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2024 end of year review

Winnie had another year of high performance in 2024, making an outstanding contribution to the Copy and Editorial, and broader GPWS and Content teams.

Her high standards, leadership, teamwork and versatility are a huge asset to the team. It’s always reassuring to the leadership team when she’s on a project because they know she’ll get it done in the best way possible.

There was fluctuating demand during 2024 but whether it was quiet or busy, she always found ways to deliver value. One example was her work on refining and improving the Wunderman briefs for Singapore, which will enable new global design blueprint journeys to be rolled out more seamlessly in 2025.

Her capacity to deliver high volumes of high-quality work is second to none. But it’s also the way she deliver it – her managing difficult stakeholders on key projects such as Privé and SG Life Insurance was impressive. She prioritised quality, user-focused copy and content but remained pragmatic with an eye on delivery and getting it done. This is an important balance to strike. She also raised her concerns when she felt that stakeholders were behaving inappropriately. Again, this is important as we shouldn’t stand for rude or disrespectful behaviour.

It also highlights the importance of good communication – ideally speaking directly with stakeholders so we all understand one another’s perspectives, each of our roles and goals.

She was pivotal to the delivery of high-profile product and proposition launches, such as Premier 3.0 and Live+. Again, it was reassuring to have her on these projects and it was great to see her add energy and personality to the copy, particularly for Live+. We should continue to showcase these examples within the team – it’s great to highlight our creativity, while working within the parameters of our standards and guidelines.

Her communication within the team is always strong – helping to bring the ASP team together and leading by example – while providing her manager with regular updates and raising issues where needed. She showed good judgement in this department. We appreciate her flagging instances where work from team members fell below our standards, which allowed us to work with those team members to improve.

The Hong Kong social scene continues to be lively – and she’s again played a key role in organising volunteering and other people committee events, which always look like good fun. We know how much people enjoy them – they certainly enhance people’s experience of work and sense of belonging within the team.

She also maintained a focus on continuous improvement – surfacing and documenting ideas to increase efficiency. The feedback she received throughout the year was fantastic to read, highlighting the way in which she enhanced the reputation of our team.
– Matthew J Woodington, Head of Editorial and Copy at HSBC

2023 end of year review

Winnie had another excellent year in 2023, maintaining the high standards she’d set in previous years. She brings great energy and enthusiasm to the role and it’s obvious how well-liked and respected she is by the rest of the team, particularly in Hong Kong.

The volume of recognition points she’s racked up speaks for itself. She could’ve outbid all other suitors for HSBC Canada with the points she had banked!

When the CX Squad has been quiet, she’s consistently found other ways to help the rest of the team, add value and gain new experiences. This proactivity is a great strength. And whenever she has had bigger projects to tackle, she’s delivered high quality work at pace – including reviewing and improving the Wunderman briefs.

Her focus on quality copy and user experience is also clear – and this remains fundamental top the job. She’s a role model for continuous improvement, with plenty of ideas for improving our processes and ways of working, whether it’s through Confluence shortcuts or finding more efficient ways of handling agency content. Not to mention, her admirable focus on personal development, in and out of work.

She raises issues when she sees them and flags anything that she thinks is not right or could be improved upon, even if it means having difficult conversations. For example, flagging issues with the quality of copy from a fellow team member can help that person improve and make sure we protect the user experience.

There are countless examples of her proactivity, but I’m grateful for her leadership in Hong Kong, bringing the team together for meetings and social events so everyone feels part of the team. It’s really important that we have that bond and feel as though we’re working together with a shared purpose. Thanks for your excellent work and effort.
– Matthew J Woodington, Head of Editorial and Copy at HSBC

2022 end of year review

In short, Winnie has been an absolute superstar and a critical member of the team throughout 2022. The quantity and quality of the work that she supports is staggering and she is always willing to support additional work when she has capacity.

It is evident that the team couldn’t have achieved as much as we did in 2022 without her support. Her contributions to P&R, both in terms of the actual delivery and in supporting/coaching other writers, has been essential.

Winnie was the first to understand the more technical nature of entity briefs, she established new processes in Hong Kong which were ultimately rolled out globally and she created a range of comprehensive guidelines to support others.

Winnie’s willingness to provide support has extended to covering many tasks outside her day-to-day responsibilities, often covering when we have had gaps in the team due to team sickness or attrition.

She is a keen advocate within the team, both for the highest standards of copy quality through supporting the education/development of stakeholders and team members alike, and as an advocate for her peers and teammates. She is always one of the first people to raise when others have too much on and offer support to ensure their wellbeing is protected.

