In George Lucas’ ‘Star Wars’ universe uncertainty or foreboding is usually announced by a character intoning the portentous phrase, “I sense a disturbance in the Force.” The same subsurface murmur - as yet unfocused - seems to be running below the surface of Singaporean life. The recent ‘Happiness Survey’ conducted by a jobs board tapped in on just such a subsurface vein with results that reinforced the surprising last place finish for Singapore among the ASEAN countries.
Vietnamese were found to be among the most optimistic with the nation’s Job Happiness Index expecting a 15% increase from the score of 5.48 to 6.30 in the next 6 months after the February 2016 survey. Prominent regional financial centres such as Hong Kong and Singapore were expecting a 5% and 3% drop respectively in the next 6 months.
The low optimism score for Singapore is not overly surprising. Indeed, for more than just the employment sector, reflective Singaporeans appear to be looking to the near to mid-term future with a degree of foreboding. One major worry is that the city-state may have reached maximum capacity, with 5.3+ million people crammed onto a low-lying island of just 225 square miles. A combination of prosperous and overstretched citizens and newcomers have driven up home prices and created the impression that less affluent locals have been displaced. Continued chatter among the city’s planning and business elites about bringing in even more immigrants to fill the skills gap between older workers who need to be retrained in order to meet the needs of the global New Economy and recent graduates who want the good-paying jobs but have little experience—raising Singapore’s population to roughly 7 million by 2030—has generated a growing sense of unease. Even amid their prosperity, Singaporeans are now among the most pessimistic people in the world, alongside the understandably dour residents of Greece, Cyprus, Slovenia, and Haiti. Some have voted with their feet— 212,000 Singapore citizens lives abroad (per a 2015 survey), and according to a recent survey, almost half of Singaporeans would leave if they could.
There are growing concerns—including high up in the ranks of business, government, and academia—that this prosperous nation faces a new and more uncertain era, one for which the government’s top-down planning model may no longer be well suited.
To the extent that Singapore has a current economic weakness, it is tied to the PAP’s inverse pyramid planning model: key economic decisions are made not by entrepreneurs but by government-led agencies and large conglomerates like Singapore Airlines, GIC, and Temasek Holdings. For a long time, it seemed to work. The supporting bureaucracy carefully built the city’s economy, expanding opportunity for the city’s middle and working classes. Unemployment, 14 percent at the time of independence, became essentially a thing of the past and it remains extraordinarily rare for a first world nation today, hovering at around 2 to 2.5 percent.
That otherwise extraordinary number belies the fact that many of the jobs created are: a) temporary, seasonal, or low-paying; b) held by an ever-increasing group of aging citizens unable to rely on their retirement and/or their CPF savings; c) include foreign talent imported to either fill the skills gap or, in a socio-politically loaded phrase, “do jobs Singaporeans don’t want to do.” The service sector is growing jobs at a slower rate than before, and the manufacturing sector continues its decline. Retrenchments, or layoffs, continue their steady drumbeat, mostly in services (i.e. the banks have been shedding jobs steadily for months) – the economic growth prognosis remains dim.
Even among those who are considered gainfully employed there are strong hints of disquiet which underlines the need for Singapore businesses to mature more rapidly in areas considered important by employees.
Dig further into the ‘Happiness Index’ and certain trends become evident regionally:
From the Singaporean perspective there are troubling gaps between what employers say (or think) they offer and what employees say (or think) they are getting.
- In a market pulse survey conducted by another jobs board, 65% of employers surveyed in Singapore said they offer flexible working hours, but only 33% of candidates said they actually receive them.
- With regards to career development, 70% of candidates said it was the second-most important factor when looking for a new role, but only 34% said the company or agency they work at provides any kind of training plan for them.
This kind of recurrent gap between perception and reality usually occurs when an economy has yet to reach a degree of maturation where corporations large, small, public or private , have their communications, value propositions and expectations in alignment. To do so, they have to be clear as to who they are – what is their mission statement? What are their values? How can they translate these into operational reality via the setting of achievable standards or goals which ensures proper employee engagement via a realistic value proposition? If these fundamentals are not thoroughly considered then there will be inevitable variance and dissatisfaction down the road.
The issue seems to be affecting the various levels of the hitherto efficient bureaucracy itself as evinced by the increasingly bewildering amount of new initiatives, schemes and "zombie projects" testifies to. Without proper focus and guidance, managers within the body politic launch ideas which sound good, but do not appear to be field-tested for sustainability and relevance. If the government itself appears to be defocused, it cannot play its traditional role of guiding the formulation and implementation of standards and goals towards desire outcomes. In this very real sense, the inverse pyramid is passing down lack of clarity, which in turn feeds the same negative phenomena in the public and private sector.
Further evidence of systemic issues can be found on the crucial topic of leadership, which plays a significant role in Singapore’s ‘Happiness Index’ results. These indicate the pressing need for companies to implement a regimen of conducting periodic and sustainable audit reviews on how managers are promoted – another sign of mature company practice. Why?
Too often people are being promoted for the wrong reasons.
For example, take the classic Singaporean dilemma, brought on by the aforementioned gap between inexperienced managers and those with the work background by whose skills have yet to be retooled to face new tasks. One can be the best person at his/her job, but managing others to do that same job requires a whole different skill set and competencies. What support and training are you giving to managers to step up? What mentoring and coaching is provided? A bad manager has a much bigger impact on morale and performance than one bad staff member who is not in a management role. In fact, it is now a truism that most people quit because of bad, or ineffective bosses, a trend exacerbated by Singaporean graduates with their heads full of theory who suddenly find out that, indeed, that actual execution is far more challenging then answers derived from lectures and textbooks (often written by those who have never actually done the jobs in the first place).
We often see people (right or wrongly) being promoted, who then suddenly disappear because they weren’t up to scratch. The talent feels downtrodden for ‘failing’ in their first leadership role, while the employer rolls their eyes and dives back into their HR pipeline to try again. But with zero support, no established performance standards or goals, and a weight of expectations, can we really expect it to go any other way?
The key to managing all of this is feedback and communication. No news is not good news, and managers need to focus on providing regular communication to staff, while employees need to open up about what they want and expect from employers. Then again, managers also need to be reality-checked, so as to ensure they understand just how (and when) to give feedback, beyond just preset milestones such as annual reviews, and provide appropriate incentives (not just increased salaries or bonuses).
Proper continuous feedback leads to development, which helps people to improve, and a positive cycle continues.
While this molding of corporations and employees so as to manage the transition to the ‘New Economy’ (and the government’s definition of this remains decidedly woolly) has proven more challenging than building new transit lines or improving port facilities, the economy is mirroring another problem in the affluent world: real wages for ordinary Singaporeans have actually stagnated. From 1998 to 2008, the income of the bottom 20 percent of households dropped an average of 2.7 percent, while the salaries of the richest 20 percent rose by more than half. Singapore’s educated population also faces growing competition from China and India, which are as ravenous for success as Singapore was a half-century ago.
These are all structural problems which, in time and with the proper focus and prioritization, can be addressed. But time, as the adage goes, is the fire in which we burn. And the most blazing fire log is the very question of national identity itself, for Singapore needs to know where it came from, and frankly understand where it is, before setting the course for where it needs to be...