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"When you shift from building for your people to building with them, you don't just get better outcomes. You get genuine ownership and people who are invested in driving real changes," Dorcas Fong, Director (Human Resources), shares.
For the Central Provident Fund Board (CPF Board), employee experience cannot be designed solely through meeting-room discussions, policies, or project plans. It needs to be continually informed by the people experiencing work every day.
Over the past year, the HR team at CPF Board has taken a more deliberate approach to employee listening – not only through formal channels, but also through conversations, feedback platforms, and everyday interactions officers have with the Board. The result has been a richer and more nuanced understanding of how people experience work.
This has shifted the organisation’s focus from asking what experience it wants to create, to examining how its intentions are experienced by officers. In turn, employee experience has become less about launching programmes and more about continuous learning, adapting, and improving.
This approach earned CPF Board the gold award for ‘Best Employee Advocacy Programme’ at the Employee Experience Awards 2026 - Singapore.
Following the recognition, HRO speaks with Dorcas Fong, Director (Human Resources), Central Provident Fund Board, about turning employee feedback into action, building collective responsibility for EX, and making career development a more meaningful part of everyday work.
Q Tell us about the biggest insight or lesson that influenced your EX approach this past year.
One of the biggest insights for me was that employee experience cannot be designed solely from meeting rooms, policies or project plans. It needs to be continually informed by the people living it.
Over the past year, we invested more deliberately in employee listening, not just through formal channels but also through conversations, feedback platforms and the everyday interactions officers have with the Board. What emerged was a richer and often more nuanced understanding of how people experience work.
This shifted our thinking from asking, “What experience are we trying to create?” to “How is our intent actually being experienced?” That distinction may sound subtle, but it changed how we approached many of our initiatives. Employee experience became less about launching programmes and more about continuously learning, adapting and improving.
Q How did you bring leaders, managers, and employees together to support the execution and success of the initiative?
The Team CPF spirit guided us throughout the journey: employee experience is too important to be owned by HR alone.
Many factors shape how work feels day today – leadership behaviours, technology, work design, communications, workplace facilities and team culture. Recognising this, we created opportunities for different stakeholders to contribute to both understanding and improving the employee experience.
One example was the Employee Experience Council, chaired by our Deputy CEO, with key leadership representation of functions which directly influence the lived experience of work, collectively reviewing insights, discussing priorities and shaping solutions. We also invested time in helping leaders and managers understand employee feedback, not as a report card, but as an opportunity to strengthen trust and effectiveness. Employee experience became less of an HR initiative and more of an organisational conversation.
“The best employee experiences aren't crafted in isolation - they're shaped by the people living them.”
When you shift from building for your people to building with them, you don't just get better outcomes. You get genuine ownership and people who are invested in driving real changes.
Q What challenge behind the scenes tested your team the most, and what did it teach you about building stronger employee experience programmes?
Perhaps the most challenging aspect was not designing programmes, but creating the conditions for honest dialogue and meaningful follow-through.
Collecting feedback is relatively straightforward. Building enough psychological safety for people to share openly – and then demonstrating that their input matters – is considerably harder.
We learned that employee listening creates expectations. Once people take the time to share their views, organisations need to be transparent about what can be acted upon, what cannot, and why.
This taught us that credibility is built not only through consistent follow-through, but also through open and clear communication. Employees are far more understanding of constraints than we sometimes assume when we explain what can be done, what cannot, and why. What matters is that they feel heard, know where things stand, and see a genuine commitment to learning and improving over time. It is this combination of transparency and consistency, more than any single initiative, that earns the trust that makes everything else possible.
Q As you reflect on the journey, what this recognition at the Employee Experience Awards 2026 mean to you and your team?
This recognition belongs to the many colleagues across HR and beyond who believed employee experience deserved deliberate attention. I am proud that it reflects not one grand initiative, but small, thoughtful improvements made consistently over time. At the Central Provident Fund Board, empowering Singaporeans begins with empowering our people – giving them the space to grow, shape their careers, and do work that truly matters.
The award is therefore less a celebration of a single programme and more an affirmation of a mindset – that how people experience work matters. For our team, it is an encouragement to keep learning, experimenting and partnering with others to build a workplace where officers can do meaningful work and continue growing.
Q Finally, as employee expectations continue to evolve, what is one area of EX you believe HR teams will need to rethink in the year ahead?
I believe the next step in strengthening employee experience is to make career development a more visible and meaningful part of everyday work. Employees increasingly expect greater clarity on how they can grow, more personalised support, and regular conversations that help them connect their strengths and aspirations with real opportunities. This is becoming even more important as time, organisational skills, technology and workforce needs evolve rapidly.
At CPFB, we have started looking deeply at doing this better, by taking a more deliberate and integrated approach to career development - strengthening leadership messaging, providing clearer expectations on what good looks like, equipping supervisors with better conversation skills to have meaningful development conversations, and embedding career clarity into officers’ everyday experiences.
But career development is only one part of the next phase of our employee experience journey. We are also looking further upstream at the strategic choices that shape officers’ experience of work – how roles and skills will evolve, how work should be organised, and how we build, buy or borrow the capabilities CPFB will need as careers lengthen, resourcing tightens and AI reshapes tasks. By bringing workforce planning, organisation design, capability development, career pathways and performance management together as one system, we want to create clearer and more varied ways for officers to grow and contribute. AI can make this experience more personalised by helping officers understand their strengths and development areas, and by surfacing relevant learning, pathways and opportunities based on their competencies and aspirations - while meaningful conversations and human judgement remain central.
“Technology can make these insights timelier and more accessible, but it should always complement the meaningful conversations and human judgement that remain central to career development.”
We believe that when people have the clarity, support, and space to shape their own careers, they are better placed to do work that truly matters.
Read more interviews on why organisations have won trophies for their HR practices - head over to our Winning Secrets section!
Photos / Provided
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