The challenge of engaging Singaporean employees

Culturally, engaging Singaporean employees can be somewhat tricky. While they are often not highly vocal in their criticisms, they tend to be very discerning and hold their organisations to highly exacting standards.

This is reflected in the results of employee opinion surveys in global organisations where response rates and category ratings tend to be lower for Singapore than for other parts of the world. The challenge for Human Resources functions and senior leadership teams is about delivering meaningful engagement in the absence of full and frank feedback on what does and does not work.

In rising to this challenge, interactions with employees benefit from the following qualities:

Authenticity: The desire for open and honest feedback and the commitment to responding to the feedback in order to raise engagement levels must be truly authentic. PR stunts and half-measures will be transparent to Singaporean employees and are more likely to reduce rather than enhance engagement.

Pro-Activity: There is an expectation that employers will put effort into engaging their people. If there is no evidence of this effort on the employer’s behalf, then engagement levels are destined to stagnate at best, or even to reduce over time.

Consistency: Engagement activities with staff benefit from being consistently implemented over time. Cramming activities and communications into the last couple of weeks before the next employee opinion survey opens is a cardinal sin which is most likely (rightly) going to generate cynicism rather than any kind of feel-good factor.

Inclusion: Including Singaporean staff in engagement activities has the advantages of increasing the volume and quality of feedback which is available and of increasing the number of people available to deliver employee engagement initiatives on the ground.

Appointing Engagement Champions from various parts of the business can enable managers and Human Resources to harness a huge amount of passion and dedication to making their company a fantastic place to work.

The scale of the challenge faced by employers was shown by a report at the beginning of this year which found that Singaporean employees were the unhappiest in APAC with 23% feeling unmotivated and 64% planning to leave their current role within the next 12 months.

This indicates that Singaporean managers and HR professionals have more work to do on improving their engagement strategies and that successful implementation will bring real commercial benefits. By winning the hearts as well as the minds of employees, Singaporean employers can reap the benefits of reduced attrition and increased discretionary effort.

Mike is among the speakers who will be sharing their expertise at the 3rd Annual Global HR Excellence conference.

3rd Annual Global HR Excellence
Pan Pacific Hotel, Singapore
13-15 October 2014

Click here to register.