Episode 46: How People Data Can Drive Better Business and Employee Outcomes (Interview with Chin Yin Ong)

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When I was in Singapore a couple of years ago I had the pleasure of visiting Grab, one of Southeast Asia's largest and most innovative technology companies and spending time with the guest on this week’s episode, Head of People Operations, Chin Yin Ong and some of her talented team. With a background in sales and marketing, a psychology degree and a passion for using technology and analytics to drive better outcomes for the business and its workforce, Chin Yin is the epitome of the Chief People Officer as a catalyst for growth. Chin Yin combines her role as Head of People with running the technology solutions team, which as you will hear, capitalises on the technology Grab has developed for its customers to enhance the work experience for Grabbers, which is Grab's name for its employees.

I know you will enjoy listening to some of the innovations that Chin Yin and her team are driving at the tech firm. You can listen below or by visiting the podcast website here.

In our conversation Chin Yin and I discuss:

  • How to keep employees engaged and connected during the crisis

  • Examples of how people data is driving better business and employee outcomes at Grab

  • How to infuse HR professionals with the skills required to be more data-driven and achieve the optimal combination of head, heart and gut

  • The rise of micro learning and the impact on skills

  • Why the 2020s is set to be the golden age for HR

This episode is a must listen for anyone interested or involved in employee experience, people analytics, HR technology and business outcome driven HR. So that is business leaders, CHROs and anyone in a people analytics, workforce planning, recruiting or HR business partner role.

Support for this podcast is brought to you by Panalyt. To learn more, visit https://www.panalyt.com.

Interview Transcript

David Green: Today I am delighted to welcome Chin Yin Ong, Head of People at Grab, to the Digital HR Leaders podcast series. Welcome to the show Chin Yin, please can you provide listeners with a brief introduction to your background and role at Grab?

Chin Yin Ong: Thank you so much for having me. I am the Head of People at Grab. I run both the people operations team, which is typically known as the HR team and also the Grabber technology solutions team, which is our IT team. And both of these teams together, try to build a productive, positive and personalised experience for everybody at Grab to thrive.

On a personal note, I have a background in psychology and philosophy. I have spent two decades across roles in sales and marketing, but most of my time has been spent on the people agenda. I have covered a whole range of different industries and also regions from Asia to the Middle East and Africa, which really have added a lot to my perspective.

So just in case people who are listening to the podcast don't know Grab well, we are based out of Southeast Asia headquartered in Singapore. Grab was founded in 2012 as My Taxi, which was initially a solution to the inefficient and unsafe taxi system in Malaysia. Women at that time could not travel safely and passengers were always complaining that they were charged unscrupulously by drivers who refused to use the meter. Fast forward about eight years, we are now Southeast Asia's leading super app that provides everyday services such as ride hailing, food package grocery delivery, mobile payments and financial services to the millions of Southeast Asians here. Our vision continues to stay true, which is to drive Southeast Asia forward by elevating the quality of life for everyone. A little bit about, how do we see ourselves operationalising that, we would like to believe that the things that we do are powered by the heart and driven by technology. So it means that we take on some of the more difficult problems affecting the region, such as excess inequality, outdated infrastructure and income disparity and seek to alleviate or fix these through the use of our ever improving technology. So our end goal really is to unlock the potential of this region by providing everyday services that matter most to our users.

David Green: And interesting the way that you are combining the role of HR and IT. Is that technology aimed at Grabbers themselves, i.e your employees, so you are thinking already that the technology element is really important from a HR or people operations perspective.

Chin Yin Ong: Correct. So basically trying to put the human into the solutioning, when we think about whether it's enterprise security, whether it's the kind of apps that we introduce within Grab or maybe to think about process systems and automation.

David Green: Okay. I know we are going to explore a bit more about technology and personalisation a little bit later, so I will look forward to that. I was in Singapore I think it was two years ago now, it has gone really fast, and I know we met then and I was very impressed with the way that culture at Grab and the energy amongst all the people that I met there.

