An active career of a HR professional
As a very hands-on and active individual, Veronica Teo continues her long and illustrious career in HR today, 41 years after entering the industry. Being a people-oriented person, Veronica loves to meet and interact with people and obtains a deep sense of satisfaction from resolving problems for her staff. It is hence no wonder that Veronica has embraced her job with much enthusiasm and satisfaction while steadily advancing in her HR career over the years.
With her humble beginnings as a payroll clerk at Tay Koh Yat Bus Subsidiary Company, Veronica worked her way up. She later accumulated over 22 solid years of experience working at Mobil Oil Singapore in the various HR Sector viz-a-viz Industrial Relations where she was exposed to collective negotiations with the Union. Besides that, she also gained experience in working with compensation and benefits area, recruitment and other interesting hands on experience in expatriate management, for example, helping expatriates look for accommodation and settling into life in Singapore, managing their payroll both local and home country.
22 years later, even though past the prime time of her youth, she still possessed much of her energy and vitality and brought it to the Singapore regional office of Praxair, an MNC dealing with the production of industrial gases. She started the entire office and HR setup from scratch together with just her boss. After 10 years in the Company, she was tasked with taking some overseas exposure in Kuching, where she once again set up new office premises and began recruitment. On the 12th year of her service, she was redesignated to the position of Business Support Manager whereby she took care of the warehouse operations of the company.
Veronica has spent most of her career as a HR practitioner in American MNCs. She revealed that she has found these companies to be very generous. When Praxair was about to relocate its regional office to Shanghai, and she decided not to make the sudden move, she received a golden handshake for her years of valuable service and contribution. It is evident that Veronica has certainly come a long way in her career from her humble beginnings at a small bus company. Today, she has succeeded in becoming a competent and reliable HR professional.
After taking a short break from work, Veronica found that her early ‘retirement’ left her with too much time to idle away and decided to be gainfully employed again. Upon seeing a job advertisement, she decided to give it a try and got a job at Far East Flora as the Assistant HR Manager.
Today, Veronica is pleased to be part of an organisation that employs a diverse workforce of different nationalities and age group. As she admits, she belongs to the ‘older’ generation of workforce herself and is glad that Far East Flora has given her an opportunity to work. It has also been a caring employer to her. She shares that her bosses would voice their concern that she might overstrain herself when she tries to help out in carrying heavy loads.
Looking ahead, Veronica is inspired to give her all for Far East Flora. To make Far East Flora an even better place to work in, she hopes to introduce more structures and frameworks and further cultivate the organisation culture of open communication and trust. Amidst a tightening job market, it becomes increasingly important to design appropriate total reward packages and to promote work-life balance.To aspiring HR professionals, Veronica’s advice is to be empathetic and to keep an open listening ear without jumping to conclusions, so as to be fair in judgment. She likes to take a soft approach in suggesting solutions but is firm at the same time. Ultimately, as an HR professional, one should possess strong emotional intelligence which will help in tackling different situations in a work environment.
By Eva Tsang
