Morning routine

One of my morning routines is climb this stairs up to fifth floor where I work. The building is 5-storey in Lutong, suburb of Miri, Sarawak. I hv done this without fail everyday since the dawn of 2013 when I am not outside Miri.

Ya Allah, grant me health and wealth so that I could do and give more.

Brand new generation in Sarawak

Had opportunity to interview few candidates in Feb 2013 to fill in various entry level positions. Candidates were all fresh graduates. All ladies, unfortunately. One candidate really impressed me. She was cool but confident. Her English was 100% Malaysian, no slang, normal and natural. Fair complexion like Local foochow Chinese, but she was not. Her paper qualification also impressive. A beauty with brain indeed and should be an asset to the Company if developed properly by HR and superior alike.

Lesson learnt:

Interracial marriage does wonder and must be promoted to create new breed of Muslim. If you cannot develop further or change their attitude or mindset, you can alter their DNA by interracial marriage.

In Sarawak it is the norm.

Death in Labuan

15/2/2013:

I heard the news at about 5 in the afternoon my staff Ali via sms, who got it from his counterpart in Petronas Methanol Labuan. Then I quickly texted and whatsapped close friends who knew him. Untimely death. A committed man to work whom I knew since I joined HR fraternity at Ethylene plant in Kerteh in Dec 2004. Just met him last December in KK Sabah when we were SI panel together interviewing some candidates from Sabah Forestery meant for methanol plant in Labuan. He told me about being alone in Labuan when the family were in KK. He told me about his empty house in Sierra KK which had been ransacked and looted and his plan to rebuild. What an ambitious man with strong drive.

Salam terakhir buat En Hardy Mohd. Semoga ALLAH SWT merahmati tuan di sana.

Death at 46

When En Azli Paat died at the age 46 last week, a force inside me insisted that I reevaluate my priorities in my life. He was just 46, with 10 kids. The fact that he appeared on TV3 last 2 weeks to give comments on government's rebate scheme for youth to own a smartphone, then to be dead - forgive my words - two weeks later, sent a sharp shrivel down my spine. Not many characters I met left such an impact. He said first question to ask is not what brand of mobile good for me, but what is is for. He was a simple man, but with a complex mission, I could sense it, from the way he explained to audience. Yes with drive and belief.    I think I can relate well to him, because we fight the same cause.

To him, may Allah bless you. To those left behind including yours truly, your time will come. What have you prepared?

Testing bloggeroid app

Today is sunday 10 feb 2013, where all my chinese friends having fun with their family.

Dragging left foot

22 Jan 2013:

another working day in miri, sarawak. izan - still stranded with left leg in casting - complained about how difficult it is to move about on ground floor. so i said -  honey life is hard. Really hard. The harder it is, the better in reward.

Bigger hard disk and memory for my old desktop PC

It was a very reliable Compaq Presario desktop PC which followed me to Yangon, Myanmar and later Miri, Sarawak. With only 80GB SATA hard disk and 512MB DDR memory, it is under capacity now. It was high end spec and strong then. But now it is nothing, even compared with Atom-powered Toshiba NB520 which came with 2GB RAM and 320GB space.
So, on one trip to KL. I dropped by at Malaysia's famous IT market, owned by Mr Low Yatt, to shop for 500GB SATA internal hard disk (RM205), SATA cable (RM5).
Days before I went to GM Klang and managed to get 2 pieces of 512MB RAM (RM45 each).
Came back home and DIY the installation, and alhamdulillah, it works! My PC hardware knowledge still sound.  Now my old faithful is much faster with upgraded components, i.e. 2.5GB DDR (2 X 256MB plus 2 X 512MB) and 580 GB hard disk (original 80GB plus new 500GB). The brain is still the same -- AMD Athlon 64 X2 2.0Ghz. No complaint.

Using performance appraisal system as a catch-up plan

This story happened in 2008. This company operates in an unionized work environment, which means our plant operators and technicians are members of the Company-approved employee union. We had Collective Agreement that spells out term and condition for union members. This CA is revised every 3 years and the latest revision was implemented last year in July.

Among new item added is new salary adjustment. Somehow during the latest revision issue surfaced as not all operators benefited from the adjustment. Some were considered not eligible. Salary people in HQ said anomalies were inevitable in big population and the approach adopted is the option with less adverse impact. And this resulted in some junior operators left out. They came compaining
to the management and CEO promised he would do something. CEO asked HR to look into the matter. I said salary is one of the policymatters managed by the HQ not by the branch HR manager. What the affected staff could do is work extra hard to catch up with their colleagues. Working harder normally translates into better performance rating. Better rating in turn translates into higher annual increment. HR and CEO met the affected staff during breakfast meeting. We explained the process and calculation and everything we wanted them to know. They bought in. Subsequent HR examined their performance ratings and push one notch higher.

