Pepper’s Philippine office (PSO Manila) joins the Circle of Excellence at the prestigious Asia CEO Awards 2021
The shared service facility operates on behalf of the Australian and New Zealand consumer and commercial lending operation Pepper Money and other third-party services and employs over 350 Filipino employees locally.
PSO Manila offer a wide range of managed business outsourcing and offshoring services from originations lifecycle, including provision of post settlement support to customers via frontline contact centre and back-office servicing activities through to HR support, that greatly reduce costs without exposing risk.
Head of Operations, Shakira Snowdon, said she was honored by the recognition of their high performing team and their continued success: “We’re honored and delighted to be recognized as a finalist for SME Company of the Year 2021. This achievement recognizes our team, their values, and their commitment to driving a great culture, involvement in social and giving programs, and our continued business growth and excellence by always putting our people, our customers and partners at the heart of what we do.”
Culture
According to Ms Snowdon, PSO Manila has a culture that sets it apart in the marketplace: “We drive a high-performance culture throughout our business with strong governance, people, and process management practices.”
To support this, “We strongly support and live the diversity and inclusion principles and recognize the value of attracting and retaining employees with different ideas, abilities, and backgrounds to achieve our core competencies.”
With the creation of the Diversity and Inclusion Committee within the business, different sub-groups were established to focus on the ongoing empowerment and training of staff.
These sessions alongside other engagement programs led to a positive culture that far exceeds industry standards and benchmarks for employee retention, with a 99.4% retention rate as of September 2021. PSO Manila’s 2021 engagement survey shows engagement is at 87% and is in the 99th percentile for Culture of Engagement, 97th percentile for Strategic Alignment, 97th for Manager Execution, and 96th for Manager Motivating and Relating.
High engagement has its advantages according to Ms Snowdon, “We know our highly engaged team translates to less recruitment fees, reduced percentage of agents in training, and higher quality and more efficient outputs.”
Social Commitment
PSO Manila invests in activities and initiatives that demonstrate a genuine interest to improve the lives and conditions of people within and outside the organization.
“This year marks the beginning of our Pepper Giving program. It brings to life PSO Manila’s community and charitable initiatives in the Philippines. The program is run by passionate volunteer employees,” says Ms Snowdon.
The committee is governed by the Global Pepper Giving policy framework that ensures clear direction for Pepper’s charitable and community ventures. The committee has three main principles that govern all decisions and initiatives. First, to support organizations that work to provide the social necessities of life including housing and shelter, transport, education, and a means of earning a living. Secondly, Pepper will work with organizations that are seeking a different pathway to help others who are underserved by traditional support structures. And lastly, support is provided to inspire innovation and courage amongst those in need to find different pathways to achieve their goals, explains Ms Snowdon.
Business performance and growth
Despite the ongoing uncertainty of the economic impacts of COVID-19, PSO Manila has continued to drive growth across all areas, finding new opportunities to build on the foundations of success and delivering a broad range of shared services.
“We don’t just aim to meet Service Level Agreements, for us it’s about exceeding those expectations. We educate our agents, so they understand the role that the tasks they complete have in the end-to-end process. This includes customer impact and awareness of dependencies on and outcomes of the tasks they undertake,” she says.
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