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Bee Kheng Tay is the President of Cisco Methods in Southeast Asia and is answerable for driving the networking merchandise big’s worthwhile development. She additionally leads its go-to-market operations throughout the ten nations within the area.
Tay brings greater than 20 years of expertise within the enterprise expertise trade throughout Asia-Pacific and Japan. She is a seasoned chief with a confirmed observe document in constructing revolutionary gross sales organisations.
Tay is captivated with encouraging ladies to pursue a profession in STEM. Exterior the world of IT, she has a eager curiosity in historical past, psychology, philosophy, and science.
On this candid interview, Tay talks about his private life, skilled life, and hobbies.
Excerpts:
How would you clarify what you do to a 5-year-old?
I work for a expertise firm that builds the web to attach folks, issues, and information to make the world a greater place. My crew helps companies in Southeast Asia use expertise to rework the best way we work and play, scale their organisations and provide higher companies to folks.
What has been the most important spotlight/problem of your profession to date?
Like many different ladies, balancing and navigating the calls for of my profession and parenthood is difficult. It took me a while, however I’ve realised that these totally different points of my life should not at odds with one another. As a substitute, they complement and enrich my life. Staying current and specializing in the duty at hand when the time requires it has been a worthwhile talent for me.
As soon as I overcame that psychological hurdle, I may accomplish many issues. A few of my profession highlights embrace turning into the primary feminine Managing Director for Cisco Singapore and Brunei and the primary feminine President for Cisco ASEAN, all whereas bringing my two youngsters up as a single mom. In and out of doors of labor, I proceed to champion ladies in tech and advocate for a hybrid work mannequin that empowers workers to work from wherever and juggle their totally different roles at residence and at work.
How do you envision the subsequent 5 years of your profession?
The tech trade holds great potential to assist bridge the digital divide and energy sustainable innovation. Cisco’s function is to energy an inclusive future for all. With the alternatives round us, I genuinely consider that expertise is one trade that performs a vital function in bridging the social divide on the planet. This won’t occur in a single day, and I need to drive this momentum in ASEAN as I develop my profession in IT with Cisco over the subsequent few years.
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I look ahead to working with my crew to make sure that folks and communities within the area can entry the knowledge they want seamlessly and securely and revel in significant digital experiences powered by revolutionary, intuitive, and automatic expertise.
What are a few of your favorite work instruments?
I like that collaboration, like many different applied sciences, isn’t only a enterprise for us. It helps us energy our whole organisation.
Particularly in a hybrid regular, it’s comprehensible that workers really feel distant from not seeing their crew and colleagues within the workplace day by day. Nevertheless, with collaboration instruments like Webex, we are able to reimagine the worker expertise so it’s participating and constant for our folks, regardless of the place they join.
We’ve designed Webex to stage the enjoying discipline for all individuals and improve their engagement with options similar to noise cancellation and voice enhancement expertise, in addition to real-time transcriptions and translations.
These not solely facilitate and improve communication but additionally be certain that the assembly expertise is inclusive for everybody no matter working areas and circumstances.
For us, inclusivity is greater than a bodily location. It helps your work type, whether or not you’re an introvert or extrovert, digital native or occasional person, frontline employee, or distant data employee. One in all my favorite functionalities on Webex is Individuals Insights, which offers insights into how workers spend their time and who they have interaction with most frequently.
The insights can solely be seen by the worker and nobody else, and this helps them uncover blind spots in how they work to empower them to remain extra engaged, be higher teammates, cut back potential fatigue and improve well-being. This has helped me customise interactions with colleagues and plan my day to get probably the most out of labor.
What’s one thing about you or your job that may shock us?
Regardless of my years in expertise, I’ve at all times gravitated towards the humanities. I’m a voracious reader, and my favorite authors are Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Through the years, I’ve additionally developed an appreciation for artwork in its totally different varieties. I’m not an artwork connoisseur, however I get pleasure from gathering and displaying work and artwork items in my residence. Sarcastically, regardless of my inclination towards the humanities, my favorite mannequin is the Commonplace Mannequin of Particles Physics, which describes the essential constructing blocks of all recognized matter. I’m filled with contradictions!
Do you like WFH or WFO or hybrid?
Cisco has at all times been an enormous proponent of hybrid work and is right here to remain. As a frontrunner, I’ve seen how hybrid work has helped obtain the fullest potential of workers by empowering them to be their finest selves with the pliability and comfort to work from wherever and in a method that finest works for them.
We’re seeing enhancements in general worker efficiency, work-life stability, and well-being for workers not simply in Cisco however throughout organisations in Singapore and globally.
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64 per cent of regional workers have shared that hybrid work has improved their productiveness. Because of this, they’re taking extra time for themselves, and 80 per cent say that their whole well-being throughout varied points of social, emotional, bodily, monetary, and psychological has improved.
However challenges stay in fostering an inclusive surroundings and a way of belonging for each worker. This essentially requires a rethink of assorted elements that underpin profitable hybrid work, together with inclusive tradition, worker expertise, and well-being enabled by expertise and led by belief and empathetic management.
As leaders, we have to incorporate empathy, energetic listening, flexibility, and steady studying in how we lead and have interaction with folks. For instance, Cisco conducts Quarterly Engagement Pulses to guage and spark conversations about how every worker feels about their crew, the work surroundings, and themselves.
All workers participate in weekly check-ins with their managers that permit workers to have a targeted dialog about their work sentiments, priorities, and strengths. This consists of what they cherished and loathed doing and the assist they want from their managers every week.
What would you inform your youthful self?
I might inform my youthful self that every little thing is feasible. You simply must need it arduous sufficient, be passionate sufficient, and set targets to information you consciously and unconsciously throughout your journey. However don’t be too arduous on your self and benefit from the journey. Past that, it’s about believing in your self and recognising that difficult instances too will move.
Are you able to describe your self in three phrases?
No concern, no guilt, no remorse.
What are you probably to be doing if not working?
I like to learn. I’m very thinking about particle physics, psychology, and philosophy. In my free time, I learn non-fiction books on these subjects.
Earlier this yr, I set myself a goal to learn the highest 100 books of all time on the TheGreatestBooks.org website.
What are you presently studying/listening to/watching?
I’m presently within the “Nice English Author” part. The e book I’m presently studying is Nice Expectations, written by Charles Dickens. I’m studying extra about William Shakespeare and politics, which extends to watching lectures, studying novels, and watching performs on Macbeth, Hamlet, Henry V, Julius Caesar, Tempest, Service provider of Venice, and Twelfth Evening.
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