To help build the workforce that CAG needed to grow, the People Team set about creating a strong culture and employer brand identity that could help to attract and retain top talent.

The new brand identity centred around people and connection, including valuing their employees.

The talent attraction programmes have helped to bring this to life through a range of initiatives that focus on Changi’s people and the opportunities to make connections.

This includes:

• On-site student engagement events, such as a series of ‘Amazing Race’ style games held across the terminals, which help to provide insights about CAG’s scholarship programme and the airport.

• CAG Brand Ambassadors, a group of passionate staff volunteers, who help to bring the brand to life by sharing their own stories across various platforms, including on websites and at career fairs. The Ambassadors also have opportunities to learn new skill sets, which has resulted in an increase in employees asking how they can be part of the programme.

• Employee stories that are used throughout the recruitment process, including features on CAG’s digital careers hub. These allow prospective talent to learn first-hand what a job in the airport is like and the varied and diverse opportunities offered.

• Outreach programmes, which are used to source a diverse range of talent that might not have initially considered a career with CAG, including education institutions (both overseas and local) and career fairs. These aim to identify people with a wide range of interests, specialisations and experiences so that the business can benefit from diverse perspectives and new ideas.

To retain CAG’s talent, the People Team needed to deliver on the ‘promise’ of the new employer brand by embedding it within the everyday employee experience.

To do this, the CEO articulated the people vision of building ‘Terminal H’ (Heartware). This represents the deep engagement of CAG’s people, both for one another and for the broader CAG mission. The People Team then embarked on the journey to build ‘Terminal H’ through its people policies, processes and intiatives.

Terminal 'H' is a core part of the talent attraction and retention campaign, and includes employee engagement initiatives that are focused on building alignment, employee enablement and leadership development.

Alignment-enabled initiatives ensure that employees feel valued, have a sense of belonging and find meaning in the work that they do. To guide this, supervisors at CAG have regular one-on-one career conversations with employees to discuss their aspirations and the steps to take to reach these goals, which are incorporated into their development plan for the year ahead. CAG also collects employee feedback about these conversations through an annual Employee Engagement survey.

Enablement-focus initiatives such as implementing the right systems and processes means that CAG employees can feel confident that they have the right resources and tools to get the job done well. This includes the workplace transformation initiative, where CAG had leveraged technology and digitized many processes in line with the belief that the future of work is anytime and anywhere.

Leadership development is critical for the long-term retention of talent, especially in a competitive marketplace. Understanding this, CAG therefore places a lot of emphasis in developing leaders. For instance, all people managers in CAG undergo a Leadership Milestone Programme when they reach three critical leadership junctures. These junctures take place when they progress to become, firstly, a manager of individual contributors; then a manager of other managers, and finally an enterprise leader. It is a journey of self discovery, where they get to think through their own leadership style. Programme participants also gain a better understanding of the business, and are exposed to case studies on challenges that they have been through themselves. The programme is complemented with training modules on people management skills.

Once new hires are on board, their skills and capabilities also need to be deployed quickly across the business to drive business growth. Rapid changes to the operating environment also mean that employees need to constantly upskill to design and roll out new transformation initiatives.

The People Team has developed an extensive learning and development programme that focuses on bringing new joiners up to speed so that they can start adding value to the business quickly, strengthening leadership capabilities, and continuous development and reskilling for all employees to better support evolving business needs.

This includes:

• Onboarding – The People Team created a new ‘Accelerate’ programme targeted at the ‘Manager of Managers’ and ‘Enterprise Leader’ levels within their first six months with CAG. This programme aims to accelerate the new recruits’ understanding of the business environment as well as the principles and thinking that guide business decisions. Heads of divisions as well as top management members facilitate this programme, which in turn forms part of their own leadership development as they engage and grow the new leaders who come on board.

An employee ‘storybook’ called ‘Extraordinary’ is also provided to all new joiners and outlines CAG employee success stories, which helps them to quickly better understand and adapt to the culture and operating environment.

