How a Hong Kong retailer stays agile through supportive HR communications and technology
Chow Tai Fook Jewellery (CTFJ) is a stalwart of Hong Kong high streets with a reputation as an ideas leader, ready to put technology to work for its goals. With 30,000 staff and a major manufacturing operation backing its retail frontage, it has outlets across East and Southeast Asia as well as in the United States.
Ivy Leung joined CTFJ in early 2019, off a six-year stint as Head of Human Resources at Octopus, and before that, eight years in a senior HR role at Langham Place Hotel. Treading gently but with a crystal-clear vision, she immediately re-defined her role as Global Chief Intellectual Capital Officer at CTFJ to reflect her HR ethos, “We shouldn’t treat people as mere resources of a company. We are not electricity; we are not water. We each have our intellectual capital, our potential. A job description can’t define what we can contribute.”
Leung, modestly passionate about recognising the importance of every role in the company, said, “I’m thinking about not just human resources, I’m thinking about the lives of those 30,000 employees as much as about the work. Because nowadays, especially for young people, they are not talking about the work. They are saying they want to have a fruitful and performative life.” There is a complete spectrum of employee needs to be considered and Leung cited one example of a young staff member in the company’s Mainland China operations, who owned a handful of properties passed to her by ageing grandparents and parents and so, “needed a job, but didn’t need money”. In other cases, employees may be the sole breadwinners for families. Leung noted, “Even if employees don’t possess assets like a flat or a car, the way younger colleagues look at life is really very different to traditional viewpoints.”
Whole-person commitment
The trust and respect that CTFJ shows its staff is paid back with a readiness to engage in longer-term thinking. Leung waxed, “If we do think people can do more than they realise this is so beautiful. Rather than just think about the business, think about how can I contribute to the company, the community, and my colleagues as well.” This combination of respect and expectation creates a space in which all employees—or ‘colleagues’, as Leung resolutely calls them—can make a fuller and more satisfying contribution to the company. CTFJ operates an ‘encouragement system’ in which innovative suggestions within each business unit are rewarded, generating ideas to go forward to a company-wide scheme that delivers both recognition and handsome cash rewards, while enabling the company to draw productively on its full intellectual capital.
Three keys to intellectual capital management
- Work-life integration - Leung stresses this is not ‘work-life balance’. She posited, “Say I’m a mother— when I come back to work, I’m still a mother. When I’m off- duty, I’m still the employee, and still part of CTFJ. We cannot split ourselves.”
- Total Quality Management (TQM) - Leung, a firm advocate of TQM explained, “When I design the whole architecture of the people strategy, I go back to TQM, because we do need a structure.”
- Technological Innovation - Leung urged nurturing mindsets that are open to technological opportunities. As an example, she pointed to an initiative offering more leave days for external studies—but that only accepts e-applications. So, people who cleave to fill in printed forms, which they then pass to the supervisor to be sent back to head office, face a choice of joining the 21st century or missing out.
Targeted technology
Leung is passionate about putting technology to work in the organisation, but always in the service of the frontline, especially for what she calls “a paperless journey: from the job application, to the interview, to onboarding, and for the whole journey, all the employee’s interaction with the company must be on one single platform.”
She explained, “Technology enables us to review the workflow, all the touchpoints, all the outcomes, the inputs and outputs [but] technology is only a tool, for us to communicate.” She cited as an example a recent project that consolidated the many different online employee functions onto a single platform, an app that all employees then install on their phone.
The software was put together by SAP, and Leung is clear about why CTFJ partnered with the global enterprise software giant, noting the breadth of its customer base, which she says ensured that the jeweller’s many different functional areas were deeply understood and catered for in one single centralized platform, including an app.
Leung said, “Globally, there are not that many suppliers can connect the dots like that, because SAP is not just a platform for HR, with traditional strength in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and finance.” She added, “It was one of our key considerations that there be a path to expanding beyond just one function. We could rely on SAP knowing about trends, say in performance appraisal, and we got more than just a 360-degree approach, with a function to receive requests from various parties.” This focus on agility means that Leung is eager to see an expanded role for SAP’s systems within the company. Such an integrationist approach to technology also helps break down the silo mentality that so easily develops in departments and functions.
“We shouldn’t treat people as mere resources of a company. We are not electricity; we are not water. We each have our intellectual capital, our potential.”
Looking back on her almost three years with CTFJ, Leung is direct about the company’s good fortune to be in an industry that has come through Covid-19 relatively unscathed, but she also credits its nimbleness during the period, saying, “This is not about luck. This is about preparation and communication. Because we have a factory in Wuhan, in late 2019 we were aware of the condition there, and quickly postponed several large functions planned for Chinese New Year. By the end of January, we had already secured 60,000 masks, at a very low price. We kept agile, and asked colleagues to purchase all available masks on the web. Then by May, we already had our own mask production line.”
Leveraging this agility has allowed the Group to continue to grow and prosper—embracing change and making adroit use of communication, underpinned by technology.
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
