Razer, the famous gaming company that grew out of Singapore, has made a lot of acquisitions in the last few years. With acquisitions comes new technology, new business, and a lot of new people - enough that at one point five years ago, Razer's workforce doubled overnight.

"At that time, we didn't have a single HR platform," said April Wan, Razer's global head of people and organisation. "We were shopping around for ways to consolidate the employee data, and more importantly, to bring all these people together."

Speaking on the sidelines at Workday's Elevate Singapore event in May, she said that communicating the company's employee value proposition was a major consideration at the time, and whatever platform they implemented would have to not only streamline HR processes but also be a channel for messaging. 

And it would have to keep things smooth for employees throughout the entire rollout, she added - because employee experience would continue regardless of what was happening with the technology.

Change management is the key

In a fast-moving tech company, ability to change seems something that executives should be able to take for granted. But under the surface, it's not so easy.

"Ultimately, you are dealing with people, and generally, people do not welcome change," Wan said. "Even for a company like Razer that does welcome change, people need to understand why the change and what are the benefits of it. So when we put a new system in place, we spent a lot of effort to explain the why to people, and how having all the additional information [from the new platform] would help them."

It wasn't just Razer's own employees who needed convincing, either. The incoming employees from the company's acquisition had not used HR platforms previously, and were not familiar with the concept of having paperless, automated tools.

"My first challenge was getting the HR folks on board, because they would have to be the champions of the new system," Wan said. "Based on Razer's culture, we like to learn new thing and conquer things, and the HR team taking that on was the first step."

The second step was bringing stakeholders on board, from the C suite right up to individual employees. There wasn't quite universal acceptance at first - there were "noises", Wan said, but in general, she believes that the transition was supported because people had the agility to learn and change for the better.

Why the EVP is so important

For Razer, the employee value proposition is a competitive advantage, according to Wan. Her people and culture team puts a great deal of effort into communicating it from start to end of the employee life cycle and ensuring that managers also understand it well enough to do the same.

"We start right out from recruitment. When you join a company like Razer, you are probably someone who wants to do phenomenal work, as per our values: someone who wants to be a high achiever, who wants to do great work and build their own CV and skill sets."

This is also where the importance of employee experience comes in, and why it was considered so critical in implementing a new HR platform.

"Employee experience, to me, is a wide gamut of things," Wan said. "From an employee experience it is typically how they are being managed, the kind of responses they receive and how quickly and smoothly. We are very strong in managing communications and change. And one of the key things that we have done as we introduced the Workday platform was to incorporate what we call Manager 101."

"We went through the entire employee life cycle, incorporating the tech process, but also taking Razer's overarching culture and value proposition, what the company stands for, and translating that into our HR processes. So we trained the managers in that culture and values at the same time as we train them in the Workday system."

Five years down the road, the HR platform now includes generative AI, which Wan says has also helped with employee experience. "AI has helped the managers in terms of ensuring they have the information to actually manage, to communicate things clearly, and giving responses to the employee that are accurate and fast."

Employees, she explained, get a better experience when they are being responded to and given clear information. Engagement scores also go up when clarity is greater, and rewards and recognition can be more effectively tied back to the feedback that the platform collects.

"With this clarity, from an HR perspective, we are also able to create better training materials for subsequent managers."

Photo: Razer's people and culture team, from Razer's official LinkedIn.