How Singapore offices can battle the "Complain Culture"

Singapore has gotten a bad rep as having a “complain culture” with their barrage of grievances ranging from not being able to board the MRT train during peak hours to having to fend off foreigners from stealing their jobs.

Now the depressing results of a Gallup poll released last month helps to provide some insight into this sad state of affairs.

According to Gallup’s ‘State of the Global Workplace’ report, Singapore has one of the world’s highest proportions of employees described as “not engaged”.

The survey found that a startling 91 per cent of Singaporean workers were either “not engaged” or “actively disengaged”, with a paltry 9 per cent classified as “engaged” at work.

This is almost embarrassing given our First World country status and highly evolved knowledge-based economy.

“Employee engagement” has been a buzzword in human resource circles for many years now and despite the intensive focus on developing talent engagement strategies, it appears that the majority of Singaporean workers are emotionally disconnected from their work.

What are we doing wrong? And more importantly, what else can be done?

Unhappiness In The Workplace

People spend a good majority of their waking hours at work so it’s easy to understand how being disengaged at work can create an unhappy person – and vice versa.  

If an individual’s main motivation to show up at work is driven by a need to hit his Key Performance Indicators (KPI), then it becomes a task-driven job and he will not check-in psychologically at work, let alone connect emotionally with his job.

This employee will likely only put in the bare minimal in order to achieve those KPIs and prevent himself from getting fired.

He will not be in the right headspace, and “heartspace”, for creativity to flourish and therefore is unlikely to propose new ideas and suggest improvements in the workplace.

The main culprit behind a disengaged employee is thus a lack of meaning at work.

The Negativity Bias

It is important for leaders and human resource professionals to understand a key evolutionary principle: human beings are wired for negativity to increase our chances of survival. So we are more likely to pay attention to negative events and expend our energy on them.

This basic survival skill creates workers who are more reactive than proactive and fuels the same “complain culture” in the workplace that is so characteristic of Singapore society.

A more destructive consequence of this intense need for survival is gossip and politicking amongst the workforce.

As an HR leader, you need to recognise that you are actually working against the grain of human nature. With this understanding, you can really grasp what a gargantuan task it is to undo this law of nature and spin it into something positive.

Creating Meaning At Work

You already know that the role of HR is not about being a pencil pusher. Your top priority should be to help your employees create meaning in their work.

Focus on enhancing your employees’ wellbeing at work and this will go a long way towards creating a greater sense of team spirit, teamwork and a strong corporate culture.

Of course, this is easier said than done and for many human resource practitioners out there, it will require a paradigm shift to make this theory come alive.

There is no quick-fix method, and you cannot achieve true engagement by simply packing your workers off for a team-building event or sending them to a one-off stress or conflict-management workshop.

You have probably already spent significant sums of money on such trainings and if you have not seen real results amongst your workforce, there is a missing link you need to discover.

The gap here may be that to bring about real change, it needs to be a concerted effort and it’s a step-by-step process that begins with you.

You may need to break out of the traditional way of thinking that focuses on problem-solving methods and equip yourself with a full understanding of how the notion of “wellbeing” can be harnessed as a science through the implementation of positive psychology in your workforce.

Positive psychology is not just feel-good motivational fluff. It is a very methodological, science-based study of the factors and conditions that lead to human flourishing.

Working on an emotional level, positive psychology elicits mindfulness and is more impactful as it seeks to improve one’s intrapersonal and interpersonal skills, leading to a greater sense of harmony and wellbeing amongst co-workers.  

Applying Positing Psychology Principles in the Hiring Process

You can even use the principles of psychology in recruitment – so that you select and hire the right candidates from the get-go, rather than employing the wrong ones and then spending resources to find ways to engage disengaged workers.

With a strong foundation in positive psychology, you will be able to recruit employees based on the psychology of strengths (and also identify unrealised strengths) and not just because they have the right qualifications or years of relevant experience.

Firstly, identify the top qualities that your organisation requires so that you have these clearly in mind when assessing candidates to ensure alignment of their strengths with the values that your organisation upholds.

Then ask questions during the interview that will help elicit a candid response from the individual to reveal his strong suits.

For example, as a punt, you could ask the candidate the following question to test their reaction and creative thinking abilities: “Would you be willing to work in this job for free?”

You could also ask him to write his own Job Description for the role at hand as this would give you insight into what he feels he has to offer.

Another option is to ask completely non-related questions such as, “Given the opportunity to do anything in the world with no constraint on time or resources, what would you like to do for the next one month?”

The candidate’s response can clue you in to type of person he really is. For instance, if he says that he would love to champion a cause and spend the next month building a school in Cambodia, then you could infer that this individual has a lot of empathy and a kind and altruistic nature. 

With an understanding of the positive psychology framework, you won’t need elaborate and expensive assessment tools to effectively delve into the psyche of candidates and filter the high potential candidates from the heap – saving you a massive amount of time and resources on employee engagement and talent retention programmes by just hiring the right individual from the start.