The Maybank Group has an international network of 2,400 offices in 20 countries namely Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Brunei Darussalam, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Papua New Guinea, Hong Kong SAR & People’s Republic of China, Bahrain, Uzbekistan, Myanmar, Laos, Pakistan, India, Saudi Arabia, Great Britain and the United States of America. The Group offers an extensive range of products and services, which includes consumer and corporate banking, investment banking, Islamic banking, stock broking, offshore banking, venture capital financing, internet banking, insurance & takaful and asset management.
Maybank has over 47,000 employees serving more than 22 million customers worldwide.
“Women currently form 58% of our workforce and have played an important role in the progress and development of Maybank. To date, 46% females at the senior and middle management and 29% at the top management levels. It is clear that they are increasingly shouldering leadership roles in the Group. Reinforcing Maybank’s philosophy of embracing diversity and inclusion, we continuously focus on identifying issues related to women and sustaining efforts to create a safe, inclusive and equitable work environment for our people.”
- Nora Abd Manaf, Group Chief Human Capital Officer
Maybank has undergone various business transformations in the last four years to enhance their service offerings to their customers, improve operational efficiency and to focus efforts on their most valuable asset – their people, to be agile, competitive and able to operate successfully in a global environment.
Part of their transformation is creating an inclusive workplace that embraces diversity across the board. Alongside its competitive total rewards package, it constantly strives to provide work-life balance to enhance productivity and improve staff retention. One such major initiative to create work-life support for their people was its launch of the Maybank Tiger Cubs Childcare Centre (MT3C) on 6 January 2014. Operating as an in-house emergency childcare facility, the first of its kind in Malaysia, the centre provides temporary childcare support for parents during emergency situations where their regular care giver is unavailable. MT3C provides parents with a safe environment within the Maybank office, high-quality care as well as fun activities for the children while the parents source for alternative childcare services.
Maybank’s mission of Humanising Financial Services across Asia extends to its employees. Maybank believes that setting up a childcare facility will support working parents, particularly women, to manage challenges faced with balancing work and family priorities.
Equality, diversity and inclusion are key strategic priorities which Maybank are committed to promoting to ensure its diverse employees’ needs are met. Having an in-house emergency childcare facility supports Maybank’s focus on Productivity Improvement, as it addresses the productivity loss when a staff does not turn up for work, and the added loss when others are redeployed last minute to cover the staff’s workload. Research has shown that there is a strong correlation between in-house child care support facilities and improved productivity, employee morale and reduced turnover or absenteeism. Therefore, having such a facility for employees makes business sense.
The decision to use an emergency childcare centre is to enable the company to cater to a wider community of employees instead of a typical childcare centre which only caters to a few employees due to capacity limitations. As a family-friendly employer, Maybank aims to position the company as an Employer of Choice. Nora Abd Manaf, Group Chief Human Capital Officer, said that the childcare centre set-up is in line with the Group’s commitment to continuously ensure that Maybank is innovative in delivering support to staff in pursuit of highly productive yet caring employer value proposition. “The setting up of Maybank Tiger Cubs Childcare Centre reinforces this commitment through the inclusion of childcare services as part of our family friendly practices.”
Through an employee online feedback forum, ‘Ask Senior Management’, employees indicated a childcare service as a business necessity. As a preliminary step, the Maybank team conducted a feasibility study on the organisation’s demographic and determined that in the last 4 years, the number of staff under the age of 30 had doubled. Also, with 58% of women constituting the total workforce, childcare services will become increasingly important and vital in retaining women talent.
Part of the feasibility study included a study on the needs of employees against current resources available. In parallel, the team also conducted an internal analysis which found a significant number of parents with children under the age of 4 taking emergency leave due to emergency situations. Through their study, the team was able to propose a business case to the Management team for their buy-in and support which they ultimately achieved successfully in late April 2013.
Maybank Tiger Cubs Childcare Centre Journey
Overall, Maybank’s childcare center implementation took approximately five months. Through the support and sponsorship of the Group EXCO members, the working committee engaged not only internal parties, but also the support of various external agencies to be involved in the process of implementing the initiative. Maybank brought in the Bomba Department (Fire Department) and Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur (DBKL or Kuala Lumpur City Hall) to inspect whether the location was suitable for a child-care facility, as well as to ensure all the safety precautionary guidelines were met. Concurrently, the team designed the childcare guidelines which they shared with Persatuan Pengasuh Berdaftar Malaysia (PPBM or The Association of Registered Childcare Providers Malaysia (ARCPM) for further validation.
After buy-in was obtained by Bomba, DBKL and PPBM, Maybank submitted the childcare facility Official Application to Jabatan Kebajikan Masyarakat (JKM) or Department of Social Welfare, a department under the purview of Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development Malaysia. Given that the other parties involved were satisfied that the set-up of Maybank’s childcare centre met their respective criteria, the application was quickly approved by JKM, and the facility set-up began in June 2013.
The renovations for the childcare centre took three months to complete, which entailed converting an office space into a conducive environment for the children. Maybank also has added security measures such as an in-house Security and Fire Department, which carries out evacuation plan drills every three months.
Childcare Centre Management & Guidelines
The child care facility is managed internally in line with the Company’s family-friendly employer approach. As such, Maybank’s Group Human Capital manages MT3C’s and all the care providers are staff of the Bank. The centre is available for all employees irrespective of grades based on a first come first serve basis. Each child can utilise the service for a maximum period of 90 days per year.
The childcare centre manages a 24-hour hotline for parents to call-in for emergency situations. The approval for utilisation of the childcare facility is at the discretion of the childcare centre Manager. The eligibility for employees to send their child to the centre follows a broad set of criteria, which are:
- When regular caregiver is ill, or unexpectedly unavailable and time is needed to search for a new arrangement
- Child’s regular childcare provider is closed due to unexpected circumstances
- Either parent is unavailable due to unusual or unexpected circumstances
Childcare Centre Facility
The services cater for children aged 3 months to 6 years old. As per JKM’s guidelines, the centre has the capacity to take in 20 children, 6 of which are allocated for babies. The centre is open from 8:00am to 6:15pm, and the centre charges a minimal fee for late-pick up to encourage parents to attend to family needs. The centre does not provide an education curriculum, however the childcare providers plan daily play based activities for the children.
Maybank hired eight care providers as Maybank employees – four of them are certified nurses and the rest are trained early years educators. All of the care providers had to undergo four and a half weeks of the PERMATA course training by PPBM. This is to ensure that the care providers are able to provide high quality care to the children at the centre. At the same time, having employees as care providers give a greater sense of comfort to parents as well as accountability to ensure quality care is given to the children.
Maybank also enforces a policy that prohibits ill children from using the centre to protect other children and care providers from exposure to illnesses. A health check is conducted on every child everyday prior to entering the childcare facility.
Maybank believes the initiative will provide equal benefits and opportunities for both men and women to ease any stress related to sourcing alternative childcare services, as well as ensure Productivity Improvement. The initiative will also target women returning to work after maternity leave to support their transition back to work. It will support Maybank in growing women leaders by enabling them to have work – life integration.
Moving forward, Maybank aims to improve the facilities over time and to potentially expand the services to other Maybank locations. Maybank also aims to focus on identifying issues related to women and initiate change efforts, integrating diversity with Maybank’s core values to ultimately create an inclusive, high performance and equitable work environment.