Reporter: There is an opinion that Viettel’s current success comes from the group’s strategy of building high-quality human resources and using the best people. What do you think about it?
Maj. Gen. Le Dang Dung: It is true. Viettel’s real quality and efficiency are the clearest evidence of the role of the staff and the group’s arrangement and use of high-quality human resources. This is the most important factor that determines the success of the group. Viettel's standpoint is to bring into play the inner power and the role of the leaders in leading, detecting, training and fostering the successors to add to the all-level leaders and managers. We have boldly assigned and appointed young cadres to managerial positions and higher ones. Tasking them with difficult jobs is a way to find capable cadres for further training, fostering and challenging in reality.
Reporter: Finding talent is already difficult, but using and retaining them is really not easy. How have Viettel handled this?
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Viettel's leaders award outstanding teams. |
Maj. Gen. Le Dang Dung: Over the past more than three decades of development, Viettel has placed first the human resource-building strategy among other development strategies. The group has its own philosophy to educate, foster, and train leaders. It has also sped up the realization of its personnel training strategy, and launched a self-study, self-research, and self-creativeness movement in the group. The corporation has implemented a series of guidelines and policies to attract and retain talented people such as implementing a salary payment mechanism based on revenue minus pre-salary expenses and a salary fund mechanism based on added value to encourage its affiliated units and branches to ceaselessly create new values. Viettel is also applying a mechanism related to contract on researching end-products and increasing automation with information technology application to increase labor productivity.
In Viettel, a director of a group-level department always stays ready to take over the position as head of a department of a corporation, company, branch or vice versa. To attract talent, Viettel has applied a policy on salary for managers and experts. Specifically, an architect or a chief engineer with good expertise is paid a salary equivalent to that paid for a leader.
Reporter: It is a fact that talented people have very unique creativity. How has Viettel encouraged and protected dynamic and creative cadres for the common interest?
Maj. Gen. Le Dang Dung: Each cadre and employee of Viettel is really a creative and brave worker who is not afraid of making mistakes, difficulties, and dares to confront with failure and accept failure.
In fact, going from nothing to success and reaping continuous successes is an arduous process during which one surely encounters failures. If there are no specific failures in work to learn from and correct in time, it will lead to strategic mistakes and some of which could result in the death of an organization. Therefore, Viettel encourages all ideas and has the right view of failure. Leaders and commanders at all levels are even responsible for assisting, orienting their subordinates to correct their failure. With the most difficult one, the leaders and commanders must support their subordinates to deal with them comprehensively, so that they could grow up and develop.
Not everyone is equally smart and not everyone has the same abilities. Thus, Viettel encourages and protects those who nurture and realize their dreams and aspirations to master technology. The real life and outcomes of task implementation will be the most accurate answers for the questions what is right or wrong and what has been achieved.
Reporter: Viettel’s standpoint is that knowing how to use talented people, you must also know how to eliminate weak ones. It is a reality that just few units could do. What is Viettel’s experience?
Maj. Gen. Le Dang Dung: Viettel is consistent with the standpoint that "If you know how to use talented people, you must also know how to eliminate weak ones" if it does not want to be left behind. This is an indispensable requirement, an objective labor screening in the market economy. Additionally, in the Industry 4.0 age, this requirement becomes more urgent when many Viettel’s industrial fields, production and business activities have been automated to replace humans and requirements of employees’ skills are higher. That is why the screening of employees is absolutely mandatory and it requires each employee to improve themselves, go beyond their limits, and continuously expand their own space. Viettel only keeps those who have heart and will, do hard work and always strive to acquire more knowledge. To this end, Viettel sets standards at work, makes regular evaluation of its employees based on work performance in a democratic, public and transparent manner to screen its employees.
Reporter: In the face of strong impacts of the Industry 4.0, which approaches has Viettel developed to plan its human resources to build “global Viettel people” in the new era?
Maj. Gen. Le Dang Dung: With its comprehensive human resource strategy initiated and completed by generations of Viettel’s Party committees and leaders, the group now has a contingent of competent personnel capable of mastering the Industry 4.0. Apart from promoting training and self-training with the goal of "Viettel people have the ability to work globally," Viettel is especially interested in the policy of attracting talents.
In the past, Viettel considered problem-solving efficiency an important basis to select and foster talented people. In the current period, the best and the most important persons are those who know how to find a problem. In addition, in the past, doing the same things with others and doing better than others was competition. At present, competition is to do something different from others and more creative than others. The winners of those competitions will be recognized as the best ones.
Viettel now needs people who find the most challenging jobs, solve the most challenging issues to increase production and business efficiency. Viettel also needs the best people to find problems and untie the knots of the apparatus. Additionally, it needs the best people to achieve the set tasks at the soonest time, affirming the role of a leading military business, and making more contribution to national defense, security and Fatherland protection cause. These urgently require a certain number of human resources in which each person should be fully aware of and strive to become the best.
Rapid changes force us to think what our core values are, and what powers us today. Viettel can only be strong if it keeps the inner strength. "Foster, attract and retain talents" is the central factor and an important part that creates today Viettel’s strength. Viettel can just be excellent if excellent people work for it. Building global Viettel people is a key breakthrough that the group has defined in its 2020-2025 period. Viettel will contribute its small part to putting the Politburo's Conclusion No.14 into practice, arousing patriotism, national self-reliance and aspiration among Viettel’s each person to develop a prosperous and happy country and realize the goals set forth in the Resolution adopted at the 13th National Party Congress.
Reporter: Thank you very much!
Translated by Mai Huong