OCBC Bank: Creating tomorrow's leaders

Summary

OCBC Bank's response to pandemic-era employee wellbeing went well beyond standard wellness messaging. The Singapore lender's MyWellness Fiesta, a large-scale interactive event, drew tens of thousands of employees into sessions covering stress management, home-office ergonomics, traditional medicine techniques, and confidential one-on-one support, designed to address mental, physical, and financial wellbeing in a single coordinated push.

OCBC's leadership development architecture, built through partnerships with a local university and a European business school, cultivates core competencies in mid-to-senior leaders and deepens strategic skills, spanning agility, sustainability, and digital transformation, for its most senior executives. The bank's premise is that leadership quality and employee wellbeing are inseparable: leaders who model resilience and adaptability set the tone for how teams experience work.

OCBC's broader employee engagement programme rounds out the picture, offering takeaways for HR specialists designing holistic wellbeing and leadership-development strategies of their own. The bank also sequences these interventions across a workforce spread over multiple Southeast Asian markets, each with distinct cultural expectations around wellbeing and hierarchy.

• OCBC Bank's headquarters, leadership, and 2020 financial snapshot
• Additional employee engagement initiatives beyond wellness and leadership programmes

What does a truly holistic approach to employee wellbeing look like when mental, physical, and financial health are treated as one problem?