Corporate Culture
Significance
BPP believes that threating employees well, making them feel part of the organization and being satisfied with their work, including providing them opportunities for fair career growth as well as welcoming their opinions for further improvement, will make the personnel work happily. This will also be a driving force to help them improve their work continuously, reduce the turnover rate, and retain talents with the organization. In addition, employee engagement is significantly involved with competitive advantages, growth, stability, corporate sustainability, and value creation for all groups of stakeholders.
Management Approach
BPP is focusing on continuously strengthening the ‘Banpu Heart’ corporate culture, consisting of three core values: Passionate, Innovative, and Committed. 10 key behaviors have been defined as following so that employees can practice tangibly.
BPP has used Banpu Group’s Employee Relations Policy as a practice guideline for building good relationships with its employees. Employee engagement consists of 3 principles, including:
- Say: Employees say about BPP with positive attitude to both internal and external people.
- Stay: Employees work happily and want to stay with the organization in the future.
- Strive: Employees have deep bonds with the organization, striving to develop BPP to be better.
The key drivers engaging employees with the organizations include:
- Agility is comprised of collaboration and coordination, customer focus, decision making, differences and unity, infrastructure and resources.
- Engaging Leadership includes leadership of senior executives and supervisors.
- Talent Focus is associated with corporate reputation, career growth and advancement, learning and development, performance management, remuneration management systems, welfares, rewards and prides, and human resources management.
- The Basics are relevant to work and work-life balance as well as working safety.
- The Work consists of work characteristics.
Annually, BPP in collaboration with external consulting firms conducted the employee engagement survey. The survey analysis results and recommendations from employees will be later used for developing the engagement action plans at the organizational and departmental levels. The aim is to create employee engagement continually and report the progress to the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Committee and management every quarter.
Performance
- The employee engagement scores were 65% for Thailand and 95% for China.
- The scores of Banpu Heart were 86% for Thailand and 91% for China.
Key Activities and Projects
The core part of BPP’s human resource management is to continually build a strong corporate culture to build upon the diversified power of Banpu Group’s business ecosystem in creating innovation and sustainable business growth. Banpu Heart is a corporate culture to which all executives and employees of Banpu Group, including BPP, have adhered as a principle for their operations. The Banpu Heart consists of 3 core values: Passionate, Innovative and Committed.
BPP has applied Banpu Heart into a materialized practice in every process involved with employees in various countries, in which it has operated business, including new employees’ recruitment, orientation, performance evaluation, job promotion, an employee annual survey regarding corporate culture and organizational engagement. Moreover, BPP has organized a variety of activities to encourage employees to understand and apply the 10 Key Behaviors to their daily work, being able to use these behaviors to drive the business goals of BPP and Banpu Group.
In 2024, BPP adjusted a format of organizing activities to support the expansion of its business portfolio, which is more diversified. It focused on creating a sense of ownership and giving employees a freedom to create various activities according to the differences of each country and employee’s age range in order to support the design and expression of corporate culture in a form mostly appropriate to the context of each location; For example, learning and creating shared/mutual understanding, promoting the corporate culture through the real lives of diverse employees under the project called The Stories of Banpu People: Voices of Dedication – a documentary film telling the stories of work, life and various experiences of employees in every operating country. The aim was to make every employee get to know each other better, including being able to connect the 10 Key Behaviors with the personal and business goals of BPP and Banpu Group through the expression of various viewpoints and opinions reflecting the Banpu Heart corporate culture in the same direction. To promote understanding and apply these core shared values to their works flexibly, the creative activities were also implemented for employees to participate in and take actions as well as to link the core shared values with their personal values. The activities conducted included:
- Close communication between management and employees was conducted to connect business strategies suitable for all employee’s various roles and responsibilities leading to the same goal, while making every department in all operating countries see the same picture under the Energy Symphonics strategy.
- Strengthening Banpu Change Leaders (BCLs), a group of employees who volunteer to drive the corporate culture, by elevating the BCLs network to become a truly global ecosystem. The activities conducted included the Culture Camp, which aimed to develop essential skills for BCLs so as to be the cultural leaders and to design activities to create the corporate culture; Listening to the heart activity was initiated to create understanding about the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and combine the diversities into strengths as well as to understand the art of happiness and working of the brain from The Brain Secrets of Change to create a team with high potential; The Co-design Employee Engagement Workshop, which pulled BCLs to design and organize this workshop both in Thailand and abroad, such as Japan; the Role Model activity of which a short movie was filmed and produced by the BCL team itself, with an aim to convey the nature of Banpu employees who have the same “Banpu Heart” through different duties and works.