I know Grab has been growing very, very fast in the last few years. I was just wondering what the impact of the crisis has been on Grab itself but also the work of your team in people operations?

Chin Yin Ong: You know, this year 2020 and Covid really caught many, many businesses off guard. We were obviously one of the businesses that didn't know this was going to happen, but we are very much part of it.

When we look back right now, we feel that we are so lucky. Relatively we are diversified across business verticals and geographies. Whilst we were affected and hit in different times in different countries and some of our business lines have been greatly impacted. When everybody was locked down, nobody was taking a car journey anywhere but we had verticals that were growing. Where food, for example, and marts became everyday necessities for many, many millions of people to get their supplies. So really what we saw was that the team doubled down very quickly to adjust to the new world, not just for Grab, but really for a way that we can help the broader community. Closer to home, in the people operations team, or pops and popsters as we call ourselves. We became the core function and the cross-functional lead to coordinate across country heads, the security team, IT, the facility team, to ensure that our Grabbers and partners were as safe and as supported as possible. So when this year began I really found myself dealing with facility changes, setting new policies and rules every hour, every day, across our 14 locations, it was quite crazy. I remember also in our IT front we had to take on such a huge step up as we ramped up the IT infrastructure capacity to about three to four times what was norm. So it was like making sure we had 15,000 concurrent connections with no downtime.

We measured there was about 145,000 zoom meetings going on just in the month of June. We have 5X our usage compared to what was the average in 2019, we had to set up a thousand laptops in 10 days so that we could enable our staff to work from home. So it was a crazy time but as the time really wore on things, in a way, got a little bit more stable but the ambiguity increased because we really didn't know what was going to happen next. We started spending time more on important topics about how Grabbers are taking care of their own wellbeing. How do we make sure that the social capital that we have is not eroded too quickly? At first it was all about productivity but then it became purpose and sustainability. And I was honestly very worried about our own team, the people operations and the IT team, because they were facing such burnout taking care of everybody. So we even thought about, okay, how can we show thanks virtually but sincerely through this time.

David Green: And what are some of the things you have done both for the pops team as you call them, the people operations team, but also Grabbers themselves? How have you kept them engaged and connected during the crisis? And you are right, we don't necessarily know what is going to happen next and the end of this story is still waiting to happen. So I am just interested in some of the things that you have done to keep people engaged and connected.

Chin Yin Ong: So within the Pops team again we are separated in to 14 different countries and everybody is going through really really difficult times. I remember for example when China was the first country that was impacted and there were lock downs within cities and stuff like that, we very quickly got them what they needed most which was face masks.

So we got the essentials for the team as quickly by using our regional contacts and how do we find the right suppliers very, very quickly. Now at a Grab level obviously that is not always scalable. Centrally what could we do? We did a couple of things. At the beginning, we made sure that we got accurate information out to our people as soon as possible and this email update basically evolved into what we call Grabber care communications. So it was weekly to biweekly, kind of comms over email or workplace posts, for example. And we started with information and then we ended up with sharing a lot of tips, whether you are a single person, whether you are parents, we thought about how do we share these tips on wellbeing with them as the situation wore on.

David Green: Which leads on nicely to the next question. I know when we met a couple of years ago, when I came to see you guys in the Grab office you are passionate about using data. What I would be interested to know as a Head of HR, how does data support you in your role as Head of HR in conversations with the business or in just doing some of the things that you have been talking?

Chin Yin Ong: We are fortunate in that way where data is in our DNA. This is something that our leaders deal with every single day and obviously it is the most effective way to influence them by giving them data, information and insights. We are trying to get to a state where we embed data and analytics across all the people decisions that we have to make within the company and use it in a complimentary way with heart and with gut. Because I don't believe that data is the only way, but you have to use it and supplement your gut decisions, your gut calls and also what you feel so I think it is a way to amend decision making. A few examples, we are really right at the beginning and as part of the routine business practices we do a lot of descriptive and diagnostic analysis. Our workforce planning team within pops, guides decisions around labour productivity, around staff costs, budgeting, across Grab on a monthly basis.

