How can Singapore companies manage with lesser talent?

Enough has been said about the difficulties many Singapore companies face in getting the talents they need to run their operations. Besides, there is also the affordability factor that is stopping many companies from employing the talents they need, since the top talents will always be commanding top dollars as they are hard to come by.

Is there a way out of this conundrum besieging our companies? Obviously, there is always an answer to every problem or else it is not a problem to start off. I am not talking about irresponsible answer like shutting down or moving your operations elsewhere. The secret lies in managing with lesser talent and outstripping productivity with cost. This may sound like an even more ridiculous answer.

But let’s take one step back and look at an example. The cost to make a car has not change much over the years even though the cost of the raw materials, labor and shipping cost had increased significantly. Isn’t this a different conundrum, amid a good one?

The secret of the automotive manufacturers lie in breaking down the jobs into simple tasks such that engineers and assembly line workers can perform these tasks easily. Besides, these companies have eliminated almost all the non-value-added activities out of their production line or normal office work processes and deploy automation for repetitive tasks which they still cannot eliminate.

Now this is not an insult to anyone when I use the term “lesser talent”. The talents required for making a safe, good and efficient car is no mean feat. But you probably find fewer Degrees and MBAs on the car factory floor than say at a typical office here. Every one of us is talented in our own ways but our talents may not necessarily match what the companies need at this moment. In fact, the talent gap often refers to the shortage of white collar workers and not the blue collar workers.

To solve this problem, the businesses should start by breaking down the jobs into simpler tasks where people with a different set of talents can perform these tasks efficiently. Companies should deploy more productivity-based IT software in the office in the same way the robots had been deployed to take over the repetitive tasks on the shop floor of an automotive assembly plant. Notice the differences, softwares versus robots, white collar versus blue collar tasks). Besides, all non-value-added tasks (those tasks which you performed but not paid for by customers in any way) should also be eliminated completely or automated if you currently can’t do without it.

Data compilation, reports preparation and countless meetings are examples of non-value-added activities that customers do not pay a higher price just because you do more of these in your companies. These are the first list of tasks to be made redundant, say with the help of a six sigma methodology.

Even better still, there are simple Excel-based productivity software that can transform the raw data from any ERP system or any other loose Excel workbooks that you have directly into easy to interpret Power-point slides ready for presentation anytime, anywhere. These simple software not only relief your companies from the mundane and often demeaning tasks of data compilation and report writing, it also keep storing your company knowledge in the software that sometimes make a staff turnover a blessing in disguise.

There are only a limited number of the “best practices” ways to look at a company performance. Once you have automated it, it can also eliminate a ton of repetitive efforts where expensive talent are deployed. These best practices can also help to improve your meeting effectiveness tremendously as someone just brought up recently as another key waste. Why employ top talents to sit through numerous meetings and leaving them with little time to do what they are paid for?

Hopefully this article gives us some food for thought on how we can manage our companies with lesser talent while lowering our cost at the same time. This article as shared is not a theory but motivated by the tremendous productivity gain achieved by a company where they generated more than 40 P&Ls for the management in less than 2 minutes, 150 presentations slides in less than 30 minutes with the use of a simple productivity software and they are now attempting to review the performances of all these entities in a single afternoon meeting!