[Blog 9] Manpower Planning – Building the Singapore Core
Over the last decade, it has grown increasingly challenging for organisations to meet manpower needs and take advantage of growth opportunities due to the shrinking local workforce and its underlying shortage of critical skills. As statistics on Singapore’s economy indicates, GDP growth has slowed to 2% in 2015 and 1.8% in 2016 and profit per employee dropped 9.5% from 2011-2015 for the top 100 companies on SGX. This is a tremendous worsening situation, and companies thus need to reinvent themselves to preserve performance, profits, and healthy business function. To combat these challenges, companies must adopt non-conventional ways of business expansion, looking beyond traditional sources of labour and identifying ways to leverage Singapore’s existing talent pool internally and externally, building the Singapore core.
Before searching for manpower externally, companies should evaluate ways to further leverage on their existing internal manpower. New policies could be implemented, including: redesigning job scopes, training and upgrading employees, and technology integration, which simultaneously help to facilitate employee growth and retain talents within the organisation. Companies such as The American Club and Maybank Singapore utilise such strategies, from redesigning jobs, cross-training employees, to facilitating employee movement to different job roles in the firm. These policies not only help the company to address skills demand shortages during different seasons of the year, but also up-skills and re-skills employees, thus helping them remain up-to-date and competitive in Singapore’s ever-changing economic landscape.
Searching externally, an important consideration is diversity. The 2010 MOM Inclusive and Harmonious Workplaces study proves that 87% of companies agree diversity is crucial to business outcomes. Hence, enhanced diversity as a solution to manpower shortage is a desirable choice, achievable by implementing retraining schemes, flexible work arrangements, and redesigned job processes. For example, McDonald’s Restaurants Pte Ltd when faced with the challenge to meet manpower needs, was a key adopter of such a strategy, rolling out flexi-time, flexi-pay and flexi-location roles to attract homemakers, students and retirees. The National Environment Agency also re-designed job processes and the physical work environment to create roles that people with disabilities could easily fill, facilitating their integration into the workforce. These inclusive policies allow businesses to attract and work with a diverse team as a synergised whole, and serves as long-term measures that improve diversity in a sustainable and continuous manner. Through hiring homemakers, retirees, the disabled, and part-timers, companies not only resolve their manpower shortage but enable an introduction of new perspectives into the company.
The Singapore business landscape is in dire need of a paradigm shift if it is to maintain its world-class status as a top business hub. In addition to government policies currently in place, businesses have a role in implementing strategic manpower planning to identify gaps in business performance such as the shortage of particular critical skills and roles, as well as new strategies to resolve them. Together with the help of hr advisory services, businesses in Singapore can work towards future-proofing their employees, building up the Singapore core.