The team also use data to help us focus our attention on opportunities where we see increase in productivity is possible within certain teams. Our people and organisational development team are very careful and sure that we are not unconsciously bias in our talent system. So what we do is that we analyse our performance management and promotion results, for example, and to see if we are truly gender neutral and to uncover any biases.

We do the same study around gender equity on compensation as well. Around diagnostics, our people analytics team, very very young team working to provide self serve tools as well as more custom insights for the most urgent issues. This means providing tools that allow our business partners to look at the latest stats around headcount, attrition, recruitment, as well as analyse the drivers on quality of hire retention as we all strive to better attract develop and motivate Grabbers.

David Green: Obviously historically Grab has been an organisation that has been growing quite quickly so I guess that look around recruitment, onboarding is very, very important. You talked about you can't have bias in your hiring process because you are potentially, within a year 15-20% of your workforce could have been hired in a inefficient way.

And I understand that's why recruitment is so important to Grab so that is an area where you have invested a lot of time with analytics so far.

Chin Yin Ong: We do quite a lot and sometimes we are inhibited by the systems that we use. So I am sure this is something that is the same for every HR practitioner who is trying to draw data and whether it is a system or it could sometimes be the habit of putting in the right data so that it is captured and you don't get into a situation where it is rubbish in and rubbish out.

I think recruitment is not just around the quantity of people we are bringing in at any single point in time. I think it has such an impact on culture because there are certain things that you can’t change fast enough because culture erodes very quickly when you have one or two negative examples that is spreading the wrong kind of behaviours within the organisation. So therefore, actually the culture part in recruiting, the way we recruit is one of the key points that defines our culture. What you recruit is a key point or what becomes eventually your culture. So I think that is just not around the numbers but I think it is about who you bring in and the quality you bring in.

David Green: And you mentioned in your introduction that you have a background in sales and marketing and I know that you have adapted quite a lot of the models and technology that you have used in the business from maybe looking at customers to look at the voice of the customer for Grabbers, for example.

And so I would be interested in hearing a little bit more about that.

Chin Yin Ong: Two backgrounds, right? So as a person who used to do sales and marketing, you get into a lot of customer CRM kind of tools that have a lot of dashboards. Salesforce is one of them and there are many. The other thing is that I have worked for a company called Hyperion, which again is business intelligence. So it is more of a financial update, not so much a customer update, but financial update and dashboards so that business leaders can drive that business with better insights. So that is the whole concept that we are trying to build within HR as well. So on that dashboard front we are building all these self serve tools on these dashboards so that eventually every single People Manager would be able to own and understand their people data and also be less reliant on the pops team. So I think that's one thing that we are driving towards and hopefully we can also build in AI where we can show indicators in order to be more prescriptive on what's going to happen and helping leaders know what steps or what actions they need to take.

So on the analytics front, we have been trying to listen more in a dynamic way to our Grabbers. So in order to do that we borrowed a tool from our data analytics team from Grab and what they did is they build this tool to sort out the millions of commentaries around our app around our services that our users share with us on the different social channels. And the tool helps us understand the top positives and negatives themes that our customers care about. So when I hear about that tool, I go like, okay there are also millions of commentaries that our people are sharing and sometimes that informal sharing is very, very important. But how do we aggregate it and try to understand it in a meaningful and fast manner?

So that is where we are working with the team to adapt this tool in order to use Grabber data in an ethical manner, in a proper manner so that we know how people are feeling at any given moment. That is really, honestly, a work in progress but we will strive to try to make sure that the machine actually learns the voices of our Grabbers.

David Green: And I suppose what that could eventually help you to do and I guess it is probably something you thought about, is you will be able to look at the voice of the customer and you will be able to look at the voice of the Grabbers and understand how those two things effect each other.

