National effort to upgrade SME capabilities

Here are some interesting facts about Singapore's SMEs (small & medium-sized enterprises):-
-      there are 170,000 SMEs here
-      they make up 99% of Singapore's (registered) businesses
-      they employ 70% of our workforce
-      and contribute to nearly 50% of our GDP

I am part of the national effort to make our SMEs more capable, more efficient, more productive, more progressive - at least in the way they manage their staff, as part of HCS Productivity & Consulting - doing work especially with Spring's Innovation and Capability Voucher (ICV).  http://hcs.com.sg/v2/index.php/info/page/hr_advisory

Source: Straits Times

 

 

About 12,000 projects were rolled out by SPRING Singapore last year to help some 9,000 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) through various projects aimed at boosting productivity and capturing growth opportunities. When fully implemented, these projects are expected to create S$8 billion in value-add to the economy and around 22,000 jobs. 

I am currently consulting for a less than 20 headcount SME with the owner as MD, wife/mother as Admin Manager and son as Marketing Director. Every little bit to help them ensure better human capital practices is a step to better management, better business and hopefully greater sustainability as a growing business and long-term employer.

Source: Straits Times

Singapore businesses ARE making progress, but I sense, not FAST enough to keep pace with business complexity, change, globalization and intense competition. I urge all HR practitioners in SMEs to do the right thing to encourage your business owners to improve and adopt good HR practices - it will BE the foundation of future business growth and innovation - I can almost guarantee it!

SPRING Singapore's ICV Scheme provides two $5,000 vouchers for SMEs to experience the HR Capability Toolkit, which provides the framework to develop the capability of the SMEs to systematically manage six key HR areas: 

• Manpower planning
• Recruitment and selection
• Compensation and benefits
• Performance management
• Learning and development
• Talent management

Why not take up the offer?!

Culture IS Leadership

Happy 2015! Wishing one and all a great year ahead!

This will be my 6th year as an independent consultant and I have had the opportunity to work with many organizations, leaders and management teams. And I can imagine all the efforts they have been putting in the last quarter of 2014 to lay out plans for 2015 - adjustments, re-alignments, re-structuring, large scale changes, strategy overhaul etc.

Many staff will always feel that management strategies are merely management whims and fancy hoping to catch on - if it does not work, try something else and hope it works, and often in an opposite 180-degree turn-around - the pendulum swings the other way.

My own take is it really boils down to - Leadership!

Leaders set the tone, mood and culture and if the organization intends to make changes to it's business, process or strategy, it MUST address the culture. Culture = Leadership.

When one talks about organization culture - you cannot Not know Edgar H Schein and his model of organizational culture from the 1980s. He offered the foreword on a recent work in this area called Leading Culture Change in Global Organizations (Jossey-Bass, 2012)
 

Authors Denison, Hooijberg, Lane & Lief make a compelling case, with relevant real-life case studies of companies, to support their assertions, that for successful culture change to occur, organizations need to manage these critical dynamics in order to remain competitive:-
-        Support the front line
-        Create strategic alignment
-        Creating a single culture out of many (esp in M&A situations)
-        Exporting culture (in a globalised, connected but diverse world)
-        Building In an emerging market
-        Building From an emerging market

Schein, who is professor emeritus at MIT, calls this "a milestone in the culture studies arena".

This was one of my holiday readings last December and I seriously recommend this to all managers and leaders who want to make and see, lasting and sustainable changes in their own organizations as they lead them into 2015 and beyond.

As this books famously says - "culture eats strategy for lunch!"

Get your culture right and everything will fall into place.



*Footnote: seriously, not kidding, just a day after I did this post,ST printed this on an ACCA study.

 

 

Adios 2014 - Hola 2015!

It has been a fruitful but very tiring Q42014 - now that my work year is done & dusted, time for some rest & relaxation to re-charge for 2015 - which is just round the corner!

Would like to take this opportunity to wish my Associates, Partners, Colleagues & Friends

 

A Merry Christmas and a Great 2015 ahead!!!

 

Developing "deep skills" for the Future!

  The year is coming to a close and sentimentalism and nostalgia take hold - time to take stock!

  As you know, I have been very involved in WSQ training for the past 5 years - time flies, am into my 6th year already. 2014 marks the 10th anniversary for WSQ and rightly so, the authorities from the education, vocation, workforce and manpower sectors are all taking stock to path the way for a different approach for the next 10-20 years to ensure our workforce are properly skilled to cope with the new economy.

