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Honed by a background of discipline and service in MINDEF that began in 1985, Yeo Ee Beng, pondered how that had been as much a contributing factor in his current career in Human Resources. By 1994, he decided he needed to do a review of where his life was going. The military had become his second home by then. But after nine and a half years he thought about where his life should take him. He yearned to experience also the commercial world. He felt the call to learn new things, get out into a world of new challenges, understand more about other career options and be in sync with a totally different working environment. He decided to target a career in human resources. |
Changi International Airport Services (CIAS) opened the door for him to this brave new world of human resources. He was appointed as a HR Assistant and also entrusted with the special task of overseeing industrial safety matters too. He did the switch from the military to a civilian occupation by taking a pay-cut – a necessity he felt to enable him to put his foot through the door of opportunity. It marked a commitment he was totally ready to make to enter a new world and be open to new challenges. Yeo put his bold foot forward and has never looked back since.
Today, Yeo is with Singapore Cancer Society. It is a career position far, far removed from a working life in the military. It is also another shade away from the commercial bustle of his first doorway into the HR world through CIAS. At Cancer Society, now closing on to his 3rd month, he contends that he has found the balance that he had been looking for. “Here my pull factor is the passion to serve in the social service sector and being able to contribute my knowledge and expertise for a worthy cause”, said Yeo. He is part of the staff strength of 35 people and heads the HR Department.
He is glad that he has been entrusted with greater responsibilities. He is involved in council matters, where policies, initiatives, projects and important decisions are made. He also oversees administrative matters for the Society. He is elated that he has the chance to participate in the development and management of corporate responsibility of the Society. In this position he has more loaded on his plate in terms of a diversity of responsibilities, instead of doing just a pure HR function. He says enthusiastically, “These diverse responsibilities lead me to several avenues of new challenges and I have begun discovering capabilities that I have that had been untapped before”.
How then has his journey in the HR world been like from the time the door opened for him at CIAS?
CIAS is a huge organization. Then it already had staff strength of 2500 people. The HR department had a head count of 40 staff. And Yeo’s role was cut out for him between HR functions and industrial safety matters. He learnt about the significance of communications skills to be an effective HR officer while at CIAS. His job involved training as well as liaisons with the Union. He learnt all about building rapport with the Union as well as other organizations within the airport circle. The stint at CIAS provided him the foundations for the passion to be in the HR industry. It afforded Yeo a great beginner’s learning experience.
“But it was not easy going adapting to civilian working life” Yeo reminded. It was a difficult adjustment period for him. “I wished to quit after 3 months”, he mused. It was his immediate boss at CIAS who encouraged him to stay. Compared to working in the military service, here at CIAS he was exposed to a business environment that was totally alien to him. “All ‘roads’, all actions, all decisions, were bottom-line driven”, recollected Yeo. He had to learn quickly about cost consciousness in everything that he did. “But I am glad I survived and moved on”, he added.
Surviving calls into play other personal aspects of an individual – the coping mechanisms! Yeo finds his stress busters through playing football and burning his running shoes through kilometeres of jogging. Cable TV follows as a favourite past time and he also takes that annual holiday with so far having checked out Japan, Australia, Thailand and Malaysia. And in between work and stress breaks, Yeo made very good diligent effort at graduating with a Bachelor of Commerce degree, with a HR major in 2002.
In 2003, he joined Mun Siong Enginnering Pte Ltd, a local firm in the oil and gas sector and located at Tuas. Yeo was quickly immersed in the full spectrum of HR work, as at CIAS he was tasked only with part of the entire spectrum, due to his involvement then in industrial safety matters too. He had a staff-strength of 300 to administer. Due to the nature of the oil and gas industry, he found himself handling recruitment matters much of the time. The hiring involved overseas recruitment programmes as workers came from Indian and Bangladesh mainly. The challenge was to hire the right people with the right skills.
“As these were foreigners who were being recruited, communication was another area that I had to grapple with and one that I could only do through interpreters”, he recalled. He also had to keep finding ways to match the company’s business growth process with the limitations imposed by the labour quota on foreign workers per company. His hurdles did not end there! The company’s business involved specialized machine that were imported from Canada and Australia. Getting visas for machine specialists from his suppliers in Canada and Australia to handle problems with the machines always proved to be an onerous task.
After 2 years in the oil and gas industry, Yeo opted for a senior position at Hamilton Sundstrand. This is where he feels learnt the most about HR and especially about Quality Culture. Immersing into the way of corporate culture and life at Hamilton Sundstrand through the philosophy of A.C.E. (developed by a Japanese quality guru) allowed Yeo to complete his HR training on-the-job (i.e. philosophies such as A.C.E. = Achieving Competitive Excellence in (UTC) = Six Sigma in (GE) = a way of life in the daily work of employees in the areas of HR, procurement, manufacturing, business process centre, and so on). The HQ, United Technologies Corporation has 8 business units as follows: Hamilton Sundstrand, Otis, Carrier, Pratt & Whitney, Research Centre, Sikorsky, UTC Fire & Security and UTC Power. And from making this full circle in his journey towards HR learning, Yeo found his way to the Singapore Cancer Society.
Describing his learning experiences and what that one thing he upholds most about the HR profession, Yeo was quick to quote from the book "Winning" by Mr Jack Welch, the retired Chairman and CEO of General Electric, where he alluded that "the head of human resources at every company should be at least as important as the CFO". But Yeo was also quick to point out that not everyone could be a HR Practitioner; you should have the following attributes such as patience & humility and more importantly one should possess the "Human Touch" just like having the "Midas Touch" on top of the relevant qualifications & experience.
In other words, “The HR practitioner should be a ‘Diplomat’ rather than a ‘Politician’. Moving forward, the HR Practitioner should be a Business Partner rather that the “Traditional Administrator”, he rounded up confidently.
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