Chin Yin Ong: Yes that would be the next step. That would be an amazing step because you could think about it from a country perspective, you could really probably see very different relationships or maybe somehow they correlate with each other. And I think that would be a fun thing to uncover.

David Green: One of the challenges, I guess, for HR teams that we speak to around the world is people analytics is still relatively new for a lot of HR professionals. And it is not something they necessarily learned when they have done their formal qualifications to get into HR.

I was wondering about how you go about infusing the people operations team at Grab with the skills that they need to be more data-driven and have those conversations with the business?

Chin Yin Ong: I think we need to embrace why people join the people team and then grow them. And so the way I would share with the team is to say that it takes the head, the heart and the guts to be able to run a successful team that actually brings lots of value to that business. And most HR people have great heart and that's why they chose this. They have to experience a lot of gut, so that gut feeling because they have seen a pattern and it's not a coded pattern recognition. But people who have experienced life, experience and see those patterns of human behaviour. So that's gut which they have, and I said okay now how do we bring the head part in? Because it is a combination of the three that is the most powerful. So starting with our HRBP’s for example, getting them to first understand how to deal with the dashboards. What can they tell, why are they built this way? We went through a series of focus groups to try to understand and we realised that the foundations that we need to build is actually vocabulary, because attrition to one person, voluntary, involuntary and so forth can mean very different things to somebody else. And so the very first thing is whilst we built all the tools, we have to talk about vocab and have a coherent set of matrix so that we have a standardised way of understanding the information and to be able to use it in a similar fashion.

So I think vocab is very important. So post setting the vocab we started to familiarise the team with the various tools, whether it's a dashboard, whether it's about labour cost planning, whether it's about hiring, whether it's about quality of hire, but the good news is that honestly our teams are very eager to learn and they are quick to get used to the tools.

And they often pull the central teams, who usually own the tools, they pull the central teams together and discuss how to get better and better data and how to be more and more independent with the data. So we have seen that. We also bring in industry experts, like yourself, who share and inspire the latest thinkings around People Analytics and AI and machine learning. So they can see their future in HR and where they want to get to, they can visualise what is it for and what does it look like.

And the last thing, obviously we have learning and development offerings to our own teams so that we keep up with the latest thinking and trends.

I think the final step for me is that it is right to draw insights from data to make the right decisions. But that is both an art and a science. To have the data is one thing, to draw insights to make the right decisions is another. So the value of People Analytics is actually where it intersects with financial analysis and that step of being a true business leader is that we also then need to help our folks understand business measures and business matrix at the same time to get the best outcome. So that is an area where we also want to continue to develop our team. And I just still want to emphasise do not just rely on data, Jeff Bezos in a rather famous interview with CNBC said that all of the data, all the spreadsheets indicated that Amazon Prime would have been a loss making business and that it would have never been launched if we depended on data and spreadsheets. But he went with his gut and so data is not everything. So use it wisely.

David Green: I agree. I think data can help us make our judgment better but it shouldn't be completely in place, yeah I would agree with that. We have talked a lot about Covid-19 and a lot of people were saying how it has acted as an accelerant to digital transformation. I think there is a quote out there from Satya Nadella from Microsoft that said we have just done two years of digital transformation in two months. I think we are all probably experiencing that, those listening to the show. So what has been the impact on the skills at Grab and what has been the response to the people operations team? Maybe you have seen a demand for certain skills or how are you adjusting to that from a learning perspective?

Chin Yin Ong: We have embarked on this future of work study ourselves and tried to make it relevant within Grab. And we have identified a set of skills that we believe at least Grabbers need to upskill in, I wouldn't say that this is skills that everybody needs to know but we found it relevant to our teams.

