Take bold steps to redesign work, thrive in new normal

IN 2020, the Singapore government passed five budgets to keep Singaporeans employed and businesses afloat at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Generous subsidies of up to 95 per cent for skills upgrading programmes provided a significant push in helping the workforce build capability through gaining relevant work experience.

This year, as Covid-19 vaccines are being rolled out nationwide, Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat announced further expansionary measures to help organisations shift from responding to thriving in the pandemic. For the workforce, these measures include extending the Jobs and Skills Package to support local workers to stay relevant and develop future-ready capabilities, and targeted support such as the Emerging Technology Programme to nudge local businesses towards digitising and gaining access to global markets.

These measures signal that organisations should look beyond reskilling and upskilling to prepare their workers for the future. Singapore companies need to think outside the box when deciding how to deploy the limited investment dollars and government assistance to make fundamental changes to their work, workforce and workplace.

We are more than a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, and there is no doubt that the way we work has changed, perhaps permanently. A survey by The Straits Times published in October 2020 found that eight in 10 Singaporean employees prefer to work from home or have flexible working arrangements.

From an organisational perspective, Deloitte's latest study into human capital trends reveals a monumental shift in business executives' views on transforming work: 61 per cent of respondents globally are considering re-architecting work, as compared to just 29 per cent pre-pandemic. And 80 per cent of Singapore respondents are planning to reimagine work in the next one to three years.

Evidently, the pandemic has led to a paradigm shift in organisations, breaking established, almost unquestioned procedures and mindsets on ways of working. Business leaders now realise that good, productive work does not necessarily only happen in the office, and that autonomy and flexibility given to teams can be highly effective in producing results.

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When Singapore's "circuit breaker" measures were deployed from April 2020, many managers struggled to come to terms with managing workforce output as they could no longer observe staff working physically in the office. On the other hand, there were consistent reports of workers feeling more productive when they pivoted to working from home.

This conundrum is pushing organisations towards a fundamental rethink of their business and workforce models. This is consistent with Deloitte's research that suggests that the majority of Singapore organisations are considering reimagining work in the short term.

However, only 14 per cent of respondents in Singapore believe that they are very ready to adapt, reskill and redeploy to new roles.

In order to prepare the workforce to recover and thrive, two bold shifts are needed - reimagining the work and embracing adaptability by default.

Reimagining work is not about deploying Artificial Intelligence and robotics to automate routine tasks to eliminate as many workers as possible; neither is it about reskilling the workforce to perform yet another job that has little meaning or purpose.

Rather, it is about shifting the time and effort that the workforce currently spends on tasks better suited for technology towards identifying and addressing unseen problems and opportunities.

This applies to everyone at all levels, at all times and especially on the frontline. Government measures attempt to nudge Singapore companies in this direction - the enhanced Support for Job Redesign aims to reimagine current jobs by eliminating manual effort, hopefully creating higher value and more fulfilling jobs for workers in the future.

The second bold shift is to embrace organisation adaptability by default. Organisations should take into account permanent moves towards more diversity and fluidity in work models. Work will increasingly be disrupted and augmented by technological advancements, competition and innovative workforce models such as gigging. As such, traditional organisations need to think about how to shift bureaucratic structures and rigid work processes towards more fluid and dynamic teams that are empowered and able to adjust to fast-moving business priorities and outcomes.

As Singapore firms gear up to place their pandemic-strained investment dollars on bets for future growth, one thing is for certain - investing solely on reskilling and upskilling will not enable an organisation to recover and thrive - not in these times.

Deloitte's study found that only 17 per cent of respondents in Singapore are making a significant investment to achieve bolder work transformation outcomes. It is clear that both private and public sectors need to heed the call to action to refocus investment in Singapore's human capital, and to think more boldly when repositioning organisations and the workforce for the future.

The effort to transform the workforce is not solely the human resource department's responsibility. In fact, the C-Suite collective should be accountable to make these bold shifts happen.

Undertaking these shifts would require thoughtful answers to these questions: How do we design fulfilling jobs of the future that seamlessly bring together humans and technology to deliver better outcomes? How do we create and nurture teams that are empowered, adaptable and 10 times more effective than they are today?

This pandemic has hit a massive reset button, suspending long-held beliefs of how a job is defined and how work ought to be done. Organisations that stubbornly stick to their old ways of working would likely find themselves vastly outpaced by competitors that have already taken advantage of this crisis to reimagine their workforce and business. By deciding to take bold steps, organisations can lead, prepare, and support their workforce to truly thrive in the new normal.

• The writers are from Deloitte South-east Asia. Adrian Ole and Lee Yun-Han are respectively Human Capital Consulting Executive Director and Director. Tan Ruoqi and Vera Tan, consultant and analyst with the Deloitte South-east Asia Human Capital Consulting team, contributed to the article.