Success Story
Redesigning people management to build a workplace
that thrives in the face of uncertainty
About Gift Market
Gift Market, a Singapore-based corporate gift supplier, has enjoyed consistent growth since it was founded in 2013. In the past 8 years, the company has worked with many prominent clients including Facebook, Google, Netflix, and LinkedIn, producing over 27 million corporate gifts since they started. As business grew, so did the team, and it became a priority for the founders to put in place sound talent management strategies to support the organisation’s growth plans.
Goals
Building a strong team that grows with the company
Gift Market already has a strong position in Singapore, and the company is looking to scale up its operations and expand the range of products and services it offers. Its founders wanted to improve their internal processes and capabilities by building a strong team to ensure that the growth would be sustainable. As their team was growing, Gift Market also needed a clear HR strategy to keep their team satisfied and engaged in their work while acquiring the new skills they required.
Gift Market’s founders also wanted to create an organisation structure that can help support their business strategy and mid-term goals. This required a good understanding of both HR and business strategy so that the recommendations linked to the overall business outcomes that the founders wanted, not just considered in silos.
Solutions
Business strategy planning and clarification
We sat down with the management team to understand the business plans for Gift Market over the next 3 – 5 years. This allowed us to have a more long term view of how the various HR initiatives can address the challenges they are facing. It also gave us a good grasp of the potential issues they will face in the future, such as new skill sets required, or the evolution of the roles and responsibilities of team members.
Clear engagement strategy, organisation structure and career pathways
With the business strategy mapped out, we wanted to have a better understanding of their employees’ motivations and satisfaction levels. This was done using our proprietary diagnostic tool, Teamsight. Results showed that there were some key areas where improvements were needed, such as internal communication and compensation and benefits (C&B). Additionally, there was concern about a lack of clear progression pathways.
Having identified communication as one of the key issues, we developed a robust engagement strategy in order to improve communication and foster closer relations within the company. Due to the nature of work, there is a mix of employees who can work from home and those who have to be physically in the office. Therefore, our recommendations have to factor in the needs of both groups of employees. The recommendations therefore included online town halls, virtual team bonding games and cross-functional teams for non-work activities.
We also developed an organisation blueprint spanning across the company’s 4 functions and 10 specialisations. We revamped each specialisation’s career progression to clearly chart pathways into management roles. Each role in the organisation blueprint was integrated with a competency framework. This meant that employees were able to visualise what their careers could look like and what competencies were needed for each grade, giving them a clearer pathway to management.
Improved compensation & benefits (C&B) package
We also undertook a comprehensive review of their compensation & benefits package, and explored possible refinements in 3 areas, fixed & variable salary, benefits, and incentives.
We benchmarked their salaries against peers, allowing us to recommend salary revisions and bonuses for certain key positions, in line with industry practices. This enabled Gift Market to fairly remunerate employees for their contributions. We also refined the variable salary (commissions) structure to bring it in line with the company’s goals.
We identified and recommended additional benefits policies to better cater to employees’ needs, such as greater insurance coverage and a flexi-benefits scheme.
Additionally, we proposed a bell-curved bonus system, which will reward top performers better. The bonus pool can be adjusted based on Gift Market’s financial performance, helping Gift Market create a sense of ownership amongst its employees, and align them with the company’s growth.
An updated performance management framework
Another aspect we worked on with Gift Market was their performance management framework. There was no formal performance management in place before, and thus reviews were inconsistent and found to be not motivational. There was also a perception that some bonuses were not justified.
We therefore came up with a formal performance management system that tied back to the newly-developed competency framework. This gave individuals greater clarity on how they could develop professionally, and whether they were eligible for promotion and bonuses. We also conducted manager training sessions to better prepare managers for performing reviews for their staff members.