When [her line manager] went on maternity leave, Winnie proactively stepped up to support the team through leading, coaching and guiding them in a gentle but supportive way. Additionally, she has taken up responsibility as the line manager to two of her peers and has handled challenging circumstances with skill, empathy and pragmatism.

It is clear from the vast amounts of stakeholder feedback that Winnie is a well-regarded member of the team and someone who is highly valued. Alongside this Winnie has also taken a keen interest in improving the morale and culture in the team, leading a range of engagement activity in 2022.

Winnie has noted in her own self-assessment the need to delegate more and not take as much on, a related piece is also being conscious of the impression it creates when she is taking on a lot of additional work and working unsociable hours. This should not be the norm or the expectation for team members, so it’s important to ensure that peers and teammates don’t feel the need to also do this. Winnie should be direct and demanding about what support she wants for her own development. Her exceptional contribution means that she has earned the right to shape what she wants to be involved in and to tell the leadership team what support she wants to enable this.
– George H Williams, ASP Transformation Lead at HSBC

2021 end of year review

Winnie has had an excellent 2021. She’s continually found opportunities to make a step-change improvement to herself, our team and wider teams. And this contribution has been widely recognised by her direct reports, peers and senior managers across Content Studio.

She leads and inspires change around her. This shows in her commitment to personal development – a consistent role model in upskilling herself and sharing recommended learning with others. The documentation Winnie has created this year has been a valuable resource for all new joiners, managers and professional development seekers who come after her.

A significant growth opportunity for Winnie this year was becoming a new people manager. She’s risen to the challenge with aplomb. Not only did she take on the responsibility of onboarding her own team of two, but she also owned the entire scaling of the six-person P&R writing squad. From interviewing and recommending candidates, creating a best-in-class onboarding experience, setting up structure and process for the new writers, and giving regular development feedback – this was far beyond my expectations of her role. She’s also demonstrated her role-model behaviour by mentoring junior colleagues outside of her direct reports. For example, she shifted some of the burdens of coaching a developing performer from my shoulders. She also has the confidence to speak up, record and escalate behavioural issues she spotted in other team members or stakeholders. As a team lead, this helped me action that feedback to improve team morale. I have no doubt Winnie can take on greater leadership and people management responsibilities soon. Another strength of Winnie’s has been her ability to grow and use her network within the bank. By offering training session, content or copywriting support, she’s built up social credit that allowed her to pursue strategic partnerships. This included collaboration with the UX writing team on improving copy governance, with Legal and Marketing teams on knowledge sharing and the Communications team on career development opportunities for our writers. Her network will continue to be a powerful advantage for her to action positive change within the bank.
– Jenefer Davies, ASP Editorial Lead at HSBC

People manager feedback

Winnie’s management style is collaborative, positive and encouraging. For example, after the P&R writers had all been in post for a couple of months, she left us notes in our lockers detailing the things we were doing well, which was nice to read.

Winnie is someone who is always learning – and recommending things for us to read/learn/watch, which is a great quality in a manager.

She gives fair and constructive feedback, and it’s hard to get anything past her – she will generally notice if you haven’t done one of your mandatory training courses by the due date, for example.

Overall I would rate Winnie a top/strong performer in her role, looking at the guidelines.
– Rachel Jean Matheson, Digital Copywriter at HSBC

Peer 360 feedback

I have had 2 opportunities to work closely with Winnie; the Global Digital Messaging Library (DML) and the Jade Tactical Upgrade projects. Both projects were heavily content-focused, whereby we’re driving new ideas from our experience, knowledge, and interest to test and improve. It’s no coincidence that both projects have been the most seamless and enjoyable projects I’ve worked on in my time in DMES. I love working with Winnie!

Winnie owns her domain; asking core questions around business, customer and message needs, provides strong and compelling ideas to business stakeholders, while being open to ideas and feedback. Bringing vague content and testing ideas back to a well-written and concise message. Messages that are then backed by data to perform well in the markets we release them into.

Domain of knowledge: For the DML project, Winnie had the largest scope in which to demonstrate her ability, as we created a wide range of email and SMS global messages from essentially scratch. In the first stage, we were convincing members of the Global team about why we’ve built Content in the way we did. In the second stage, we engaged India, Malaysia and Singapore local marketing teams to get buy-in and work through localisation. This was a lot of meetings and sessions, and at each stage Winnie demonstrated her knowledge and creativity to guide stakeholders back to the core message and ensuring that it’s personal and relevant to our customers in these markets. Over time, Winnie became a trusted partner for both India and Malaysia marketing teams.

