The continuing pandemic has exposed growing gaps in the job market, as employers struggle to hire the right people to help drive transformation and growth. Still, that is not stopping companies from adapting and pushing ahead with the new practices to stay ahead.
Anthony Choong, head of international business at career development platform Glints, says hiring woes have continued amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. Speaking at a recent webinar organised by Glints entitled “Future of hiring: Building successful hybrid teams in Southeast Asia”, he adds: “What we have seen recently is that 27.5% of job vacancies are unfilled for more than six months. We realised that this is more so because of how 57% of roles are now transformed to that of a remote one, rather than a lack of required skills, work experience or stiff competition from other employers.”
Fellow speaker Malik Badaruddin, chief technology officer at car sharing platform GetGo, also notes that the changing needs of consumers due to Covid-19 prompted a rethink of their expansion strategies in terms of hiring and operations. “As a new start-up that launched only in February [2020], we were hit right at the spot where Covid-19 was pretty much still around,” says Malik. “We found it difficult to grow quickly, due to the nature of the business, but also in terms of development and finding talent due to competition.”
Meanwhile, Economic Development Board (EDB) regional vice president Alfred Lum observes that companies in Southeast Asia are likely to have reacted to the pandemic in two phases. As he explains: “The first phase is that of recognition and reaction, likely occurring during the first six to 12 months following the onset of Covid-19. During this phase, many companies actually focused on strengthening their operational resilience to ensure business continuity. At the time, it is about [the company] being able to meet operating capacity thresholds in order to ensure customer fulfilment.”
Lum notes that at this first stage, market expansion was not a priority for companies. “However, as we move forward to the next phase, which I believe many companies are right now, there is a desire for retooling and restructuring,” he adds. This entails planning for a future when Covid-19 eventually becomes endemic, when “companies begin taking stock of new trends, developments, opportunities and making sense of all these in order to reset some of their corporate priorities, in order to identify how best to capture these opportunities and turbo boost recovery.”
He also believes that building new capabilities and capacities will invariably lead to more downstream investments moving forward — an essential catalyst for innovation, fostering collaboration and enhancing employee engagement levels.
Growing in a pandemic
As the pandemic continues, Lum is seeing many companies are centralising more by region: Instead of pulling roles back in their respective home countries, many are actually concentrating even more in their regional control towers or headquarters for important growth markets like Southeast Asia. This means that Singapore, as a regional hub, will likely remain relevant for days to come. “If anything, there is a preference for Singapore, because in times of uncertainty, there's actually a flight to safety,” he adds. “We now look at a model where Singapore then serves as many companies’ regional headquarters, and what we are likely to see more of is strategic business activities that have a global or regional scope will likely continue to be centralised out of Singapore.”
He also believes that many companies in the coming months will set up more so-called “centres of excellence” in headquarter locations, where they will actually lead efforts in terms of innovation, developing critical technologies and human capital capabilities. Some examples include potentially setting up consumer insights hubs, to gather insights on the Southeast Asian market, to better guide some R&D efforts in areas that are witnessing early demand growth.
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Fellow speaker Jason Seng, a partner with people advisory services at Ernst & Young (EY), agrees that Singapore’s strength as a Southeast Asian business hub in this time of Covid-19, as Singapore continues to have high index scores for quality of living and talent pools.
However, in light of expanding hiring models and ‘hybrid’ remote working situations, he believes that businesses are still inclined to hire regionally — from Vietnam and the Philippines — and working collaboratively with workers from those countries. “In my view, there is an eclectic mix of options that will change the face of hiring that continues to prove uncertain in this time,” he adds.
The Nov 23 webinar highlighted the opportunities for regional businesses, while speakers shared insights on managing a hybrid workplace
Changes in hiring practices
In the meantime, Glints’s commercial director Puay Lim Yeo notes that present hiring strategies by global companies are likely dependent on the nature of their work and how they wish to expand in Southeast Asia. “Overall, there needs to be a greater appreciation for the different nuances or textural differences of the different talent pools around the region,” he says. “For example, I think today Indonesia is seen very favourably as a talent pool for e-commerce, whereas Vietnam is seen as a very good talent pool for the gaming industry.”
Another trend he anticipates businesses small and large to likely turn to external support to identify and access specialised talent pools as previously mentioned, and how to employ them. “We are seeing an increasing usage of what we call employer of record services, this stands to make it easier for companies to employ talents in distributed locations like Vietnam or Indonesia via a single platform.”
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EDB’s Lum believes that the pandemic has presented an opportunity for human resources (HR) teams to evolve in this climate. “With hybrid work practices likely to stay, and also taking into account new technologies that are driving shifts in the workforce and workplace, there are increasing expectations for HR functions to move beyond just playing an operational role to what we see what we term as more strategic,” he explains. “These roles are having a bigger hand in terms of strategic activities like organisation design, talent management, workforce planning, with these activities likely to be consolidated out of regional control towers or headquarters.”
The new normal
Covid-19 has made remote work a widespread phenomenon across industries worldwide. But as time goes by and the severity of the pandemic tapers, calls for managing these ‘hybrid’ work models have been made for improved levels of engagement and productivity in this new normal. EY’s Seng notes the problem of “passivity” in terms of overall engagement levels that comes with remote working due to Covid-19. “When team members are unable to work physically alongside their bosses [and vice versa], and people become [exceedingly] passive on Zoom meetings or conference calls with many participants, engagement becomes a huge challenge,” he adds. “What managers need to look at, moving forward, is increased empathy and engagement, [where] a new performance management mindset is critical [for success at the workplace].”
On this note, Lum says resilience is likely an equally or more important priority at workplaces, alongside efficiency and optimisation. He continues: “Another key factor is agility. I think [companies] need to organise themselves to equip themselves with enough flexibility to move and succeed in fast changing markets and environments [moving forward].”
For GetGo, Malik adds that while a hybrid workforce is “nothing new in the software space”, as GetGo has worked with Java developers, software engineers and more distributed across all over the world since its inception, he notes that it is important to be mindful of “establishing a common understanding of working culture” in the company.
“When you hire across countries and [oftentimes] cultures, there inevitably are communication differences,” he continues. “We have to establish not only with [healthy] working relationships, but also interpersonal relationships, to avoid miscommunication and make sure that instructions are understood and clarified.”
On a personal level, Malik says he conducts one-on-one sessions with his subordinates to understand their needs, and how to make them successful in their roles. “What I prioritise with my subordinates is to understand the need for growth, because not only are they hired as staff, but they also have that [need for growth] and [desire] to learn more,” he shares.
At the end of the day, Lum says it is crucial that companies balance pragmatic approaches when developing their operating models with investing in resiliency considerations. “The goal really is about ensuring that your workforce model is not only implementable, but also sustainable in the long run.”