- Supporting employees to truly own the corporate culture through the Bottom-up Culture Building approach, by listening to employee opinions and using the employee engagement data to analyze activities suitable for the diversity of employees in each country; For example, the activities based on employees’ interests included making chocolate for people about whom they care; making inhalers for the elderly at nursing homes; weaving carpets by using a yarn gun to make ideas come true; making perfume to find your identity and dare to experiment; organizing external activities based on employee feedbacks.
- Activities to promote the employee’s sustainable quality of life have been continuously organized for the 4th consecutive year through the Boost Me Up Series program with special activities carried out throughout the year. Under this program, 17 activities were designed to take care of all 3 important aspects: mental health, physical health, and financial health. BPP believes that when employees are happy and have a work-life balance, good and creative energy will be passed on to co-workers and fully extended to the society.
Banpu Group is committed to continuously creating a culture of Innovation by promoting collaborative works between the departments, exchanging knowledge and being open to idea differences. The aim is to build an environment conducive to emerging innovations, including encouraging employees to dare to take initiatives, experiments and develop innovations.
The UnBox iDeas program is an activity designed to cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset and agile working. In 2024, the program has been improved by extending the idea incubation period up to 4 months and adding the Upskill Workshop aimed at enhancing potential on creative thinking and innovation development, such as UX Research, Power Platform, Generative AI and Storytelling, etc.
In the previous year, a total of 48 people participated in this project, divided into 24 thinkers & doers and 14 experts. The ideas on 6 topics with the potential to be extended into real practices were initiated. Participating employees developed new ideas through experimentation and learning from the doing process, being ready to receive suggestions to improve the ideas even further.
BPP also supports various resources, such as budgets for project experimentation and development to increase the chances of bringing ideas to a tangible success. In addition, BPP puts great emphasis on developing personnel with specific expertise to step into the role of Subject Matter Experts and internal facilitators, which will help them transfer knowledge, enhance skills, and create a culture of shared/mutual learning to strengthen the organization’s capability to grow steadily and sustainably.
Thailand Innovation Awards and Banpu Global Innovation Awards are the important platform having been running continuously for more than 10 years. They have provided employees with the opportunity to show their potential and creativity to executives and colleagues both domestically and across the world. Presenting new ideas and innovation projects consistent with corporate goals not only does it help strengthen the exchange of knowledge but also opens opportunities to apply digital technology to increase work efficiency even further.
Banpu Group has created the Innovation Community to support sustainable development and innovation by establishing the Banpu Innovation Group, which plays a pivotal role in setting the direction and guidelines for innovation development in the organization; For example, specifying the project evaluation criteria and creating a compensation system to encourage employees to participate in inventing and developing new innovations. The Banpu Innovation Group also helps support the implementation of creative ideas into the actual work processes, being ready to connect these ideas with the corporate strategy to create sustainable changes and values for both the organization and society.
In 2024, 31 innovation projects from various operating countries were submitted to the 2024 Banpu Global Innovation Awards, divided into 21 projects having already been implemented and another 10 ideas being in the research and experimentation stage. Examples of innovative projects include the Digital Twins, which is the digital technology application used in the power plants in China. Digital Twins raise the production control level at the power plants by processing data and making the boiler operation and heating pipe network the most efficient. This innovation helps improve production quality, increase safety, reduce carbon emissions, and enhance the power plant’s operation efficiency sustainably.
In September 2024, BPP organized the activity to strengthen the organization engagement under the concept of Team Collaboration for Greater Success, with a focus on joint-working as a team, developing work plan under certain constraints. The lecturer will summarize the lessons learned from implementing each activity to make participants aware that everyone’s cooperation is the key success factor to make the event successful. Moreover, the activity called Empathy in Action | Managing Differences at Work was organized by the iSTRONG Department to provide mental health counseling in both work and personal matters to employees, including providing knowledge and understanding about people differences in each age range. As BPP is a diverse organization in terms of ages, genders and ethnicities, embracing diversity is important in helping employees be happy at work. It also promotes the human rights principles.
In addition, the event satisfactory survey was conducted, receiving 95% scores from participants. This demonstrates a great engagement from BPP employees. Moreover, employees also have a chance to share things they will take into account in their future work.
