By Sue-Ann Chia

TEAMY the Bee could be buzzing back with a turbo-charged boost into your offices.

The cute cartoon insect - Singapore's first productivity mascot in 1982 - may be given a movie-makeover and resurrected to front a new campaign.

'After 30 years, we will have Transformer Bees because the world has gone on to The Matrix and Transformers,' Mr Lee Yi Shyan says with a grin, referring to the science-fiction action films.

There is, after all, a Transformer known as Bumblebee - a black and yellow Autobot which transforms from a Volkswagen Beetle into a dynamic robot.

Mr Lee's comments on movie-theme mascots are clearly tongue-in-cheek.

But the Minister of State for Manpower, and Trade and Industry is serious about pushing companies to work smarter and faster.

He is overseeing a new government task force which aims to pump up productivity levels, which have been plummeting over the last three decades. The slide has become more pronounced in recent years.

Companies are not producing as much or as fast as before with the number of workers and resources they have - leading to lower output per unit cost.

To counter this dip, civil servants in the five-month-old inter-agency task force have been wracking their brains to find a way to convey the message that more can be done with less - through automation, innovation and imagination, for example.

Gone are the days when teamwork and the efficiency of individual workers were the main buzzwords.

Today, there is an equal, if not greater, necessity for companies to relook their processes and business models, and for industries to overhaul their practices.

In this battle for greater productivity, a Transformer Bee could be the new-generation mascot to help propel Singapore forward.

But can that Singapore Bumblebee help pull it off?

No more sweatshop model

THE action hero mascot personifies what Mr Lee describes as 'Productivity 4.0' - the next phase that will require boosters, such as through the greater use of technology or radical changes to work processes.

The first phase was in the 1980s, when annual average productivity growth exceeded 5 per cent.

It dropped to around 3 per cent in the second phase - the 1990s - and even lower, to 1 per cent, in the third phase of the 2000s.

Such a slide, Mr Lee notes, is a trend in developed countries because economic growth - which affects productivity - tends to slow down and moderate after a while.

But Singapore is not content to let it slide further.

'Where we are today is really Productivity 4.0. We are preparing the blueprint to allow us to grow in the next decade,' he explains.

The target: that productivity growth can hit 2 per cent a year from 2010.

But how to do it?

Mr Lee, an engineer by training, has a ready answer: 'The basic concept of productivity is really to increase output while reducing labour input.

'Every one of us must strive to produce more with the same head count or less head count. So that is the objective.'

It sounds simple.

But it is no mean feat, considering that productivity figures have gone far south - into negative territory since the last quarter of 2007 - and stayed that way for five consecutive quarters until early this year.

Latest figures for the second quarter of this year have not been released yet, but the situation is unlikely to have improved much.

The official view for why there has been this constant contraction is that companies have had excess manpower.

The period of decreasing productivity coincides with the employment boom, where a record level of jobs had been created in the two years of 2007 and 2008.

Employers could have been on a hiring binge - recruiting too many workers too quickly in anticipation of further growth, but without a spike in orders to support the increase in manpower.

It led to a situation where each worker ended up producing less. This was because the work available was spread out among more of them.

The onslaught of the global economic crisis late last year just made matters worse, as there were even fewer job orders due to the slowdown in global demand.

So is it just an issue of over-hiring by employers?

It could be part of the problem.

Mr Lee reveals that 55 per cent of Singapore's economic growth in the last decade stems from manpower growth.

'For GDP (gross domestic product) to grow, you can either inject capital or you can inject manpower,' he explains.

Since Singapore's economy has been growing at a faster rate than productivity growth, it would mean the country has been growing with 'a lot of injection of manpower'.

'We really can't go on just injecting manpower as the driver for growth. That is not sustainable and that shouldn't be our default position,' he says.

'Companies shouldn't feel that they can now relax and slow down on innovation, on reinventing business models, and just rely on manpower. If you do that, you would lose competitiveness over the long term.'

