The roundtable "Made in Việt Nam: New Workplace Initiatives for improved labour productivity and enhanced business efficiency post-COVID" held in Hà Nội on December 20. — Photo courtesy of Respect Việt Nam
Foreign-invested companies have been urged to adopt the new workplace initiative “Made in Việt Nam” to improve internal communication quality, labour productivity, and business efficiency post-pandemic, according to a recent roundtable held in Hà Nội.
NordCham and Respect Việt Nam held the roundtable "Made in Việt Nam: New Workplace Initiatives for improved labour productivity and enhanced business efficiency post-COVID" on December 20.
Businesses and employees in Việt Nam have been facing increasingly unpredictable changes in both social and economic terms, especially in the aftermath of the pandemic. While both have been making all efforts possible to operate normally, new ways of working and operating are needed that are leaner and more effective to create more resilient organisations, ready for any new challenges, including the economic downturn.
Đặng Thị Hải Hà, Founder & CEO of Respect Việt Nam, a regional organisational development consulting firm, said: "Businesses in both manufacturing and non-manufacturing have been facing a similar challenge: Employees and employers hardly understand each other despite their great efforts to communicate. This results in their struggles in creating their own agility and resilience necessary to prepare for and react to future disruptions.”
Respect Việt Nam encourages more companies to undertake changes by introducing new workplace initiatives to facilitate communication.
The first two workplace initiatives got special attention from both local and international manufacturers. They include digitalised Handbooks for the New Labour Code 2019, Internal Working Rules & Standards, and Sustainable Development in Free Trade Agreements.
Nguyễn Thuý Hằng, Partner from Baker & McKenzie, said: “Each multi-national corporation (MNC) has 20 to 30 different policies to adjust employee behaviour in every aspect of working lives. This creates a great challenge for both employees and managers to localize policies, to learn, live and apply them in a consistent way. Therefore, these initiatives are really meaningful to both employees and managers at work.”
Thuy Huynh, HRM, KONE, said: “The initiatives will be very helpful if they are used to localise MNCs’ wordy Codes of Conduct into trendy and fun infographics, which are particularly favourable to the young generation under 35 who occupies 85 per cent of the whole workforce.”
With regard to another initiative of translating employee grievances into real-time inputs and contributions to continuous improvement at work, Nguyễn Quốc Cường, CSR Manager, Tessellation Việt Nam, said: “Worker Grievance Handling is one of the CSR requirements by international buyers for their own suppliers in Việt Nam. Among 70 buyers, some require one supplier to have 14 hotlines to be installed to collect grievances. Not many suppliers can handle that much work.”
“Moreover, production workers want to contribute to continuous improvement, however, they hesitate to disclose their identity. Meanwhile, there is not enough personnel to handle all grievances. Therefore, the BLUE FORM initiative might help reduce the workloads, respond to workers’ concerns in a timely manner and encourage them to speak up anonymously until they completely trust the system and contribute concrete proposals. With regard to shared values, the initiative also helps businesses prioritize (4P) which Problem to be solved, which Procedure to be improved, which People skill/capacity to be built and which Policy to be enhanced,” Cường added.
To conclude the Roundtable, Đặng Thị Hải Hà from Respect Vietnam recommended businesses think lean and work smarter with their manpower by learning deeper about each other below the tip of the iceberg.
She also called for a proposal for experts to constructively contribute to and lengthen the list of “Made in Việt Nam” initiatives in due diligence and “beyond due” diligence efforts in global supply chains and value chains. — VNS