Smiti: Hi, everyone. And welcome to yet another episode of Inspiring Leaders & Leadership by AdvantageClub.ai. My name is Smiti. I’m the founder of AdvantageClub.ai and your host for this podcast. Today we have another amazing person joining us all the way from Manila in the middle of a crazy storm, by the way. We have Darwin Rivers, who is the VP HR and global HR operations at Inspiro Philippines. Welcome Darwin, and thank you so much for joining us today.

Darwin: Thank you, Smiti for the invitation. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good day to all of you guys who are watching and listening to this podcast. Again, my name is Darwin Rivers, and I’m also the founder and president of the Philippines HR Group. This is an organization or a community of more than 300,000 HR and HR-aligned professionals here in the Philippines.

Smiti: Yes, and I’m part of that group too. And that’s amazing. So, Darwin has been working pretty much behind the curtains, running the group, and I think he’s been doing a fabulous job at it. That’s also something we’ll talk about today, in addition to his current official roles and responsibilities as leading HR for Inspiro. So Darwin, to start with, of course, we know a lot about you, but would love to let the audience know as well. So can you start a little bit with your background, what you do, your journey of reaching where you are today?

Darwin: Sure. I have more than 20-plus years of working experience. Most of it is in the BPO shared services industry. I started my career in operations. I started my career as an agent, moved my way to becoming a coach, up to an operations supervisory level. And then decided that, I’ve been doing a lot of stuff that is connected to HR. I have been interviewing candidates for my team. I’ve been training team members. I’ve been overseeing their performance management, handling case management or whatnot. It was natural for me, plus the fact that my educational background is in behavioral science, it was natural for me to gravitate and move from operations to human resources.

And, as an human resource professional, I had worked in different industries. Although most of it is in the BPO shared services IT industries, but, I’ve also been a consultant, working with, mostly startup companies and mostly, global companies who would like to have entities here or set up entities here in the Philippines. Also small and medium enterprises, in various industries like food and beverage, retail, leisure, and a whole lot of other industries. I’m fortunate enough that I was able to start a career in HR where I really fell in love and met a lot of wonderful people who have provided me with the support and the guidance in growing my career. I’m just giving back to the community of whatever little success that I have had or opportunities that I have had in the past through the Philippines HR Group.

Smiti: I think you’re being modest here, considering that the Philippines HR Group has over 300,000 members. We’d love to hear your story behind that. Everyone is so busy in their corporate jobs, especially when you’re leading HR in a large organization, it’s even harder and you barely get time for anything else. So tell us the story behind starting this and scaling this up to 300,000 members. How did you do that?

Darwin: Well, it started as an online community. 20-plus years ago, it started as a Yahoo group. And then, there was also a Jobs Street community where different HR professionals from across industries are exchanging ideas and whatnot. The problem with that platform is that it was closed down by Jobs Street. The Yahoo groups also became obsolete. And, it was more of exchanges of emails, and whatnot. And during my time, a lot of HR professionals, when I was starting my career, a lot of HR professionals were really in the position of a sink-and-swim, experience. And I’m saying this because it was during my generation where training is very costly. And very limited opportunities for talent development were available. Even if you graduate from a human resource or industrial psychology background, and you start your career in HR, it is very hard for you to marry the theoretical and the actual work. I’ve seen a lot of my colleagues that are really having challenges and difficulties.

When Facebook created Facebook Groups, I started a small community among my network of friends. And mostly these are the people who are friends throughout the industry, colleagues, previous team members that were part of my team when I started my career in HR.

So imagine these are the people who I’ve worked with since the early 2000s who, up to now, after 20 years, have been with me, supporting the mission, vision of the online community. And, it was really more of a private community. And, we decided to go public in 2014 to encourage some more people in discussion, in exchanges of best practices, in sharing our experiences and knowledge, and also updates about, labor, about what are the particular trainings, or certifications that we can, learn and whatnot. We created this group, the Philippines HR Group as an avenue. It’s a safe space for people who would like to share their experience, share their knowledge, get information and ideas and valuable inputs from people who are seasoned HR. And it was formed initially with less than 200 people. We’ve never advertised, but it grew from 200 to 5,000 to 20,000. Also, by 2017, we’ve decided to register it as, a non-profit, non-stock organization, because it was during that time that we stepped up our game where not only do we have an online platform, an online community, but we’ve also started providing, free face-to-face or public seminars, public workshops that are either free or very cost-effective. That actually changed the game in terms of how vendors are charging people for training and development or certifications, and whatnot.

During my time, whenever you wanted to attend a training program, a workshop or any certification programs, you had to spend thousands and thousands of pesos. But because of what we did, we’ve changed the game, and we’ve started providing very cost-effective offerings of certifications, training programs, public seminars, and most of them are actually free because we have friends who are sponsoring our public events. That’s where we started, and that’s how we grew into this very dynamic, active, and growing community still.

