A mingling of cultures
When three successful businesses come together
When you’re combining colours, whether additive like when mixing light or subtractive like when mixing paint, the result is a new colour. It’s the same with culture.
Where it all started
SEEK Asia was formed when the SEEK Group acquired and then merged together two of the leading job board businesses in Southeast Asia, JobStreet.com and jobsDB.
Currently, we operate under these two leading brands as the customers prefer to source for opportunities and talents with us. And it comes to no surprise, as both of our brands have built this loyalty for almost two decades. But as both JobStreet.com and jobsDB are newly acquired, this means that previously our businesses were rivals.
When rivals turn into business partners
Both businesses operated as competitors for many years. But because of this, both JobStreet.com and jobsDB have much in common, even though on the surface they may seem at polar opposites.
There is the opportunity for us to consolidate how we create value and increase our impact such that we can serve our customers even better. To achieve this, internally, we needed to shift from operating as two separate businesses to operating as one dynamic business which supports multiple brands. We are now two and a half years into this journey.
The challenge
For us to be truly SEEK Asia, a single united team, means integrating three businesses (and more as we have made acquisitions since) to form something new together. Integrating businesses means integrating culture — the values, the purpose, the strategy, and ways of working.
I see these many dimensions like different colours on our palette. Something that we can use and mix together to create the desired effect. It’s also a great opportunity to introduce new ideas and together find our new identity and culture.
My journey at SEEK Asia as a CIO
Everyone at SEEK Asia will have had a different experience when it comes to establishing the identity of our company. But here, I would like to share some of the journey that’s been had over the past two years from my perspective, the lens of a not-so-typical Chief Information Officer (or so I am told).
I started around eight months after SEEK Asia was formed and as a CIO my responsibilities span across our Product Delivery teams (where I partner with our Chief Product Officer to co-lead this part of the organisation), Infrastructure & Operations for all the services SEEK Asia provides and also the IT needs for each of our offices.
That means, on any given day I may be talking about anything from our company strategy, our purpose & values, new products & services, the reliability & performance of our services, systems architecture, governance & risk, customer service & service management, policies on the management of IT peripherals, roll-out of new finance and HR systems, Intranets & Office software suites, collaboration tools… I don’t ever get a chance to be bored :)
My role in the context of the newly formed business was to help shape the Team, Delivery and Service cultures that would deliver the next generation of Products, Services & Innovation to be competitive.
The SEEK Asia culture is still a newly forming culture with ingredients from the three successful businesses which are SEEK, jobsDB and JobStreet.com and is currently in its formative years.
Like many progressive businesses of today, SEEK Asia is shifting away from traditional approaches to ways of working which support aligning around customer value.
These shifts guide the company to the state that we want to be while bridging the gap between the elements that we’ve brought from 3 different businesses and the new elements that we’ve been introduced to.
A prelude to the next post
As you can see we have a rich palette from which to dab our brushes and together create the collective self-portrait of our future selves. In my next post I will share some examples of the sort of changes and evolution we have gone through and the SEEK Asia culture that is forming.
