The rise of the CHRO in Singapore
With employee experience becoming more and more important, chief human resources officers are increasingly being recognised as key strategic figures
THE dynamics of C-suite teams across Singapore are evolving to reflect a changing world of work.
Identifying the most effective ways to enable and support employees has become one of the most prevalent and important conversations for leadership teams, which are tasked with navigating the continued impact of the pandemic on how and where teams work to the macroeconomic climate and ongoing talent shortages. It’s a shift that has seen human-resource (HR) leaders and the employee experience programmes they lead move into the centre of today’s strategic business operations.
Leadership teams have long understood that engaging and enabling employees is essential for long-term success – whether that’s increased productivity, revenue, customer satisfaction, or employee retention. It comes as no surprise that in recent Qualtrics research, 80 per cent of HR leaders in Singapore believe improving their organisation’s employee experience management capabilities will significantly improve business results.
These findings indicate senior executives in the region are moving quickly to capitalise on employee experience as a competitive differentiator. Nearly three-quarters (71 per cent) of HR leaders say senior leadership are paying closer attention to employee experience, and 78 per cent say leaders review employee feedback at least monthly.
With regular employee insights becoming critical for executive decision making, 79 per cent of HR leaders anticipate the frequency of employee listening is going to accelerate over the next three years.
Seven key priorities for HR teams in Singapore
As organisations in Singapore double down on their HR strategies, three top priorities that are emerging are 1) training and development, 2) preventing and treating employee burnout, and 3) making progress on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
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Not far behind, picked by over a third of senior HR leaders in Singapore, are 4) onboarding, 5) talent attraction and hiring, 6) linking HR operations to business outcomes, and 7) environmental, social, and governance standards as also important in their organisations.
Everyone’s business
Improving people management, leadership, and employee experience management capabilities is no longer a responsibility held by HR teams alone – to do it well requires and demands participation from the whole organisation. This is why we are seeing chief human resources officers (CHROs) being recognised as the organisation’s most important strategic executive.
This shift in dynamic is with good reason. Research from the Qualtrics XM Institute found organisations with above-average experience management capabilities in Asia – that is, the ability to understand and meaningfully take action on employee and customer feedback – report 2.9 times higher revenue growth, 2.1 times higher profitability, and two times higher employee retention compared to those with below-average abilities.
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Four areas of focus
The business case for improving employee experience is obvious. For leadership teams working to better realign their organisations around supporting and enabling their teams during a period of significant change, we recommend four key areas of focus:
- Change management: Experience management enables an organisation to continuously learn what employees are thinking and feeling, and distribute actionable insights across the organisation that empower leaders to rapidly adapt. For example, as employers continue to refine their hybrid work strategies, regular feedback from their teams can tell them what support, environments, and experiences will help teams be productive and engaged in this new model. This is an entirely new way of working for most teams and their leaders, and 78 per cent of senior HR leaders in Singapore believe the HR function will be out in front building these capabilities. Previously, leaders would get to see employee feedback once a year (if they were lucky!) and they would only measure engagement. Today, feedback is captured more frequently across a range of areas such as well-being, inclusion, intent to stay, and engagement. As leaders and people managers have access to a greater volume of employee insights, it’s critical they are able to understand what the feedback means, and what they need to do to act on it. This is going to require a strategic focus on change management.
- Linking employee experience outcomes to business value: Many organisational cultures are rapidly shifting to become more evidence-based, and employee experience metrics are being used as indicators of organisational performance. Leadership teams with mature employee experience management programmes align employee feedback with operational data, such as turnover and time to hire, which helps them understand the responses in the same way they view financial data. Going beyond the narrative of reducing costs and increasing revenue, connecting employee experience to value drivers such as risk mitigation, brand integrity, innovation, customer experience and organisational agility enables senior HR leaders to create deeper understanding, drive action, and focus efforts on what matters most.
- Starting small and scaling: Rethinking employee experience does not need to done overnight. Rather, the best employee experience programmes we see from our customers often start small, demonstrate value, and then scale to make a sustainable and positive impact. This approach is also often met with the least resistance and builds the business case for investing in employee experience programmes.
- Collaborating behind a common goal: Our study shows that aligning teams within HR and shared service functions behind a common vision or strategy makes a huge difference to employee experience programmes. One of the most important relationships that exist in business today is between technology teams and HR. With the rise of hybrid work and the data-driven nature of business, both functions now have a fundamental impact on the employee experience, and the strength and success of it can have a great impact on the ability of a business to drive its outcomes.
The future belongs to organisations that get it right
Engaged employees who are enabled to do their best work are a business’s greatest investment and asset. Right now, this is getting harder to build and maintain. But we know it’s worth the effort, as these are the people delivering your customers’ experiences and business results.
More eyes are on getting the employee experience right than ever before, and organisations that do this well are most often led by executives focused on reinventing the way they centre human experience in their everyday work, and enable leaders and managers to take the right actions in the right place at the right time.
The writer is principal XM Catalyst, XM Institute, Qualtrics
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