|
By Goh Chin Lian
Productivity was a dirty word when former civil servant Freddy Soon was handed the task of promoting it at the national level in 1982.
'Workers thought that productivity meant the employer tang lui, wah zor ga bua si,' said Mr Soon, 68. The Hokkien phrase means the employer 'earns the money while I work till I'm half dead'.
Thus began a carpet-bomb campaign to make every adult and child in Singapore appreciate the meaning of the 'P' word.
Nearly 30 years on, this word is making headlines again.
Raising Singapore's productivity growth to 2 per cent to 3 per cent a year over the next 10 years is the key target of the Economic Strategies Committee's (ESC) report released last Monday. In the weeks leading up to the release of the report, government leaders took pains to explain the 'P' word and correct misconceptions.
Productivity, they said, was not so much about working harder, but working smarter and getting more training. They stressed that companies too had a role to play in developing new markets and finding innovative ways of doing business.
Such talk contrasts with the productivity message of earlier years, which focused on incremental changes like improving work attitudes and management practices.
The drumming up of the message is also nowhere as loud and wide as the productivity movement of the 1980s, going by the accounts of those who took part in it.
As director of productivity promotion at the then National Productivity Board, Mr Soon had a budget of $1 million to drive home the message.
'No civil servant dared to spend $1 million on advertising, but I dared,' said Mr Soon, who later became deputy chief executive of Spring Singapore and is now an adviser to the group chief executive officer and managing director in water management company Hyflux.
Backing him up was a report by a committee on productivity in 1981 that recommended the launch of a productivity movement for the public.
It went down to the nuts and bolts, such as setting up a system of national awards to reward productive practices in the form of paid holiday tours, exchange or study trips.
Schools would also play a part in inculcating productivity values from a young age.
More project work where students' work is assessed as a team will help to emphasise the value of group effort, it said.
Even the precise messages and method were spelt out for the media to adopt.
The Singapore Broadcasting Corporation could highlight the benefits of good management practices, teamwork and labour-management cooperation through news items, forums, radio talks, documentaries, humorous sketches, cartoons, quizzes and debates, said the report.
The message also took the form of a productivity jingle that played so incessantly on TV that Mr Renny Yeo, president of the Singapore Manufacturers' Federation, still remembers it today.
'Good, better, best, never let it rest, till your good is better and your better is best,' he recited, referring to the jingle composed by the late Charles Lazaroo, a retired head of music at the Education Ministry.
The hard sell, as it was described by the press at the time, was matched with a mushrooming of worker-engagement groups in factories and offices known as Quality Control Circles (QCCs). The equivalent Work Improvement Teams (WITs) emerged in the civil service and military camps.
Brainstorming (to generate a large number of ideas for group problem-solving) and fish-bone diagrams (which broke down root causes of an event in layers of detail) became their new thinking tools, recalled Mr Loo Say Tuang, 57, who took part in QCCs at his workplace through the 1980s and 1990s.
Then a technician with Seiko Instruments Singapore, he and half a dozen of his colleagues would discuss ways to improve the speed and quality of repairs for watches.
He said: 'We felt a great sense of achievement because we could solve our problems with our team members.'
This pro-active approach was one of the desired changes in workers' attitudes.
By 1990, nine out of 10 workers surveyed also knew that productivity meant having good work attitudes, improving quality and doing work more efficiently.
More than 90 per cent of the workforce were reportedly satisfied with the understanding and trust between labour and management, and participation in QCCs and WITs reached 8.5 per cent of the total workforce in 1995.
Productivity proponents felt the movement later lost its momentum as a national campaign: By 2003, there was no productivity campaign rally.
They cite a host of reasons for the loss in interest: People were less likely to buy a top-down hard-sell approach. The nation became busy with seizing growth opportunities. It became unclear which was the lead agency and what the focus was.
This was mirrored by the name change of the National Productivity Board to the Singapore Productivity and Standards Board in 1996, and to the Standards, Productivity and Innovation Board (Spring Singapore) in 2002.
In the process, Spring Singapore acquired a new role to promote creativity to sustain growth, as the country moved towards an innovation-driven economy. Promoting small- and medium-sized enterprises became a priority.
Now coming full circle is the ESC's proposal to form a high-level national council with a broad role to drive efforts to raise productivity, a move welcomed by its proponents.
Said Mr Yeo, who is a sub-committee member in the ESC: 'I think 2 per cent to 3 per cent productivity growth is ambitious but achievable if we put our minds together.
'The whole nation must rally behind this effort like what we did in the old days.'
chinlian@sph.com.sg
This article was first published in The Straits Times.
| 