So horizontal across functions and business because of disruption and because of ambiguity, the generalist is the guy who going to win the race. And we hire a lot of very skilled generalists from the top notch management consulting firms of the world. What we see is generalists are able to pivot, they have that amazing digital literacy around virtual communication, they have a data anchored mindset. They know how to virtually collaborate with people that they have never ever met before but being able to get a team up and running really quickly and some of the basics on how to work with AI and machine learning.

So these are some of those generalists skills that I think will be very important. I do feel that the way to win the future is to be supremely multi-skilled.

The second thing around essential skills is the idea around agility and how do you flex your workforce. It is not just your personal agility it is how to embed agility within your teams. What is true customer-centricity, a lot of empathy is within customer centricity. I think because the world is waking up to a lot of problems around ethics, I think having a proper ethical mindset is also going to be very very important. So I think those are some sets of skills that we are starting to see being very important in the coming months and years. When we come to learning we also found that we should micro everything. And what does that mean? So for example, micro steps in behavioural change, really just making it very, very small. Tell yourself if you never exercise, try to go to the gym for an hour every day. It is really very hard to get anybody to do that so why don't we start with five minutes, three minutes, five pushups a day. That is good enough and pat yourself on the back. So micro steps in behavioural change. Micro learning so that it is really just in time and that people can use whatever they have learned immediately. Micro coaching so that everybody can care coach and not only executives get executive coaches. So how can you cut things into smaller chunks because it lowers the barrier to entry, it lowers the barrier to growth and that becomes much more effective. That is one thing that we are experimenting in. The second thing we are really looking at is trying to digitalise our own learning platform because we are really quite manual at this point in time. I do see the benefits of really just being able to capture a lot more data when you have the right platform that tracks the right things. So be very very clear what you want to track when you select the platform that you are looking for. It shouldn't be just an operational tool.

David Green: Yes its got to be about the user experience and you have got to make people want to use it, I guess it is different from maybe some of the HR technologies that we have had in the past. I love that stuff about micro-learning. It's certainly something that we have built into our platform.

You have talked a little bit about how technology is helping the pops team, people operations team, at Grab. I think we talked about the bot that you have got on Slack to try and connect different people together in the organisation. What other uses of technology have you got? I'm particularly interested here of course, because you have got that overview of people and technology.

What are some of the other ways that technology is helping the team at Grab?

Chin Yin Ong: Let me share that we need to be very clear what is the vision of rolling out technology within a company or why are you doing it? You shouldn't be doing it because you want to just follow everybody else or it sounds like the right thing to do.

So for us our approach is really quite simple, how can we make work simpler whilst increasing productivity for every individual. That is how we try to be able to scale the company by simplifying. So let me give maybe two to three examples of how do we use technology to be able to achieve that. Our talent acquisition team like you highlighted, we use really a whole variety of systems to build the pipeline and it is not just about LinkedIn. Trust me, though LinkedIn is a great platform, but there are a lot of other tools that we used to build the right pipeline. How do we do recruitment marketing in a personalised manner? And recruitment marketing again is not about writing an email, every single recruiter needs to write an email to somebody they find on LinkedIn. But I think it's about talent communities, doing marketing within your talent communities, back to the right segment of people at the right time. And we also use technology to onboard our Grabbers so the engagement starts way, way, way before the first day. And there are many, many solutions out there that could really help.

The second thing we are doing is we are building middleware between systems so that a lot of people related actions can be completed via Slack, for example because we are on Slack. People don't have to log on to the different apps that you have from approving expenses to launching a zoom call. You don't have to open multiple clicks in order to launch a zoom call many things can be done through Slack. So how did we do that? So I think middleware, find the kind of middleware that helps you enrich within your ecosystem of apps that you use.

In terms of engagement, we use Workplace to conduct town halls, because interactions are highly encouraged especially when we are working so virtually. So people are chatting as the town hall is going on and there are thousands and thousands of people. They can like people's comments and start a thread and so on and so forth. And this is really a way that helps us operationalise a lot of our programs and initiatives effectively. We are lucky, really. We have very tech minded leaders and because everything takes resources, in terms of money to deploy, we are really lucky that we have such forward thinking leaders.

