EMPLOYEES are a company’s biggest asset. For Petronas, people are the heart of its business, and talent management has always played an imperative role in supporting its business strategies.
“We believe our people are essential to the company, and employees’ development is the key behind the successes that we have achieved to date.
“With that, our Global Talent Strategy plays a central role in ensuring development opportunities for our talents while the organisation adapts to change and remains competitive.
“This alignment between business and people strategies is among the reasons behind the resilience that we have built and the growth that we have achieved in the past 45 years,” said Farehana Hanapiah, Petronas head of Human Capital Expertise, Group Human Resource Management.
Petronas’ Global Talent Strategy highlights the company’s commitment in building the Right Leader, Right Talent and Right Environment and is aimed towards establishing talent pipeline for long-term success, as well as creating a conducive ecosystem for employees to thrive.
“In nurturing the Right Leader, we adopt a model that focuses on passion, performance and people-centricity. We believe that these are the qualities that make up a well-rounded leader.
“As for developing the Right Talent across the organisation, we implement a 70:20:10 Learning and Development model that distributes 70% of learning on-the-job through mobility and rotation, 20% through coaching such as mentoring, and 10% through formal learning in the classroom or via online – which promotes self-driven learning among our workforce.
“For instance, our accountant can have the opportunity to move around distribution and retail to exploration and production as well as plants. These are all very different working sites.”
For its people to flourish and grow, Petronas aims to create the Right Environment by giving them support through a wide range of programmes and facilities.
“We try to meet the needs of our people. Like young mothers, especially first-timers, they tend to struggle in coping with caring for their babies and working at the same time. Also for those who have dependants such as elderly parents to look after, they struggle to be physically in the office at a fixed time. To give them support, we have options such as flexible working hours,” Farehana explained.
Considering the disruptive forces driven by technological, economic and social shifts that are profoundly transforming the global manpower landscape, Petronas has always been looking into ways to prepare its workforce to be future-ready.
“The rapid changes include shifts in technology, adoption of digital solutions, and transformations in workforce values. The increase in technological and digital productivity through the incorporation of automation, big data and advanced analytics also affects the ways of generating business value.
“As for resource distribution, increased competition in the global economy has led to shortages of skilled knowledgeable employees in some markets.
“The talent demographics has also shifted whereby the Gen Z and millennials have different preferences and expectations when it comes to employment,” she said.
To address and adapt to these changes, Petronas has institutionalised moves such as reskilling, upskilling and redeploying a significant part of its current workforce to create agility and adaptability to new environments.
“We also promote a life-long learning culture via learning institutions such as Universiti Teknologi Petronas’ Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality Embedded programmes, Petronas Leadership Centre (PLC) digital learning, Institut Teknologi Petroleum Petronas (INSTEP) and our education sponsorship programmes as well as adopting new operating models such as agile methodologies to improve thinking out of the box,” she shared.
Farehana also emphasised that “the company strives to strengthen focus areas – redefining our work processes, devising methods of multi-skilling our people, and equipping ourselves with niche and specialised skills required for us to pursue new business opportunities.
“The niche skills that Petronas look after in a talent are creativity, team player and strong leadership with special niche skill-set such as in specialty chemicals, renewable energy as well as digital,” she added.
Given all these talent competitive landscape, Petronas continues to attract and retain its people through competitive remuneration, reward people based on performance, and promote diversity and inclusion in the organisation.
“Currently we have over 48,000 people from 111 nationalities located around the globe and here in Malaysia, 20% are non-Malaysians,” she pointed out.
As Petronas continuously aspires to realise its business goal, the company also prioritises in upholding its sustainable development agenda with its investment in the establishment of higher learning institutions and scholarship programmes for secondary and tertiary students.
These efforts are in line with its corporate social responsibility efforts that are spearheaded by the newly-founded Yayasan Petronas whose goal in education is to enhance the opportunities for underprivileged students to realise their potential through STEM education.
Above all that, Petronas has been named Most Attractive Employer in Malaysia 2018 and 2019 by human resources solutions agency Randstad.
“While the award can be a testimony to the efforts that we have put in place, we still have a long way to go,” said Farehana.
“Our journey continues in upholding the Petronas statement of purpose: A progressive energy and solutions partner enriching lives for a sustainable future.”