Efficiency: Winnie is very fast at delivering quality work – that may just be the dictionary definition of efficiency! For this point, I would like to call out Winnie’s efforts on the Jade project – whereby she was able to edit the existing content to extreme concision within a week. This email communication is a dynamic message, with many potential variations. We had very little content feedback from marketing in the end, which helped us well on our way to hitting an aggressive release schedule.

Organisation: When we first started the DML project, Winnie organised a new Confluence ecosystem and template. I was sceptical at first but the new layout greatly assisted us in keeping on top of all of the copy changes – which slowly onboarded to tracked changes vs. comments. I’ve since adopted the Confluence page layout and approach to other projects – and for compliments on the pretty page layout (which I quickly attributed back to Winnie!). So overall, Winnie is very well-organised and able to keep on top of a lot of moving pieces.

High standards: While Winnie is fast and flexible, she holds high standards on the communications she works on. Pushing back and standing firm where needed to ensure good quality work goes out to customers. From concept to delivery, there were fewer revisions from stakeholders as they largely bought into the communication angle and delivery.

Behaviour: I will evaluate based on the new HSBC values around valuing difference, succeeding together, taking responsibility, and getting it done. Winnie is a role model in this category for me. She has demonstrated exemplary interpersonal skills within a global project team. Whereby she valued and supported the work of teams from Global, India and Malaysia. She took the responsibility of developing all the content for our use cases. She was efficient in getting it done. And she was integral to the success of the project, both from my personal view and also comments echoed by Hussam and other team members.

Even Better Ifs: I don’t want to give a cop-out answer here but I’m very happy with Winnie’s deliverables as far as I’ve seen. So I will focus on something that I would love to see more of. Which areas of our current messaging would she love to test and change? This is perhaps answered in the other projects she works on but she has so many good ideas, concepts and learnings. I wonder, how can we scale and amplify that across everything we do? Or to tackle specific communication shortcomings?
– Eoin Murphy, Digital Messaging Specialist at HSBC

Talent Bench feedback

In your role as content strategist / copywriter for Co-Pilot, despite our delivery slowdown due to funding issues, you were able to still accomplish a number of things:

  • Provide a framework for reviewing existing public website content and copy related to carers and the Go-Pilot propositions
  • Provide detailed copy review and wrote new copy for an essential page (Assisting someone with their money). The UK is planning to make your proposed changes, independent of Co-Pilot delivery.
  • Provide a framework and initial thoughts on social media strategy for Co-Pilot

I observed a couple of strengths while working with you:

  • Able to turn a vague request / idea into structured organised thought
  • Very very quick turnaround, without any compromise in quality
  • Went above by getting feedback from other people / consumers (such as talking to your neurodiverse friend, etc.)

I honestly cannot point out any even better ifs. Perhaps if we had gotten a chance to work longer together. But it was great to work with you – fun and productive.
– Nino S Ocampo, Business Lead for Youth and Co-Pilot at HSBC

Project PEGA feedback

I started working with Winnie at the beginning of August when she joined the cross-functional team tasked with running a proof-of-concept (POC) to test the feasibility of a ‘build once, deploy multiple times’ approach to message creation. The desired outcome is to drive an increase in message delivery capacity in markets. We brought together a cross-functional Global team made up of DMES Ops, D&A, Digital Data and CommsHub to work with colleagues in India and Malaysia. From day 1 Winnie was central to the process; being a strong voice at the table while representing the customer experience.

In the last 3-4 months, as part of the POC, Winnie has attended daily stand-ups; during our time in and out of meetings she has:

  • used her fantastic interpersonal skills to help educate the markets (and the wider global team) about effective and engaging copywriting
    • Winnie immediately developed great working relationships with everyone on the virtual team, she drove engagement and involvement in getting to the final version. She worked dynamically providing direction and options as the picture became clearer about what data was available to power the customer experience. Having Winnie involved early in the process meant she could help influence the final customer experience. Winnie is collaborative, always welcoming feedback and appropriately providing alternative suggestions if required. She is perceived as approachable and diplomatic by the wider team.
  • driven a passion amongst the team for the customer
    • Winnie is able to take colleagues with very commercial mindsets on a journey of thinking more customer-centrically – this is a great skill to have as we move to a more agile and customer-focused way of working at HSBC. I find it fantastic that she will do guerilla testing on her email templates and content. This innate passion for the customer and the experience we give them is a fantastic asset to the team and will drive the great outcomes we want for our customers.
  • been reliable and dependable
    • Winnie gets it done. She works hard and does what it takes to get the results and make her promises regarding deadlines. She takes accountability and delivers what she says she will. Confluence is always updated when she says it will be!
  • been driving the principles of Agile ways of working
    • As it became clear that India wanted to deliver more complex messaging journeys than we had estimated, Winnie was spending more time than anticipated on the POC. Being transparent and upfront about her time pressures Winnie used all the appropriate channels to ensure she didn’t let anyone down (or break herself). This is great professional communication that is often underutilised; if she had not called out the pressures we wouldn’t have identified key learnings. Her professionalism in communicating challenges kept the project on track as we were able to solve for a challenge.