David Green: As someone who oversees HR and IT certainly for employees. What advice would you give to other HR leaders about implementing technology and people analytics in their companies?

Chin Yin Ong: I just want to first give confidence to HR leaders, to not worry about not understanding technology.

I have got a great team, honestly I lead the IT function but it is the leaders in the team who are really the people that are defining the roadmap. I come in as an executive sponsor most of the time and try to get them to think about how someone would experience that change in technology? Whether it is around two-factor access, whether it is about making our mobile apps. It is about saying, okay that sounds like the right tool but tell me how someone will experience that change.

David Green:  So putting the user think at the centre of your thinking really.

Chin Yin Ong: Definitely, exactly. You put it very elegantly. And so no matter what, just start small. Accept that there will be changes along the way. The often grand visions of “oh everything will work perfectly” and the silver bullets involved in terms of systems and team. The truth is that honestly tech and analytics can often be messy, data can be super messy and solutions are definitely not going to solve everything in your life. Focus on getting some things done and then improving it along the way. So for example, in people analytics, we learn to build the basics and foundations and we are starting on our people data warehouse, while solving reporting needs through tools and developing test cases at the same time. None of the efforts are perfect. The team is really, really small. Sometimes they have failed, but you know we keep pushing all fronts at the same time, knowing that we need all systems in place. We need reporting to be in place, we need a warehouse to be in place, we need to solve them for the right things so that we really deliver the value.

Second thing really is to find the people who are good bridges between tech and business, tech and people. In the tech world we have product managers. Find the right folks, they may not be in traditional HR roles right now, but bring them into the team so that they become effective translators of the needs from the tech side and the business side or the people side. And that it becomes much more seamless because if left on their own devices, tech folks will only talk tech and people folk will only talk people. And so find the bridges, because the bridges are very very important.

And the last thing for me is that so many of us are on the same path. We have met people like yourself, who are very willing to share. So seek the support. There is nothing embarrassing about it, trust me, every organisation has messy problems to solve.

David Green: Yes I would definitely agree with that. Some are more messy than others, as we said, but I think that is some great advice there.

Last couple of questions now. I think one really is to look at the HR field. So if we look towards the future what gives you the most confidence about the HR profession in its ability to deliver value? And then what gives you the most concern?

Chin Yin Ong: For me what is giving me the most confidence on the future role of HR is that the higher order needs and mandate is getting clearer and clearer to the whole HR community. The needs you previously articulated was we need to get people paid. We need to find a system where people can work smoothly. I think more and more leaders know that a lot of issues start with people issues and the need of the hour is very clear. So the need is getting articulated and the confidence for me is that more and more HR professionals are not running away from taking on that challenge. They are stepping up to the plate and saying I will learn data in order to meet those needs. And to me, it is like a second string to our industry where more and more people are finding that the opportunity is exciting enough for them to spend tons and tons of blood, sweat and tears on. I think the good thing is that the business leaders understand the importance of technology for people work to be done well as well. And therefore they are very ready to invest in tech. Its just that we need to show and market it and communicate the business cases, for example, in a way that they can accept. So I think that is why many of us call this the golden age of HR. I truly think that lets seize the opportunity and do that.

Biggest concerns. I think as we feel the energy to step up, I think we are equally sometimes limited by how we define ourselves. What is the role of HR? What is the product that we produce? So where the finance team are probably very clear about what their products are and the legal team are very clear about what their products are, I just hope that the HR team doesn't say, oh our product is the engagement score of the company. That cannot be our product.

So we need to think broader on how to solve complex people issues without being bounded by traditional team setups around whether it's HR, facilities, IT, security, internal comms, but we need to be customer and product centric so that we step up and we pull all of these skills together in order to tackle the people agenda.

