D&I activities in Jakarta Office involve three companies, namely SSRI, JPCO and PT Summit Niaga because we are located at the same premise in Summitmas Building in Jakarta.

One of our action plans for D&I in year 2022 is to encourage more greetings among us. Greetings including smiling are very powerful in building relationship between humans. It is said that smiling is contagious and when we smile the whole world smiles with you – yes, the old song is right.

With greetings and smiling, we can make more connections between people, between departments, between expatriates and national staff, between seniors and juniors, between bosses and subordinates, and even between the highest rank in the company and the lowest ones, all without prejudice, with just greetings.

Greetings and smiling have always been there in our culture, however sometimes we are reluctant to initiate greetings because we do not know the person well enough – maybe due to coming from different departments, never cooperated with each other, never conversed before, she/he is a newbie/temporary staff, or guests transiting at our offices, and so on. Other situations that may hinder us from giving greetings are we are busy with our own works, we are so preoccupied with our own thoughts that we are just walking past each other. Our body and mind are not focusing on our surroundings so we missed greetings and we missed the opportunity to communicate and establish relationships with other people. Finally, we missed lighting up each other’s day and that could lead to lesser sense of belonging to the company and lesser commitment in making the best contribution to the company.

That is why we chose this action plan and would like to remind ourselves to give more greetings and smiling.

Let’s start from ourselves today!
We hope the seeds will spread around and blossom as beautiful habits whenever/wherever/whoever we meet.

D&I Committee created banners and posters with fresh wordings and put them at several locations in our offices to raise awareness on our Greeting and Smiling campaign.

After having launched this programme for three months, we received positive feedback that people started to initiate greetings by saying “Hello”, “How’s your day?” etc, even to the Heads of other departments. Some guests from SC Tokyo were not hesitant anymore to start chatting with our staff. We saw good progress and would like it to continue.

Another D&I activity held in this October 2022 was the celebration of “Batik Day”.

Indonesian batik was added to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity list in 2009, and has been internationally recognised as an historical fabric of human civilisation. “Batik” is a dye-resist decorating technique that has been practised by people around the world since ancient times. The batiks are produced in several regions of Indonesia where each variant has its own characteristic. The process is traditionally performed on cotton or silk using a resist technique.  Other batik methods also exist, such as the splash method, the screen printing process, and the hand-painting method.

Every 2^nd of October is celebrated as “Batik Day” in Indonesia, so D&I Committee invited all members to wear Batik on Monday 3^rd October at our offices. People from all departments responded enthusiastically and they also put some Batik decorations at several spots, crafted lovingly by hands. It encourages inter-department and cross-department collaborations. D&I team prepared a Twibbon for taking pictures. Our General Affairs also organised a “catwalk” show just after the lunch-time. Although photoshoots and catwalk lasted only a few minutes, these activities made everybody happy and included, and feeling refreshed to work again with good vibesJ. That is the essence of Inclusion.

You can find the catwalk video here
or the happy faces below (including one from behind the scene).