Exclusive interview with Kulpreeya Buddharudisuk

Kulpreeya Buddharudisuk is a seasoned leader who joined Zoetis over seven years ago to lead the regional finance function for Southeast Asia, eventually leading all Asia Pacific countries. In this role, she successfully led multicultural, geographically diverse teams through a transformative time in the business. 

Her experience and development as a Finance leader led to her appointment as the General Manager of Zoetis Thailand nearly two years ago, in the midst of new and challenging environments caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Since her appointment as General manager, Kulpreeya has been leading the team to embrace the change both externally and internally and find new ways of enhancing customer experiences.

With a clear goal of influencing the customer journey through digitalization initiatives, Kulpreeya has united the team under the shared vision of propelling Zoetis Thailand to be the top of customers’ minds. She drives with a mindset of achieving challenging business goals whilst continuously supporting an inclusive company culture, and colleague well-being.

In addition to her management role leading more than 130 employees or colleagues, she is also a working mother of two young daughters and partners with her husband to take excellent care of their family. She says her family’s support has always been a source of strength. 

Q: What is your vision for the Company Culture?     

A: Zoetis fosters an entrepreneurial culture in which colleagues share in the company’s success while providing valuable solutions to customers with one purpose in mind:  to nurture our world and humankind by advancing care for animals.

One of my most important responsibilities is to establish expectations about the company culture required to achieve our objectives. Every colleague plays a role in making our Core Beliefs culture come to life. These Core Beliefs are: Our colleagues make the difference; Always do the right thing; Customer obsession, Run it like you own it; and We are one Zoetis.

Meanwhile, embracing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace is another of my aspirations. Acceptance and learning are good starting points that have led me to be open to discussing and freely sharing opinions with my teams. I am always happy to openly share interests, concerns, and ideas during meetings and in leisure time with colleagues.

I encourage my team to incorporate these values into all actions and decisions, and I make a point of reinforcing them in town hall meetings, executive conferences, and smaller activities such as team meetings, individual performance conversations, and other colleague engagement activities. I believe that constantly communicating and putting ideas into practice are required to maintain focus, especially during times of challenge.

Because we are committedly building the inclusive workplace environment and companywide encourage our colleagues to express their full self, the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Working team is now working hard with me and my leadership team to support our colleagues in alignment, recommendations, and implementations. Because we are One Zoetis.

Q: How Did You Build a Positive Workplace Culture?

A: I have prioritized cultivating a positive company culture through a single goal of bringing diverse voices and experiences into play when achieving our company goals. I am surrounded by talented, passionate colleagues and my goal as a leader is to actively create opportunities for them to get involved, be accountable to our vision and feel that they belong here at Zoetis. I try to be a good example to my colleagues in my own leadership style and approach. 

On top of that, I am so proud that Zoetis Thailand participated in and is now certified as a Best Places to Work in Thailand 2021. In addition to understanding that our colleagues feel proud to be a Zoetis colleague, the process to become recognized by the organization has allowed me and my leadership team to discover areas where we can improve our culture even more.

Our team achieved a very high response rate to the survey and the result exceeded the global benchmark of 70% across all categories with an overall engagement score of 82%, signifying that 82% of the colleagues believe that Zoetis Thailand is the Best Place to Work and an employer of choice in Thailand.

With a strong culture of run it like you own it, our colleagues have been continuously empowered to take ownership of their business results and being creative in finding faster and smarter ways to do business. While they have been doing their jobs, I and the leadership team have been focusing on keeping the colleagues informed of our vision and strategic objectives,  building consensus through various channels of communication and actively listening to provide timely support in the form of tools, resources and guidance.

Q: From a leadership perspective, what lessons did you learn from this difficult time?

A: The first and foremost goal for me and my leadership team was to fully support our colleagues to cope with the new challenges at home and in business. Despite the external challenges, we have never stopped developing and investing in our talent development, improving colleague knowledge and well-rounded skills, and supporting their well-being in order to be ready for any difficulty and balance their personal and work lives. We have built several initiatives to engage our colleagues and take every opportunity to communicate and update the key movements in the company. Furthermore, we recognize that everyone is an important member of their families, so our colleagues should be able to thrive on both business and personal goals. We have significantly invested in initiatives that continue to make our colleagues feel safe, being safe and feeling supported. 

Once they feel supported and inspired to operate under the new dynamics, they are able to think and respond well to their current barriers and limitations with strong accountability which clearly shows in our results. The ongoing pandemic has dramatically affected customers, purchase behaviors and the way we do business, however a well aligned and empowered team at Zoetis Thailand has been able to come up with new and creative ways of connecting with them.

Partnership and co-creation to craft new offerings in order to maintain and enhance customer connectivity as well as engineer digital experiences based on changing customer demands became our focus since the beginning of COVID-19. The use of the global digital platforms and analytics-based customer service solutions has in fact given us immense leverage in transforming our future go-to market strategies.  Sustainability is another area that has become increasingly important in our daily lives and highly impacts our communities, animals, and the planet. Our Sustainability team has initiated various valuable initiatives in Thailand that reinforce our role as responsible partner to our customers and communities and engage our colleagues to be participate and contribute towards our Sustainability goals. 

Lastly, one of the most important and effective lessons has been about creating deliberate focus on recognizing our colleagues’ efforts, no matter how big or small. It really comes down to celebrating wins and successes together as a team and expressing genuine gratitude where it is deserved. It isn’t always easy in a fast-paced, pandemic-restricting, socially-distanced environment, but I can proudly say that it can be done.