW as they gave us an unbiased external perspective on the overall group results. In addition, being able to provide access to results to all leaders and key people managers ensures that the Executive Team feels supported by passionate leaders across all countries of Thai Wah operations,” says Ho Ren Hua, Chief Executive Officer, Thai Wah.
“Our Executive Team takes survey results very seriously. It was very valuable for us to have discussions with WTW as they gave us an unbiased external perspective on the overall group results.”
Ho Ren Hua | Chief Executive Officer, Thai Wah
Overall results showed positive outcomes (vs. benchmark norms), but deep-dive analysis reflected specific groups that need support, for example, office employees, central business units in specific location (e.g., factory locations) and demographic groups (e.g., entry and mid- level staff), helping Thai Wah identify hotspots for further improvements to make it a workplace with a truly differentiated employee experience.
“WTW’s reporting platform enabled Thai Wah to get to the right level of insight on hotspots for improvement by using features such as multi-layered cross tabs, AI-powered text analytics and drilldowns into the organization’s hierarchy, and seamless views on new combinations of data,” says Ms. Duangkamon Jirapornkasemsuk, Director – Talent and Organization Development and Deputy Head of HR, Thai Wah.
Underpinning Thai Wah’s progress on their key survey metrics is a highly structured follow-up process that is engrained in the business. It started with a presentation of the overall group results to the Executive Team by WTW, and continued by including key insights in the 2023 strategy planning sessions focusing on key themes like sustainability, people and digital.
The Executive Team (in partnership with the HR Team) identified five focus areas for follow-up actions that Thai Wah will focus on as a group (with five Assistant Vice Presidents taking up engagement champion roles for each focus area).
A key ingredient of any action planning process is to communicate follow-up actions back to employees. Here, it is important to strike the right tone.
“We give leaders and managers access to their results and help guide on what to do with results and feedback, but at the same time emphasize individual ownership by encouraging them to take a lead on actions after the results. This way, our leaders and managers take full responsibility for driving change in their teams too," says Ho Ren Hua, Chief Executive Officer, Thai Wah.
Many companies are currently moving away from doing only an annual holistic census survey to a more agile listening strategy consisting of short, topical ad hoc surveys and other feedback channels. Thai Wah will conduct the annual survey as a cornerstone of their listening strategy, while also engaging in broader listening activities, leveraging WTW’s self-service employee listening platform.
The annual rhythm allows Thai Wah to gain momentum across the business, encouraging high participation rates and strong management involvement in the follow-up process. Moreover, the census provides the rich data throughout the whole organization that Thai Wah needs for their detailed results analysis.
“For us, that once-a-year viewpoint gives us clear measures on the actions we need to take and the things we need to focus on, not only from a business perspective, but also from employees’ perspectives. An annual survey also gives us a baseline for yearly comparisons,” says Ms. Hataikan Kamolsirisakul, AVP – Group Strategy, Sustainability, and Innovation, Thai Wah.
Going forward, it is Thai Wah’s ambition to integrate data from various listening activities with the annual Employee Experience Survey results, to get a complete picture of how the employee experience drives business success. As such, having DIY (do-it-yourself) access to WTW’s Engage platform will enable more listening activities through short pulse surveys, entry-exit lifecycle surveys, and topical surveys based on the transformation journey at a click of a button for Thai Wah’s HR team.
Working closely together over the years on short and long-term incentives and compensation – and now employee experience – means that Thai Wah and WTW have developed a strong partnership. CEO Ho Ren Hua says: “The partnership is very important, because of the trust built from the hand-in-hand working relationship. When you trust that you are equal partners at the table and WTW listens to the issues that Thai Wah has, rather than just sharing market data, this drives the types of results that we have seen. It has been an incredible journey.”
“There are various solutions available, but it is important to carefully consider the overarching conceptual framework first. The reason clients work with WTW is that we are not a technology company that decided as an afterthought to get into employee experience. Our foundation is routed in science, research and advisory. We have great software, and we give great advice and perspectives. Our approach turns data into insight and insight into action. This combination is unique and provides compelling value,” says Manasi Vartak, Regional Director Employee Experience, WTW.