Smiti: And I think that is knowledge sharing in its true sense because you’re not doing it as a non-profit, you’re not doing it to make money out of it. You really want to create a community of people who can learn from knowledge sharing with each other. It’s a truly noble cause for the Philippine HR community as well.

Darwin: Agree. And also it drives a sense of voluntarism. We never have someone who we pay to whenever we have events. There are really a lot of volunteers and when I say volunteers, these are not only entry level people, these are HR directors, HR managers who would like to be part of our program, who would be okay to be ushers, to be part of registration, to be at the background, or even speakers. I mean, these are the people who have the sense of passion in the things that they do. They have passion in HR, and they would like to give back to the community. I think that’s where every one of us is thriving. The reason why we’re thriving is because each and every one of us recognizes that by working together, we are able to do more and we are able to affect more and inspire more people.

Smiti: Talking about inspiration, who has been inspiring you to do so many things at the same time? Like, who has been your biggest supporter or your biggest mentor over the course of your career?

Darwin: Well, as I said, my mom, who has at an early age taught me that education is the only treasure that she can leave me, and that I should value each and every opportunity for me to learn and upscale myself. That’s the reason why, I think all of the opportunities for me to attend different learning programs, certifications and whatnot, I value learning. It was also through learning that I’m able to network with more people and learn from people.

But in terms of mentors, I’ve worked with leaders who have been my direct and indirect mentors. When I say direct mentors, these are the people who I’ve worked with, not particularly only in HR but also in other departments, these are the people who inspire me because of how they think, how they work, and how they manage teams. It’s their thought process that made me appreciate them as a leader, how they resolve issues, and how they’re able to manage difficult and challenging situations.

So those are my mentors. And I also have mentors, who I never had the opportunity to work with, but I see them as mentors because I read their books, I attend their seminars, webinars. These are local and international, seasoned leaders, not only in HR but also as a people leader that I see as a mentor even if they don’t know you personally. But, because I read the kind of work that they do, I like the way they think, the way they do things, how they created a journey not only for themself but for the people who believe and follow them.

Smiti: Awesome. And let’s also talk a little bit about your current role. So obviously as the VP HR, one of the core responsibilities which you would have is to drive an amazing employee experience, better employee engagement. How have you innovated engagement or recognition programs in Inspiro for your employees?

Darwin: Not only Inspiro but in all of the other companies, organizations that I’ve been with, recognition is part of employee engagement. And, I think as a people leader, we should not only look into employee engagement per se, but also be reminded of the employee experience. Because an employee can be highly engaged or let me rephrase that. An employee can be very satisfied at work, but it does not mean that that employee is highly engaged. Do you agree? An employee can be highly engaged, but it doesn’t mean that they are. They see their organizations, they don’t see themselves always as a part of that organization because they don’t…

Smiti: No belongingness,

Darwin: Yes, they don’t belong. They aren’t able to look into the experience. What’s my experience as an employee? So I think employee engagement and employee experience goes hand in hand for you to be successful in your strategy for the whole employee engagement strategy that you will be driving. I always believe that employee engagement and employee experience, looking at those two things are the formula for successful organizations. So employee engagement plus employee experience equals productivity, equals growth.

Smiti: Absolutely agree with you. And, that also brings me to the last question of today’s podcast. Employee needs are forever changing now and therefore to drive a better employee experience it’s becoming harder and harder for leaders to address these needs. What would be your advice for the HR leaders of tomorrow?

Darwin: I would put it as more of an engagement enigma for a lot of companies. I mean, a lot of companies have been spending billions of dollars in terms of creating different engagement programs or engagement activities or whatnot. They have great intentions. I just feel that a lot of us may have the wrong focus because there’s no employee experience.

And then, the lack of simple but effective tools. When I say effective and simple tools, this can be your daily routine of your one-on-ones, your daily routine of really engaging employees, or having a system in place that would be able to regularly and periodically recognize employees for going above and beyond, or for doing the best work that they can do in the organization. That’s it for me. Simple but effective tools, processes and procedures that really focus not only on engagement, not only on rewards and recognitions, but entirely on the experience of employees.

Smiti: Yeah. The key takeaway from Darwin today is that, one, an employee can be a great performer but that does not necessarily mean that they’re engaged. And, you know, for a lot of organizations they’re facing that engagement enigma today where there’s lack of focus, where there’s complicated processes. Instead you just need simple, effective tools and also just trying to create a better connection with the employees. And I think that’s the golden rule to driving employee experience.

With that, this is the end of our podcast. And thank you so much, Darwin, for joining us today. We’re truly elated to have you here and keep inspiring all these amazing HRs in the groups you’ve created and, all the best for adding more and more people in your Philippines HR group in the future.

Darwin: Thank you, Smiti, for the opportunity to be part of your podcast and the opportunity to have a venue to share my experience and also whatever little things that I can give or share to the community of people who would be watching this podcast. Thank you very much.