• Project Starship Platform – The People Team created a skills exchange platform known as ‘Starship’, which was named as a tongue-in-cheek reference to Star Trek and the famous quote “To boldly go where no one has gone before”. This skills exchange platform was a first for CAG, where project owners and individual employees can connect and the exchange of skills and time contributed be brokered. Starship also represents the organisation’s journey towards reinforcing “One-CAG” collaboration, where diverse talents from different clusters can come together to solve challenges and offer new ideas.

• Learning Festivals – CAG conducts programmes that create opportunities to enhance employees’ professional and management skills, knowledge and abilities. For example, the annual Learning Festival is a week-long festival packed with workshops and talks by high profile industry speakers and CAG leaders and experts, which helps to create an environment that encourages active sharing and learning.

• Personalised Career Development Plans – The People Team recognised that career growth and development opportunities are critical for the long-term retention of employees, especially in a competitive marketplace. To support this, supervisors and employees co-create tailored development plans. This includes one-on-one career conversations to discuss employees’ aspirations and what is needed for them to reach their goals. This then guides the developmental focus for each individual and specific development plans each year. Development plans may include changes to job assignments, projects, coaching or training.

This range of initiatives has enabled the organisation to become a sought-after employer, with CAG named by Randstad as Singapore’s most attractive employer in 2016 and 2018.

To boost employee engagement and enable them to drive sustainable business change, the People Team uses employee-centric approaches to designing new initiatives, such as co-creation exercises.

One of the critical ways that the People Team helps to drive CAG’s business strategy is by leading the ‘people change’ approach to tackle business transformation initiatives. This includes engaging employees right from the start in developing the solutions to tackle business issues, rather than just as an afterthought when the organisation is preparing for rollout.

For example, CAG was undergoing a high-growth phase, where there wasn’t enough office space to accommodate new employees.

The People Team decided to involve the broader employee base from the very beginning and use their co-creation approach to developing a new workspace solution for the organisation.

• Informing – The project started with an initial ‘sharing’ phase, where information was cascaded down through the organisation, including the business reasons behind why the change is needed.

• Co-creating – The People Team used co-creation exercises, including workshops and focus group discussions, to ask employees to envision the next phase of working for their organisation in terms of culture and how they wanted to work.

Leaders were engaged to discuss how they wanted their teams to work together, patterns they had observed in working styles and their team identities.

The People Team also sourced data on how the current office space was being used and how employees preferred to work to ensure that the new approach could be built upon a strong evidence base.

These inputs then culminated in the design of a new space that was more of an open-plan space, rather than the existing traditional, cubicle-style office that the organisation had inherited.

• Refining – The draft plans were shared with employees to get further feedback. For example, some employees were concerned about their ability to remain productive in an open-plan space and were concerned about sound level when having small discussions in an open-plan space. The workspace plans were then refined in response, as well as additional supporting rollout tools to help manage the concerns raised.

• Rollout – The new workspace was launched with a unique CAG flavour and is laid out taking inspiration from cities of the world. New pantry hubs and collaboration zones encourage employees to come together, and green walls and potted plants to create a calming environment.

CAG employees are free to vote on how they wish to make use of the coworking space in their zone, such as adding bean bags, writeable walls or couches.

The new space was a massive hit with employees.

• Tracking and sharing success – Ongoing monitoring and evaluation has played an important role in the success of the new workspace. For example, employees reported that they found communication easier, and that their social connections increased.

These results and successes were then shared with employees to create an ongoing conversation about the change, which informed further changes and actions to support employees in the ways they work.

CAG’s new workspace has helped to further drive business transformation, with employees reporting increases in productivity and innovation as a result of their new working environment.

It has also been regularly featured on social media and TV as one of the ‘coolest’ office spaces in Singapore alongside perennial favourites the likes of Google, Facebook, Microsoft and DBS, and has become an important part of CAG’s talent attraction and retention programme.