With S$5.5 billion committed over the next five years to raise productivity, the government is taking bold steps to achieve its goal of 2% to 3% productivity growth over the next decade.

A key measure highlighted to increase productivity involves raising the skills and creative potential of every worker. 

"We will progressively build up a first-class system for Continuing Education and Training (CET) over the next decade. This will be a major investment in our people, up and down the skills ladder.

“Our employers must also empower their people to find new ways to create value, and help unlock every worker’s potential. The best companies already do this; we must spread this enabling culture across all businesses,” said Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam.

CET and investment in development of the workforce is now more important than ever. At Comaea, we fiercely believe in making human capital work. A competence-based training and development programme can make the difference between a run of the mill and a value adding, strategic based development programme.

A competence-based development programme lets you define employee job profiles that are specific, comprehensive and consistent throughout the organisation. This helps to ascertain if employees possess the required competencies for each job profile he or she is involved in. 

By applying this framework, strategic development decisions that are backed by facts can be made. Increase productivity today by developing a job profile specific competent workforce. 

Mattson argues quite rightly that making the wrong decisions about employee layoffs can put a company in a serious state of disadvantage especially as the economy starts to rebound. After all, employees that remain following an organisational restructuring effort will determine its future success. The bottom line is that in times where layoffs are necessary, it is imperative to retain the best, most motivated and high potential employees.

That said, it is of common sense and knowledge that in order to do well, an organisation must retain its best employees. The problem many managers face is the lack of data to make informed decisions. This is exactly what Mattson means by seeing a need to "democratise" human capital management. Human capital management these days is purely a HR process where the rest of the organisation contributes information once or twice a year. A transformation in this process is required to help managers identify their best performers with vital information and statistics and do their best to retain these top performers.

To "democratise" this process would mean to empower every employee to make performance and competence measurement part of their daily routine. This will help managers identify employees who have both potential and motivation. After all, people perform differently under different conditions; differentiating the 'once a year' top performers from the all year round top performers would provide excellent intelligence to managers.

With the right tools, human capital management can be transformed into a democratic process where vital information is passed on the the strategic decision makers. In the weeks to come, I will discuss more about Mattson's views on the democratising process itself. I hope that with today's article, some seeds of doubt have been raised with regards to your organisation's human capital management processes.

Edit: In my article I had neglected to add in the "Asian context" of Mattson's views. What I meant was that, these views are especially applicable to Asian companies, where many HR processes are driven from top down, there to fulfill administrative functions. Companies go through the motions once a year to fulfill their HR departments' performance management requirements. By democratising these processes, these would cease to be an annual pointless exercise and present top management with very good data to help with decision making.

Instead, in these times, we find it important that firms re-think their HR management strategies. Turbulent times require active performance management initiatives, creative methods, innovation and out of the box solutions.

For example, instead of totally stopping all non-core training sessions (ie. leadership programmes), firms can switch the method of training to a webinar style training course where the value of the course is hardly compromised while costs can be kept to a minimum.

The basic principles of performance and competency management remains the same:

1. What we have - in terms of employee competencies and skills
2. Where we want to be in the future - overall organisation goals and targets
3. How do we bridge this gap and get to the future point successfully - training, development, recruitment etc.

This core methodology can still be adhered to in these times with limited budgets and resources. We believe that a measured approach is needed here.

First, a review of the organisation's goal and target setting process is required. New targets have to be set which take into account the current business climate.

Second, a tool is required to understand the firm's current standing and the gaps it is facing to reach the revised target.

Upon which, a strategy to align all resources, current and future, towards this revised goal via creative and innovative methods is needed.

Try this out at a department or unit level and you may be surprised at the results!

These days, companies are increasingly facing the dual challenge of (a) reducing administrative costs while at the same time (b) increasing overall organisational efficiency.

The key is to accomplish more with less. To achieve this, organisations need to align their employees’ competencies with high level business objectives.

For Human Resource (HR) executives, these challenges are accentuated by a lack of technology infrastructure to eliminate inefficient paper-based processes, centralise employee competence data, and maintain a clear picture of how employee effectiveness impacts the organisation.

HR is no longer just an administrative arm of the effective organisation; instead HR initiatives are being tied to the strategic decisions and goals of an organisation. Contact us to find out how you can lift your HR's effectiveness to prepare your organisation for future challenges.