HR features
Getting HR social HR Magazine spoke with Sam Lau, Managing Director, Total Loyalty Company Limited to find out how staff club programmes help HR get more social with their staff. Following 15 years experience in running outsourced staff club programmes for Australian companies, Sam is now bringing the concept to Hong Kong. An innovative solution that helps HR managers reconnect with employees and enhances staff engagement to boot. What HR benefits can a staff club bring to an organisation? Having a successful staff club improves staff morale. Not only does it inject the ‘fun’ element back into working life, it also serves as a great informal staff communication platform for HR. Having a fun workplace with different activities and special offers all the time helps employers to stand out. Those who offer practical, useful benefits—relevant to employee lifestyles—are able to significantly differentiate themselves. It helps tackle two of the key issues facing many HK companies now—how to offer a better work-life balance and how to get staff more engaged. The staff club concept is not just a set of ‘ideals’ or ‘targets’, but rather practical benefits that staff can relate to individually and use immediately. Through interesting activities, staff clubs help bring together employees from different parts of the company— breaking down internal barriers and facilitating a more harmonious working environment. It goes a long way to help companies achieve ‘employer of choice’ status with their staff. How do Australian staff programmes differ from those in Hong Kong? Australian companies embraced the worklife balance approach a while ago, and since then companies have been looking at different ways of incentivising, and showing that they care about, their staff. The use of professionally run social clubs as one such solution has been in place for over 15 years in Australia and I was a pioneer in creating this as a new industry. The focus in Australia is very much about organising discounts for employees. In Hong Kong, we noticed that many companies have really only just started to look for new ways to engage staff. Bearing in mind the busy lifestyle of a typical Hong Kong employee, we have
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HR Magazine
found that helping run staff events has been a real key to our success in the region. Our programmes in Hong Kong, therefore, have been more focused on creating different and unique events for company staff. How can staff clubs help achieve better work-life balance? I believe Hong Kong companies have struggled, to date, to come up with practical solutions to provide a better work-life balance for their staff. Following US and UK models, such as providing flexible working hours and working from home, simply does not fit the Hong Kong working culture. Companies need to look at something more practical for Hong Kong employees—we all work long hours, and don’t have time to go and find really interesting activities to do, let alone arrange for colleagues to get together. It gets talked about over lunchtime but no one actually has the time, or the inclination, to organise these activities. Staff also expect that by working for a company of a reasonable size, they are entitled to special offers and benefits. Again this is normally left up to HR to try and source, and usually gets done in a very ad hoc manner. A staff club is a platform where all these benefits and activities are presented to all staff, giving them instant and regular rewards. By ensuring new offers are continually added to the programme, the staff club becomes the portal through which HR can deliver meaningful lifestyle benefits to their staff to help enhance their work-life balance. Why outsource staff social clubs? Traditionally a staff club is run by enthusiastic individuals within a company, normally without much, if any, recognition or support. In fact, a lot of times when the team goes to a staff club