TRACKING PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH

TRACKING PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH

46.

Mdm Ho Geok Choo asked the Minister for Trade and Industry (a) what measures and methods are in place to track productivity growth in firms and across industry sectors in Singapore and how will these processes and approaches be cascaded to the human resource departments to enable them to better track the productivity of employees; and (b) what is being done to ensure the cooperation of agencies and Ministries in their data crunching and approaches to the treatment of productivity measurement and tracking.

Mr Lim Hng Kiang: At the national level, the Government tracks productivity through indicators such as Value Added (VA) per worker. Such data are readily available to the public.

But productivity improvements are essentially driven at the firm level by employers and their workers. The scope for such improvements will also depend on the unique characteristics of the industry they are in. Thus, to help firms understand their own productivity performance and to drive relevant changes at the firm level, more granular indicators are needed.

For example, the Food and Beverage (F&B) industry employs a high number of part-time workers. This is part and parcel of the nature of the F&B business. However, including part-time workers into the VA per worker numbers would necessarily bring measured productivity down. A more meaningful measure for the F&B industry would be VA per man-hour.

Another example is the Hospitality industry. Hotels who serve similar consumer segments may choose to compare the efficiency of their processes through indicators like room units cleaned per housekeeper, or number of check-ins/check-outs handled per front desk officer. Besides quantitative measures, there are also qualitative measures such as how pleased customers are with the check-in and check-out experience, attentiveness of service staff, level of customer satisfaction, etc.

In the retail sector, there is also a tripartite effort to raise productivity. GEMS-UP, which is the program name for "Go the Extra Mile for Service", aims to raise the capabilities of retailers for service excellence, by way of helping retailers re-design their business processes, increasing their use of IT and technology, as well as instituting comprehensive training programs through frameworks such as the Service Excellence Workforce Skills Qualifications (WSQ). In short, productivity improvement requires a holistic approach towards upgrading and human resources development. Employers and HR managers have a great role to play in the process.

The above examples clearly demonstrate that different industries require their own plans for productivity measurements and improvements. It is with this consideration that the National Productivity and Continuing Education Council approached productivity improvement on a sectoral basis. It has set up working groups for the 12 priority sectors ranging from construction to retail, F&B and general manufacturing to develop productivity

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improvement plans for each sector. The working groups will work closely with the business associations and companies to develop sector-specific productivity measurements and indicators, guide companies in gathering data for tracking productivity performance, as well as help to provide relevant productivity benchmarks from overseas.

In addition, the working groups are also studying the need for sector-specific productivity centres. These centres could become thought-leaders showcasing industry best practices, best-of-class innovations and solutions found locally or internationally, and also undertake industry-level research. In this way, industry players, intermediaries, research bodies and training organisations can all come together in a private-public sector partnership to raise productivity across industry sectors.

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