Is your business sick?

Singapore businesses face a wide range of unique operational issues, none more so than how to retain staff in a highly competitive market and at the same increase productivity. With a limited labour pool, the answer is not just hiring more people.

The Government's 2015 budget got things very right here—Singapore's future is in developing sought-after skills and making the workforce more productive. While the SkillsFuture programme will be the foundation for this development, employers should ask themselves how they can contribute.

Increased pressure on labour market
With a tight labour market, employers have been caught in a vicious cycle of increasing wages and having to do more with less. For Singapore businesses to grow both domestically and internationally, this labour crunch has to be overcome.

Increased productivity is the obvious answer, but achieving this is often easier said than done.

Getting more out of your labour resources can come in different ways. Increasing individual skills can help staff do higher value jobs, this is the core of a skills-based economy. Skills development takes time and investment from both employees and employers.

For employers there are certain risks in letting staff take time to develop new skills. First there is the obvious time needed to conduct study. But of far greater concern is how you keep staff engaged and happy once they have these sought-after skill-sets.

Increasing workload of focusing on time-management tends to be an easy solution during busy times but, when managed poorly, this more often than not results in staff turnover.

Undoubtedly a certain proportion of employees could make better use of their time. However, managerial oversight of this is often a difficult process.

In an ideal world all staff are motivated, engaged, and are filling up their calendars productively.

So…it is easy to conclude that motivation and engagement are the keys to productivity. They are also the reason why highly skilled staff will stay with you.

Where do you look for savings?
Time and time again I see sick leave being used as a measure of productivity. Reducing the medical days staff take-off from work is seen as an 'easy win' for increasing productivity.

There seems to be an MC war going on between employers and employees. And why is this? Medical data, I'm sure, doesn't point to the working population being sick for an average of two weeks a year. The vast majority of people, ethically, don't treat their medial allowance as extra vacation time.

And yet medical leave is the benchmark. A smart employer should be asking who is actually sick. Is it your staff, or is it actually your business?

We should be asking why people are actively trying to avoid coming to work, because this is not just an issue of days off. Unhappy staff, who are looking for an MC, are going to be disengaged, unmotivated, and possibly disruptive to your business.

In this context, making them return to the office, shop floor, or factory may not be such a good idea.

The savings are in the data
Medical data and employee feedback programmes can provide businesses with the real keys to unlocking increased productivity. Looking at the causes of employees' medical leave can provide important insights into the health of your business.

Too often employers are quick to attribute blame for illness and lack of engagement purely on their employees. The comment 'it's so hard finding good people' can only be said so often before it has to be acknowledged the problem does not lie with just your workers.

This is not only the case for businesses with an obvious problem. Increasing productivity should be a priority no matter what the obvious state of a business is. Even successful companies can increase their output by considering the health of their business.

Happy workers
The above scenario plays out in all parts of the economy. From banks to restaurants, from insurance companies to hotels, the basic issues around employee engagement and motivation are the same.

If businesses want to look at how to increase productivity, they need to first take a long hard look at the working environment they are providing.

Engagement solutions such as developing corporate wellness and team building programmes are pointless if they do not address the key issues employees are facing. Business owners and managers need to treat this as a priority as workers become harder to find and even harder to keep as they upskill.

The solutions are out there, suiting in the data most companies already have. But are you looking in the right place for the answers?