What's made them Finalists

From challenging herself to take the lead on new projects to facilitating employee engagement initiatives and actively giving back to the community through mentorship programmes, Urmila has played an integral role in the organisation's sales transformation success. 

Taking on Leadership 

Urmila started her career with BT as a graduate and has since challenged herself to take on multiple new challenges across different functions and territories. Most recently, in 2022, Urmila stepped up to lead a transformation program to establish a new sales organisation across AMEA, and continued to serve as their business manager. Urmila collaborated with the regional leadership team to define the Go To Market strategy, establish an ecosystem of partners, and build the executional teams to deliver on BT's strategic priorities. More importantly, Urmila’s strive for excellence meant she was on the look out for new ways to grow BT’s business in the region. Key achievements include the launch of a demand generation program which accelerated customer engagement, development of new partnerships, and execution of sales engagement initiatives to create the best sales team in BT and in the industry.

Inspiring Future Leaders through Mentorship

Urmila strongly believes in paying it forward through mentorship. She mentors youths from the Institute of Technical Education to inspire the next generation of female leaders through career guidance and key life skill workshops. In BT, she is a sponsor and manager for the graduate program, aimed at nurturing graduates across the AMEA region into future ready sales talent for BT. Urmila is also often seen reverse mentoring other colleagues in areas such as DEI and digital skills.

Community Building in Singapore 

Community Building in Singapore: Urmila’s proudest achievement at YWLC has been the launch of the peer mentorship program. This 9-month program was close to 2 years in the making and addressed a huge interest amongst members to find their tribe by forming deep meaningful relationships with their peers and having crucial conversations on work and life. Over the past year, Urmila recruited and led a team of six to design, implement and launch the program. The program started with an initial expectation of 20 participants for the first run, but received three times more the number of applications, which is testament to how many women need and want mentorship and a community to grow along with. The program is currently on-going and participants have rated the program 4.15 (out of 5) in terms of usefulness and enjoyability. This program will soon be converted into a flagship offering for YWLC. Urmila’s contributions to YWLC also led to her being voted into the 8th Executive Committee as the Member Engagement Director.

Achievements 

Sales Transformation Success: The past year was challenging – with the set-up of a new sales organisation, a weaker macroeconomic outlook and the COVID-19 pandemic, there were numerous challenges to overcome, but BT in AMEA had shown concrete business growth. Some of Urmila’s personal contributions included: executing a demand generation program which led to a 21% increase in customer engagement, strengthening relationships with partners such as Equinix and Forescout to find new avenues into customers, and creating a sense of camaraderie amongst the sales colleagues across AMEA which was reflected through an engagement score of 4.88 (out of 5) for the bi-monthly townhall sessions and an overall engagement score of 78%.

Colleague Engagement: The work of the Site Champions is best proven through the colleague engagement metrics for the Singapore office: 81% agreed that their wellbeing is valued and supported (up from 77% in 2022), 84% agreed that people from different backgrounds can be themselves and thrive (up from 81% in 2022), and 73% will recommend BT as a great place to work (up from 66% in 2022). These remarkable improvements were due to the engagement activities organised by the Site Champions. Over the past 12-months, there has been 5 cultural awareness activities, an IWD celebration, 1 year-end party, and 3 charity events where $30,787 SGD was raised for multiple charity organisations in Singapore. To top it off, Urmila was nominated and awarded the “Rising Star of the Year” award at the end of 2022 in recognition of her leadership and efforts within the Singapore community.