Lesson learnts: Anomalies do happen in any salary revision implementation. Use less damaging approach. Arrange for engagement session. Explain. Don't apologize.

Resigning at 24

This is premature, too me.

While most fresh graduates are so excited to join the labor market after 5 years of burning midnight oil, this one chap strikes different cord. He tendered 24-hour resignation notice just after joining the company in Feb 2012. Reason given is to be closer with family in Melaka. The pressure from the wife and his in-laws seemed so intense that it finally broke down his determination and perhaps sanity to decide wisely. Yes living separately due to work location is not a cuppa tea for every married man or woman. Highest degree of understanding and trust are prerequisites.
In this case, there is an option, Plan  B. Be a weekend husband until your transfer is approved. But he has different plan. Wish him all the best.

Rezeki masing-masing.

Resigning at 48

A cool and highly experienced senior technician who was supposed to be transfered to Basra to support our Iraq operation next month or so made a bold decision. He tendered resignation to everybody's surprise.

Resignation is for the brave and bold only. Making a decision to resign is not a cup of tea. Especially resigning from a well-paid job. Or from an established and reputable company, like this company. Many I met said they had to think over and over and over again before coming to a decision to quit. Quit checklist so lenghty. WHo will pay the bills? All sorts of bills -- water, eletricity, gas, ASTRO, Celcom broadband, cukai pintu, manitenance fees if you are staying in condominium. All sorts of monthly committments -- house rent, home 1 installment, home 2 installment, car 1 installment, car 2 installment, children school fees, childrens pocket money, airtime reloads for all the mobiles you and kids have. School bus fares, petrol money for car 1, petrol money for car 2, money for old mother back home, maid salary. Eat-out expenses, yes once in a while kids and their mom crave for some kinda western meals at McD or KFC or pizza hut. All those are not cheap and are in different league as nasi lemak or mee kolok. They cost a bomb for a penniless. Being used to travel on now-everyone-can-fly airline, you need to continue the tradition. Sedekah to masjid, haji, umrah. All those activities need to be revisited once you resign from the company.

You see that the quit checklist is pretty long, thats why I said tendering resignation notice is for the bold only.  It is certainly a collective decision, should be supported by a spouse, more so if you are the sole breadwinner in the family. In this organization where there is no pension scheme, only KWSP savings is your goldmine, quitting anytime makes no difference. Quitting means you simply lose income from the company you are quitting from.  But quitting closer to retirement age has an advantage. You can withdraw from KWSP to do things you want to do and enjoy doing it. 

Pushing factors

Another resignation. This time a senior executive in procurement department or in this organization, we call it supply chain management.  7 years in the company. Quite an experience. Given a couple more years, he could become an effective manager. But he wanted to leave. What can HR do? Technically nothing. It is employee's right, enshrined in Labor Laws.

Another exit meeting for HR people. The intent is not to persuade him to stay, but to make sure others do not follow him. One staff leaves, one more headache for a recruiter. To find a replacement, with  equivalent experience, is an uphill task, a time consuming process.

To get to the bottom, probing must be structured, questions aked one after another. Some will hide the actual reasons, so as not to hurt current superiors or company. Or not to be seen greedy especially when monetary compensation is concerned. However reasons of staff leaving could be summarized into 2: pushing factor or pulling factor.

As for this procurement guy, he was rather straightforward, blaming superiors for not keeping promises. He talked like he is a caring family man but his the problem is his family is not in Miri. So the reason for leaving is to be closer with the family --- personal reason, I'd say.
His story started in October 2011. He was told he is too new in Miri to be considered for transfer to KL. He began to accept the fact and activated Plan B ---  bring the family to Sarawak. He worked hard to transfer the teacher wife to Miri area to the extent of seeking recommendation from Deputy Prime Minister Office in Putraja, via his brother's UMNO political link. The wife transfer was about to materialize when suddenly the superior promised him that he could go back to KL in March 2012 due to department downsizing. With this good news, he dropped everything about bringing his wife to Miri, putting DPM recommendation letter into a dustbin. He felt guilty to everybody who helped him -- his brother and above all to DPM. He waited for March. Came January, the superior dropped a bombshell on him. He was not releasable for reasons that downsized structure still needed experienced personnel like him to stabilize the operation. He got frustrated so much. All his plans came down to ashes. You know what happened next --  this Plan C.

I could see his points.

On the exit interview form, I summarized what I heard and ticked the PUSHING FACTOR.

Regret? Yes I had a few.

5/5/ 2012@Miri:

Self-Discipline is key to success. A ladder to go up. a key to unlock all sort of doors.so  said wise men of earlier times. and contemporary ones. we pass the same message to our young ones, students at school, staff at office.

