Singapore Sun Venture: Fostering Diversity and Inclusivity in the Workplace amidst a Pandemic Period

The Firm received the Team of the Year accolade for Asset Management in the recently concluded Singapore Business Review Management Excellence Awards 2022.

Founded in 2006, Sun Venture is an investment firm that invests globally across different asset classes to achieve optimal long-term returns.

Its humble history as a real estate developer for 50 Scotts Road began with its visionary leader, Ricky Au, who founded and grew the business steadily over the years to become a multi-asset investment firm. However, the success of Sun Venture did not come without HR working in the trenches to transform the staid real estate developer into a bustling investment firm. Sun Venture attributes its deserving success to the HR team to attract, develop, and retain top talents in this competitive industry. To date, Sun Venture counts professionals from diverse backgrounds with an inclusive culture weaving investment and operational activities through its well-oiled processes to sustain its relevance to the industry.

Segueing into the details of what the HR team did is the crux of Sun Venture's transformation story. During the infamous COVID pandemic in 2020, Sun Venture embarked on its multi-asset investment strategy. This is the time when attracting top talents for investment, technology, finance, and compliance, to name a few, is pivotal but seemingly arduous. The strategy implementation did not do justice to a one-lady (Katherine Toh) HR team then, as the economy was in a tailspin, and talents were not in sight.

Be that as it may, the HR team took the adverse situation in its stride, mustered its courage, and grew its talent pool first. Once a full-fledged HR team was established, the team members examined relentlessly the confluence of factors that led to the talent crunch and devised a talent infrastructure framework to withstand the vagaries of human capital management.

The talent infrastructure framework is holistic and inclusive. The framework's holistic approach to talent engagement spans from process digitalisation to service empowerment, thereby modernising the engagement experience. The digital eco-system within the framework, empowers staff to engage HR through self-service applications, including recruitment, training, compensation and benefits, travel arrangements and other HR-related services through its cloud vendors.

Having transformed the engagement experience, the HR team moved on to address the heart of the matter — culture. Aligning with Sun Venture's mission to hold high standards in the industry, the HR team ensured that the talent infrastructure framework also promotes a culture where talents are high-performing, respectful and cohesive in the workplace. To achieve this, the HR team conceived programmes to advocate inclusivity and let staff collaborate and design firm-wide activities.

With diversity, inclusivity and modernisation, industry talents started recognising Sun Venture's transformation and acknowledging its value proposition. Over the past two years, new hires made up more than half of Sun Venture's people expansion, enabling the firm to attract talents to grow its assets and geographical presence in the UK, and recently in Australia.

The Sun Venture HR team is not resting on its laurels. Beyond investing, Sun Venture also engages the community to support social advancements in Singapore. The investment firm has supported the Singapore Art Museum, Assumption English School, All Saints Home, and Beyond Social Services. All these activities, with participation from staff, form part of Sun Venture's proprietary talent infrastructure framework.

With Sun Venture’s unwavering efforts in successfully promoting diversity, inclusivity and modernisation, and its subsidiaries waiting in the wings to replicate the success of the talent infrastructure framework, the work for the Sun Venture HR team is fully carved out. Therefore, the Team of the Year Award under the Asset Management category at the Singapore Business Review Management Excellence Awards 2022 finds its deserving winning team — the Sun Venture HR Team.

In its eighth year, the Singapore Business Review Management Excellence Awards 2022 honours the country's most outstanding business leaders, including trailblazing teams and individuals whose initiatives have resulted in substantial business gains for their companies.

The SBR Management Excellence Awards is presented by Singapore Business Review Magazine. To view the full list of winners, click here. If you want to join the 2023 awards programme and be acclaimed for your company's employee engagements and management initiatives, please contact Julie Anne Nuñez at [email protected].