Unsung Hero

A Real Feeling of Home

Siva, Assistant Manager, Banquet Operations, Suntec Singapore Convention & Exhibition Centre

Ensuring that plates are full and attendees are satisfied, Siva strives to make a vast convention center feel like one big family.

Unsung Hero

A Real Feeling of Home

Sivakumaran Ramalinggam, Assistant Manager, Banquet Operations, Suntec Singapore Convention & Exhibition Centre

Ensuring that plates are full and attendees are satisfied, Ramalinggam strives to make a vast convention center feel like one big family.

Even at a large-scale venue such as the Suntec Singapore Convention & Exhibition Centre, little things can make a big impact with a client. This is a truth that Sivakumaran Ramalinggam, assistant manager of banquet operations, has internalized after 14 years at this Central Business District event hub. A recent example: When an attendee brought a young child to an event, rather than waiting until they arrived to their table to retrieve a baby chair, Siva made a note of the family during the pre-dinner cocktail party, found out at what table they were sitting and made sure the chair was waiting for them before they had to ask.

“The doors opened for the dining, and as they went inside, they saw a baby chair at their table ready for them,” says Siva. “It doesn’t take much, but it makes a big impact on the customer.”

Such attention to detail grows out of Siva ’s philosophy of work. To him, Suntec and the event attendees who visit are part of an extended family. When guests set foot in the space — whether they’re part of a 10-person executive team utilizing one of the venue’s dozens of breakout spaces, or among the thousands of attendees to an international trade show in its column-free exhibition space — Siva makes it his mission to give this 452,000-square-foot venue the coziness of home.

“He's good at talking to customers,” says Grace Yang, senior director of HR and business solutions for Suntec Singapore. “He has a great smile that can really melt your heart, and his passion really lies in helping customers and making them happy.”

For Siva, his colleagues — including two other assistant managers and their 17 banquet captains — are central to his own success. He works with them to create standard operating procedures that every employee or contractor follows, whether for a coffee and tea break, cocktail reception or something far more elaborate, such as Suntec’s Road to Prosperity Banquets, from which groups can choose from 168 different Chinese dishes to create one spectacular F&B experience. With Siva helping to guide the team, above-and-beyond gestures of service become standard offerings. “When everybody is involved in creating these processes, everyone’s proud to implement them,” he says.

It makes sense that Siva would approach his work with the passion of a proud father, as he has a supportive family of his own — a wife and two daughters, ages 13 and 10 — although his work can require him to sometimes go without seeing them for up to a few days at a time.

This May, a major full-capacity event that Siva had to oversee at Suntec required him to miss his daughter’s birthday. He was disappointed not to be there to celebrate and took pains to make it up to her on his next off day and spent quality time with her. For Siva, this level of dedication is not necessarily a sacrifice. “It’s part of the job,” he says.

Learning on the Job

Siva got to where he is in Suntec the old-fashioned way: working his way up in the organization. He joined the venue in September 2005 as a waiter at the on-site Joaquim buffet restaurant. It didn’t take long for him to realize he had a knack for hospitality, deriving pleasure from being able to provide guests with just the items they wanted. Within a year and a half, he had been promoted to the banquet operations team, a far more complex and demanding area.

“At a restaurant, you are doing the same thing every day, but in banquet operations, almost every day is something different,” he says. “There’s always some different requirements, and we have to help make those changes happen for the guests.”

In his early days in the role, Siva made a habit of sticking around after working hours or on his off-days to observe the setup and execution of events and understand how other managers were doing their work. “If you need to learn something, you just have to put more hours into it,” he says. He took particular interest in the seasoned banquet captains, noting how they ran their stations and what made things run so smoothly.

“Even though I was an assistant manager, I’d ask the [subordinate] captains who had been working there a few years, ‘How do you do this? How do you do that?’” says Siva. “A key point of success is that you should not be afraid to ask things.”

Now a veteran himself, eight years into his role, Siva credits Suntec’s culture and executives, as well as his own boss, with creating a supportive environment for implementing new ideas. “Suntec is flexible — they want you to deliver whatever the guest needs without always needing approval,” he says. “It’s ‘do the best you can first, and then report.’ And we have the empowerment to do that.”

And while Siva’s dedication to making Suntec feel like home has sometimes kept him from his own home longer than he’d prefer, he has also enjoyed opportunities to meld the two realms. Recently, the Suntec organization held its annual family gathering, allowing Siva to bring his wife and two kids to work to enjoy games and treats, see what he does up close and meet his colleagues and their families.

“Everybody meets each other and we get to know them — it’s just a happy event,” says Siva. “Each of our families can talk to each other, and it creates a real feeling of home.”

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