And i am one of those who needs a reminder, a constant one, because I sometimes lose sight of the destination. So I will start writing again, at least 100 words a day. God help me. 

Double parking

Dec 2011:
The above situation is called 'double parking' in our organization. It is not a good HR practises anywhere. But somehow we have to have it. A young female process engineer came sobbing into the HR Manager Room. So innocent. She is worried that in the same position in her dept org chart, there is another name alongside with hers. It took some time to explain why it happened.

Why it happened? It could either be:
1. The incumbent in the box was away from the dept doing other things on assignment basis. In this case he is still in the box. At the same time the manager wants somebody to do his/her job. Someone comes into the position, thus 2 names.
2. The second name just borrow the box while waiting for another approved box or waiting for the new structure approved.
3. To secure the competent staff, even though no position available.

Her case was no. 2. The way forward is to relocate the other name to another empty box (read: position) in other dept. ANd we did that. The challenge is you must find other vacant box and once you found it, you must seek the approval from dept head to relocate the body (read: staff) there. After all, mobility of staff is a willing buyer willing seller business.


There are also cases of triplr parking.

Salary adjustment based on working experience

In this organization (Sarawak Operation), contract staff are employed to assist in our operations. They are aplenty making up of about 12% of total population. Their actual employers are the manpower service companies (or contractors) with whom the organization establishes the service contracts. Some contract staff such as foreign expatriates are hired directly with the organization, because of the specific skills they possess.

Finance department is one of the depts most dependant on contract staff. This is about one of their account clerks. The original work order stated that we needed an account clerk with 5-year working experience. The contractor managed to find a person meeting the spec, initially. Somehow mid-contract she resigned and they could not find equivalent replacement quickly. Since line dept (Finance) required the body immediately, they compromised the criteria and took in the whoever replacement clerk being offered by the contractor at the original work order value.
What we did is reduce her salary by reducing the work order value awarded to her company, upon the beginning of the new fixed-term contract.
The line manager has met her to alert her of the new contract to be offered. She took it positively.

HR Manager is a member of many steering committees.

HR Manager is a management position. He is a member of management committee. There are many management level committees --- or better known as steering committee -- in this organization, one for each critical function in the Company. Apart from Management Committee (MC), there are HR Planning committee, tender committee, Health and Safety committee, and others.

HR Manager is member to all such committees. Attending meetings is the order of the day especially when the CEO is in town.

Today’s tender committee meeting, we discussed about whether or not to award this one particular bid to this one particular bidder. The bid was about the supply vessel to support the shutdown of our platform off Andaman Sea. I was no technical guy but I could contribute to the meeting by offering views from business or HR perspectives. I was IT Manager last time. I was HR Manager from downstream last time. When I was transferred to upstream, I need to learn a lot about upstream and E&P business. The management expects me to ‘run’ immediately at the new job. By the virtue of being a member of this committee member, I manage to reduce the learning curve.

Lesson Learnt:

Learning about the business is made simpler if you join many high level meetings. No matter how technical the subject matter is, at this level, it all boils down to business decision.

Networking dinner in Yangon

December 2008


Yangon was not a bad place after all. Not what like Americans and Westerners had described in their one-sided media or Lonely Planet guide book who maintained a chapter on whether or not to visit Myanmar. Those were politically-motivated rubbish.

Halal food is important criteria for principle-hardened individual like me. Halal food outlets are many here, if not abundant, in this city of 6 millions.

Today I got a call HR Manager from PTTEP, our partner in Yetagun project in Myanmar. He wanted to meet me over dinner to get to know the new HR Manager from a partner company. I responded in affirmative as I was also at the receiving end. I was new in this country, in this city and a need to establish network with other multinational companies operating in Myanmar was of paramount importance.

We set the date on the phone. Followed up later with the venue via email. We met a week after that at Mai Thai Restaurant, a halal outlet, on Kaba Aye Pagoda Road. Mr Sarapong was accompanied by his Finance Manager, a lady in early 40’s who spent 3 years in Jakarta before her assignment in Yangon Office. She talked in Bahasa Indonesia quite fluently. I was accompanied by my colleague from INSTEP who happened to be in Yangon on business matter on the same day.

They ordered food before we arrived – prawn spring rolls, fried fish in chili, tomyam goong --- yes their national dishes – bean sprouts and of course rice. We talked about so many things that night. Over Thai dishes in a Thai restaurant, the topic of main interest was not surprisingly on Thais and Thailand . Thais just got the new Prime Minister Mr Abishit after existing PM was driven out of office by yellow-shirted Thaksin followers. They did not bank high hope either on this Obama-like young prime minister, for the same reason Obama was initially rejected by Democrat Hillary Clinton’s supporters.

