Engaging Singapore's workforce of the future digitally

THE rise of millennials in the workforce and employee engagement had been hot topics for human resources (HR) professionals for a good part of 2017 and will continue to be in 2018. This burgeoning demographic has now taken over as the dominant generation of the workplace, with some estimates (Deloitte Millennial Survey, Adecco Manpower Survey, PwC) that they will make up 75 per cent of the workforce over the next decade. In Singapore, they are expected to form just over half of the workforce by 2020.

With so much socio-economic rhetoric and mythos around the millennial generation, it is important that Singapore companies try to better understand their needs and perspectives. There has been a real struggle for local businesses to actively engage, train and retain talent and it's clear that the future workforce is complex and divergent from generations past. This was evident in an Aon Hewitt study earlier in the year which found that Singapore had fallen five points in talent attraction, promotion and retention practices among major Asian markets (2016: 59 points, 2015: 64 points) ranking as the worst for employee engagement in the region.

Senior Singapore executives and HR leaders who were invited to a recent year-end panel event that Workday hosted identified competition for talent as the biggest HR challenge they will face in 2018, followed by managing workforce diversity and a lack of data and insights. Digital transformation can help address these challenges.