We get siloed within our minds and say, Oh, we can't be doing this because internal comms are better at it. No, we need to be much better at communicating and marketing a lot of the things that we do. So I think the concern is about us not spending enough time defining our identity and our product.

David Green: Yes, I think what you are saying is actually there is an opportunity, but we probably need to take more of an outside in approach that we have taken in the past. Think about users, think about the business, think about customers and also customers being employees as well. I think we are at an interesting moment for all of us around the world with the crisis. This is a question that we are going to be asking all of our guests on this series of the show. Thinking about this shift towards virtual working.

What can HR leaders do to prepare their organisations for a future where we will likely see more virtual or hybrid working? You are probably already doing some of this, but just thinking that this is something that's going to be with us for some time.

Chin Yin Ong:  We often talk about leadership by walking around the office. We talk about having our ears on the ground. Well, this remote and hybrid working you will find that walking the office will not give you the full reality. Your ears on the ground, probably can’t hear as well or as accurately any more because people are not congregating together as much. So for me, HR leaders need to find a way to get the pulse, the sentiment and basically listen. How do we listen in a remote and hybrid working manner? I think that is one of the very very important things.

The other thing I think is balance. We see that remote working has its impact where people do not know how to switch off. They find themselves working longer hours and they find themselves having to do triple the times of meetings in order to align and collaborate with people.

You can't just rock up to someone and say “Hey, what do we do? How do you do that?” You need to set up meetings and then “oh thats a good idea, I need to talk to the other person about this idea” Then you have to set up another meeting. So that balance of all these meetings versus deep work, versus wellbeing and mental wellbeing, I think it is something around that is important and emerging that we need to work on.

For me, the final thing really is about social capital and culture in a virtual world. We just did an experiment, we did a workshop around pride and purpose. And we had an in-person version in one country where people could still come together and then we had a virtual version. Very similar type of work but the NPS score of the two sessions were different. They were both extremely good, 90% or more, but there is a marked difference between them. In the new world of Pokemon Go and Animal Crossing in that world how do you think about having virtual employees? So, whether it's an avatar, whether you have an enterprise version of Animal Crossing where people can badge other people, thank other people in that virtual world. And how do you think AI can help in doubling people's perspective, if in fact there are two people working at the same time. There is my physical self and then my virtual self could be going around the system or the knowledge systems within Grab and pulling insights that are relevant to me, without me having to read the 50 documents that are out there in the world. So that emerging idea of a virtual worker that is an extension of the physical worker is, okay this is Chin Yin crazy thinking, but I think it is a very interesting and something that really increases productivity. It has great impact, if you can make a different version of yourself, a virtual version of yourself, be productive at the same time as you are working.

David Green: So I’m going to ask you a question about the Grabbersauraus that is behind you.

Chin Yin Ong: So Grabbersauraus is not my virtual self, it is something that, you know in the tech world, after working for five years in a company you really feel like a dinosaur because you grow so fast. You go through so many things, it is almost as if you have gone through centuries, not just decades, not just years, but centuries as a company. And so this is a long service status that we give to Grabbers who have achieved five years or more working at Grab.

David Green: Well, many people have said that I am a dinosaur as well.

I really look forward to hopefully next time I am in Singapore, Chin Yin, that we can meet up again. But lastly, thank you for being a guest on the show. Can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you or follow you on social media?

Chin Yin Ong: Yes, I am active on LinkedIn and LinkedIn is probably my most professional self.

I am not on Twitter. Honestly, if anybody is on Slack, you can also Slack me inter company. And the last thing is create the enterprise system or the enterprise version of animal crossing and I will be the first one to sign up. You will see my avatar there trying to maybe do some gang chats or do a focus group whilst my physical self is attending a podcast.

David Green: Perfect, we will put your LinkedIn details in the publicity that we provide with this and Chin Yin it has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much. And thank you for introducing me to Grabbersauraus as well.

Chin Yin Ong: Thank you so much David. Have a good day.

David Green1 Comment