Total 650 words used.
PT Indosat Tbk, a 56-year-old telecommunication company, underwent a merger with Hutchison 3 Indonesia in January 2022, integrating its employees, cultures, and brands into Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison. Whilst many studies showed M&A’s failure rate is 70-90%, Indosat has proven that it could turn around the low expectations by the growing revenue and great engagement despites all post-merger challenges faced by the management and employees. Attention to people and detailed holistic preparation that encompasses culture immersion were key contributors in ensuring its merger process went smoothly.
The merger’s upcoming challenges have been discussed and anticipated even before the deal was done.
Engagement in Uncertainty
Amidst the uncertainty and anxiety about the impact of the merger, we ensured engagement and cultural immersion were embedded even before the first day. Everyone from both legacy companies was invited to join the new merged company and grow together. We created excitement for the upcoming agreement by holding an event which involved everyone to get to know the perks of the new company (benefits, career opportunities and development, etc.) Our senior leaders were also involved in ensuring their team members were excited about the merger.
After the merger, we created a year-long friendly competition with various games each month, to maintain oneness, collaboration and embed our new company values.
Rightsizing, not Downsizing
We need to ensure the business stays agile and relevant. Therefore, we exercised Right Size, Right Shape, Right Structure, and Right People to the organization. We used data driven advanced technology for decision making through predictive analytics, whilst paying attention to the human side by implementing empathetic and transparent communication to our employees. In the end, people viewed rightsizing without negative perspective, that’s why we had 100% acceptance rate of the rightsizing exercise, positive reviews by the media and no business disruption.
The Future of Work
Rightsizing made our organization leaner. With less resources in a more complex business situation, we need to make sure that we operate effectively. Leveraging our advanced digital capabilities, we deploy RPA (Robotic Process Automation) to take over administrative and repetitive tasks across multiple employees’ touchpoints from onboarding to offboarding. RPA shortens the process from 5 hours to 18 minutes with up to 100% accuracy and 0% human intervention, hence enabling our employees to do more valuable jobs.
RPA also helps create a predictive analytic tool that supports our Talent Management. It enables us to determine specific retention strategies for specific person including their development plan based on a forecast of their performance and potential. This tool becomes a foreseeable future for this company.
Ensuring Continuous Engagement
Employee engagement is the most crucial aspect of growth post-merger and rightsizing. We have a group of ambassadors in each function called Growth Partner that endorses positive change and continuous improvements, as well as the voice of employees.
We also expand our engagement effort not only to employees but also to their main support system, family. We held Family Festival with more than 14.000 employees and families to celebrate 1 year of togetherness in 9 cities across Indonesia.
The Results Speak for Itself
Amidst the challenges of merger, our continuous investment in people resulted in the stellar performance of +48.9% of total revenue and +76.2% of Net Profit (YoY).
We also received various acknowledgements, like HR Asia Awards - Best Company to Work for and Most Caring Company, Asian Telecom Awards for HR Initiative Year, and LinkedIn Learning Awards 2023.
All these could only be achieved when our people are engaged, reflected in employee engagement score of 94%, and enablement score of 86% (Employee Engagement Survey by Korn Ferry, 2022). Even our score on Glassdoor in 2022 touched 4.6 which was the highest in industry, and higher than other big preferred companies in Indonesia.
With continuous support and positive engagement from our people to the business, we will continuously challenge ourselves to achieve higher and keep beating yesterday!
Nomination Title: Indosat: Conquering Challenges with People