I managed to ask on how PTTEP outsourced their non-core functions. Not much info I got as PTTEP is relatively newer oil and gas player in Myanmar compared to my organization. Their track record was not proven as yet.

After the dinner, I walked up the hill to my apartment from the restaurant. At 9pm, Kaba Aye Pagoda Road was busy as usual. And dusty as usual.

Lesson Learnt:

You may have some agenda in mind during networking session but remember the other party also has theirs. It is more appropriate to let the host complete their agenda first. Don’t worry you will have enough time to cover yours.

Myanmar - land of pious people

To say Myanmar is a land of gold is half correct. It is also a land of human resource, abundant in supply, indeed. You can see them in their lungyis ("sarong") everywhere -- at the airport, on the streets, in offices, on the open pickups, etc. The people are polite and soft-spoken, humble and pious. They welcome foreigners as if welcoming a saviour to take them to a better future.

People are still the best asset for this military-run country. Seen in this photo are the young and ambitious who just graduated from University of Yangon. They are ready to enter Myanmar labor market. (Dec 2008)

Their ladies are not exceptional. Ladies make good HR personnel, everywhere, in Malaysia or overseas, because of their caring and loving and maternal instinct. That statement is correct even in Myanmar. I have four lady executives under me in Yangon, taking charge of four core HR functions respectively namely HR Planning, HR Development, Training and Employee Relations.
These are local Burmese ladies with fairly high degree of commitment to work. Three of them are working moms. One is still single. They are my staff and I have to get to know them in order to understand them. They are important to me during performance appraisal as they provide me the feedbacks on me to my superior. I will describe each and every one of them in more details in future posting, God willing.

But I must say pronouncing and thereafter remembering their names is a struggle for me.

Yangon, here I come

The next entries on this blog will be about my experience as HR Manager assigned at Yangon Office, Myanmar.

Myanmar is also known as the Golden Land, probably because of golds are everywhere in every pagodas in this low-key country.

You may want to refer to this travelogue www.bumisepi.com for info on Myanmar or in particular Yangon. I noted that most entries in this website are in Bahasa Melayu. The webmaster told me it is his policy to uphold the national language of Malaysia in his website. I could not agree more. Well, get somebody to translate them to BM. They are some cool stuff there.

Moving on

November 2008

In this organization at the corporate level, subsidiaries are clustered together by the product types or simply known as ‘business’. At the current subsidiary I am currently attached which is under petrochemical business, we produced vinyl chloride, a specialty chemical used to produce PVC pipes and other end-user polymer products.

I was not here long, only for about 8 months. The company didn’t make tons of money like my previous OPU. The morale of the staff was low. The management tried hard including bending some HR rules and throwing away parties to please staff so that they don’t leave the company and go to the middle east. A small feat by any rate was celebrated in a grand scale.

I left the company on mid October 2008 after my application for an international posting was accepted, not without much hurdles.

It is still a transfer within the parent company, not really a resignation, unlike those lured away by the middle east syndrome who has to tender resignation.

By mid November 2008 I was entrusted to take charge of the HR Dept of the Exploration and Production (E&P) outfit, based in Yangon, Myanmar, after my predecessor there completed his term and left. This was my first experience working overseas. And I look forward to it. Moving to upstream must be fun.

Lesson learnt:
Never stay too long in the same position. Once complacency creeps in, creativity dies. As a rule of thumb, more than 6 years is considered too long. Discuss with your HR to find out the the available opportunity which suits your talent and experience. Discuss with your boss also. You must initiate this discussion, not waiting for your ever-busy HR people.

Celebrating an accomplishment

October 2008

In this organization, having financial figures in red is a norm. Year in and year out the management and staff are used to it. So having one small profitable year is welcomed by everybody in a big way. It is not about incompetency but more about the higher feedstock price, escalating production cost and low selling price. But I know the management could do more than what they are doing now rather than blaming the market alone. They should have looked into getting rid of stocks quickly and improving plants reliability. Removing blood clots in business world could enhance cashflow in a way.

We threw a dinner party to all staff and their family members to celebrate a successful plant shutdown and since it fell in Syawal, there was nothing wrong in including Raya celebration as well – 2 in 1. It saved cost. Really.

The event was a huge success with plenty of foods and shows from staff, expatriates and management team alike. No highly-paid performers or celebrity was invited. Only home-grown talents among technicians and operators on their offday. One of the process technician got the grand prize lucky draw --- i.e a plasma TV. The climax of the night was a performance by the MC members. Yes, we sang our newly-created company song to a tune of P Ramli’s Madu 3 song.

Lesson Learnt:
If you are running a losing company, not even breaking even, celebration is even more important in order to keep staff’s morale high. Cut cost by having internal performance – by department. You’ll be surprised at what they could actually do. But the food must be good – place order from the nearby hotel. Never cut cost on food.