Winnie’s great core competencies in copywriting, her ability to build relationships with cross-functional team members, and her focus on the customer has been a huge asset to the programme. It’s been a pleasure working with Winnie and I hope she continues to be involved in this innovative programme.
– Kathleen Radford, Global Head of Digital as a Channel at HSBC

Project PEGA feedback

  • You created a shared working space where copy is hosted, reviewed and structured to allow for global creation and localisation.
  • You created / sourced copy for ~20 messages to date across emails and SMSes.
  • You provided customer experience (CX) guidance from a tone of voice and overall messaging journey experience to both global and local teams.
  • You addressed local feedback on copy and supported the localisation process when required

We’re extremely pleased with your contributions to the Proof-of-Concept (POC) project so far, and more importantly, so are the local markets we worked with (India and Malaysia). This was showcased in the various copy and content review calls we have with the markets and how your recommendations are almost always taken up.

Your opinion is valued across global and local teams, as such, we would like to see you be more vocal in the group sessions, especially in the early ideation stages of message building.

We look forward to continue getting your contributions as part of a 3-month extension of the POC as we localise the journeys we have built into Singapore and UAE, as well as create new journeys in the global layer.
– Hussam Abdulhai, Senior Manager of Digital Customer Strategy at HSBC

Digital Forbearance project feedback

You have been an absolute superstar on Digital Forbearance supporting asks at short notice without issue and complaint despite often having moving scope, tight deadlines and disorganised stakeholders. I have found you very proactive in setting things up and getting started without having to be asked or chased, this has really helped in getting on the front foot with copy which has been a real advantage for some of the more complicated forbearance markets.

I think your attitude to work is great and very positive. You are very to-the-point, no-nonsense and action-oriented which helps drive conversations to conclusion effectively.

At times you don’t suffer fools gladly which is worth bearing in mind for some interactions with some stakeholders – this being said I have been told I am the same so not so much a criticism but passing on a learning – I think this directness is part of what makes you effective in getting stuff done.
– Alexander Godwin, Digital Product Manager at HSBC

Peer 360 feedback

Winnie is a pleasure to work with and an excellent team player, always prepared to support all types of requests coming her way. As a copywriter her skills are needed in various types of projects, and I’ve had the opportunity to work with Winnie in two significant projects and one side project. Winnie has proven that she is always keen to embrace the challenge.

HSBC Meet-ups is a great example of how Winnie got involved in activities beyond her role as a copywriter. She took an active role and got involved in the strategy, vision and key decisions that shaped the Meet-ups initiative. She applied her critical thinking abilities to find the best possible ways to tackle the tasks and was proactive at proposing solutions to move forward.

The quality of her copy is constantly impressive and Winnie is systematic and thorough in her approach. She presents work she is proud of and delivers at impressive speed. She should see this as an opportunity to use the extra time that she has to develop her career further.
– Costin Iorgulescu, User Experience Manager at HSBC

Cross-functional feedback

Reputation for going above and beyond. Ability to challenge at the right time and the right level to make sure she was heard. The quality of her work was definitely needed and seen by some of the senior leadership across the bank.
– Jen Flowers, Global Head of Strategy and Business Management at HSBC

Winnie is AMAZING and super helpful. Her work on the Lion Cubs prototype was in response to an urgent request and we only managed to brief her on the concept at the very last minute, but she reshuffled some of her work and sent us her work within the day! Not simply completing the task but very thoughtful in choosing the right words for young children [who were the target users]. I know Winnie has also helped on other Partnership Development & Innovations projects and gave us some great ideas on how to improve digital engagement. We need to have more colleagues like Winnie.
– Crystal Chan, Senior Innovation Manager (Partnership Development & Innovation) at HSBC