  The CET2020 Masterplan is a strategic review on what the Singapore workforce will need to continue to contribute to and build a vibrant economy that provides good jobs for all. The setting up of the SkillsFuture Council is timely to get the key relevant stakeholders together to chart a new course for the Singapore workforce and they met for the first time just this month.

 
  The SkillsFuture Council, led by DPM Tharman Shanmugaratnam, decided to tour the newly set-up CET hub in the East - Lifelong Learning Institute @ Paya Lebar as a wrap up to their first meeting and I was "fortunate" to be chosen to have them visit my training class @ HCS when they did their tour on 7Nov2014.

  You can see the "entourage" accompanying DPM Tharman in the 2nd pic which included SkillsFuture Council members, WDA Chief Exec Ng Cher Pong, Dy CE (not in pic), HCS CEO Mdm Ho Geok Choo, David Ang (former Exec Dir of SHRI and currently on HCS's management team) etc.

  The focus on "deep skill sets" is something I abscribe to, back to even the "old days" of the apprenticeship approach to ensure niche industries can continue to find talent and grow. I guess Donald Trump got it right, after all.

  I look forward to this new phase as we set our sights on CET 2020!






 

Social Learning

There can be no doubt that technology today is a true-enabler. Cisco last year estimated that by 2050, there would be 50 billion (internet-)connected devices. Some say, based on estimates today of 8.7 billion for 2012 and the historical rate of exponential growth capable in tech, this would seem even conservative. By 2020, the number of internet users would reach 5 billion.

And by 2020, it is estimated that at least 2 billion smart handheld devices will be in use with direct, immediate and constant access to the internet or the "cloud". Almost all of your employees have one now already - just observe the BYOD discussions and early adoption attempts today, let alone in 6 years time.

Hence it is an opportune time for organisations to review how they are "learning".

The trend of moving away from formal, face-to-face trainings/learning to more technology-based, informal ways of exchanging information, ways to store/extract/analyze data, social learning etc can only accelerate.

In my work as a facilitator, I am seeing more organisations harnessing informal social learning like Communities of Practice, Learning Circles and adopting blended and/or E-learning approaches for better employee engagement, better learning outcomes, better time management etc.

Many are even creating internal Knowledge Management (KM) approaches like internal blogs, forums for social sharing, knowledge capture - from the mundane of best caterers to use for office functions to more cutting edge innovation / idea sharing of best practices or tried practices.

 



Jane Hart's work on the Social Workplace Learning Continuum will help  organisations understand where they are in their evolution, where some of their current or planned future interventions are on the scale, and perhaps ascertain if they need to be even bolder in their transitioning away from their formal learning processes.

 

Where are You in your social learning journey?

 

Learning Moments

Today, there is a cacophony of opinions, propositions in the area of e-learning, m-learning, blended-learning, knowledge management (KS), performance support (PS) etc.

One of the pioneer thinkers in this area has been Seymour Papert - an MIT mathematician, computer scientist and educator. He is one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, as well as an inventor of the Logo programming language. He has worked on learning theories, and is known for focusing on the impact of new technologies on learning in general and in schools as learning organizations in particular.                                                                                                                            Source: Wikipedia

He once famously said: "You can't teach people everything they need to know. The best you can do is position them where they can find what they need to know when they need to know it."

I was invited to a soft-launch of a new mobile (iOS/Android) technology-based PS system just last week. This mobile learning startup won the Most Innovative Startup Award at Ideas.Inc. 2013. Hearing the very young (fresh out of grad school) Founder and CEO speak, in his jeans, jacket over t-shirt, was reminiscent of hearing a certain Zuckerberg, less than a decade ago.

The “app” probably finds itself in the sweet spot of performance support (PS) in the 3^rd & 5^th “moments of need”. The "Five Moments of Need" model (Mosher & Gottfredson, 2011) is a  model that captures both formal and informal learning tracks and needs. Bob Mosher & Conrad Gottfredson have also made significant contributions to the thinking on workplace learning.

The Five Moments are:-

# 1.  Learning for the first time (New)
# 2.  Workplace Learning (More)
# 3.  Applying what you've learned (Apply)
# 4.  When things go wrong (Solve)
# 5.  When things change (Change)

In Jane Harts 2012 Social Learning Continuum (this will be the subject of another post), the first 2 needs are best categorised as Formal and the other 3, Informal. And with an expected 2 billion smart handheld devices by 2030, the stage is ripe for an explosion of informal learning via assisted mobile technologies.

 

Are you ready for the future of learning?

Happy Year of the Horse!

吉中精神气势显，马不停蹄喜迎春

Best Wishes for a Healthy & Prosperous New Year!