Companies have to be smarter, he says, adding: 'Productivity growth does not really mean working longer, working harder. That is really a sweatshop model that nations are so accustomed to.

'Productivity growth really means doing things differently, doing more value-added things... using less or the same resources.'

Less reliance on foreigners

ONE question that has arisen in an ongoing debate is whether the influx of foreign workers contributed to the plunge in productivity.

Easy access to cheaper foreign labour could be one reason companies hired more workers rather than looked at ways to improve work efficiency.

Foreigner numbers here have shot up. They grew 20 per cent last year, the fastest-ever in the last decade, as many flocked here to take up the bumper crop of new jobs - which are too many for locals to fill.

Mr Lee reasons that having more foreign workers is an outcome of companies expanding quickly to respond to market demands. But this cannot be the long-term solution, he concedes.

Offering solutions, he says: 'Maybe it's the next-generation machines that you must use; maybe it's the next-generation products you must produce; maybe it's some form of outsourcing you must consider.'

The newly formed Economic Strategies Committee (ESC), which is looking at new ways for Singapore to grow, is also reviewing the foreign worker policy.

It wants to wean Singapore off its reliance on foreign labour.

With more than one million foreigners working here, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong recently remarked that he could not imagine having that number grow to two million over the years.

Asked if his task force will work with the ESC on getting companies to rely less on foreigners, Mr Lee Yi Shyan says: 'Certainly, they are two sides of the same coin.

'When you want to moderate the growth of the labour market, it would mean that you also need to raise the productive capacity of whatever number you have.'

Manpower Minister Gan Kim Yong is chairing the ESC's subgroup on inclusive growth.

And one thing they want to achieve is a more even distribution of jobs between foreign and local workers, Mr Lee discloses.

In what may seem to be a departure from Singapore's current grow-at- all-cost model, he adds: 'You don't want a situation where it is growth for growth's sake and you have to bring in lots of foreign workers to support the growth.

'It has got less value compared to growth that creates more value locally - better jobs for workers, more value-retention here.'

Making services work

FOR a start, the task force has zoomed in on increasing productivity levels in the services sector, which employs almost 70 per cent of workers here.

The focus is on three areas: hotels, retail, and food and beverage (F&B).

Together, these sectors employ 320,000 workers and contribute 3.5 per cent of Singapore's GDP.

They have been targeted as the sectors that have fared poorly on the productivity scale when compared to other countries, says Mr Lee.

Singapore's retail sector is half as productive as that in the United States and Britain; while F&B is 60 per cent as productive compared to the US; and our hotels are 75 per cent as productive compared to those in the US.

'Why is this so? We are very curious,' he says. 'If we can improve their productivity, we can derive a lot of value.'

One reason has to do with how the industry operates, he notes.

In the US and Japan, for instance, it is common for the hotel industry to outsource their chamber maid functions.

'The chamber maids can clean many more rooms than your resident chamber maid. Productivity-wise, maybe they can tidy up and clean 1.5 times or two times the rooms that you can,' he says.

So the question is: Why doesn't Singapore have companies that offer chamber maid services?

'Is it a chicken-and-egg situation? Is it because our hotels don't outsource, therefore there's no chance for people to supply this contract... and therefore our hotels cannot outsource?'

Likewise, there is a lack of proper support functions in the F&B industry.

He gives an example of Japan, where suppliers to restaurants wash and cut ingredients such as asparagus to the length that the restaurants require.

This means restaurants in Japan can save on hiring kitchen assistants to do the washing and chopping.

Improving productivity could also be as easy as rearranging the kitchen layout. So instead of walking six steps to get an ingredient or a utensil, it can be reached in three steps, he says.

Service can also be stepped up in the dining area by having customers pay their bills at the cashier, rather than wait for the bill to be delivered to the table.

Many F&B outlets find that quite a number of customer complaints arise from them having to wait too long for the bill to arrive, he says.

In the retail sector, Mr Lee cites how American retailer Nordstrom charms customers by letting them try on as many pairs as possible - and offers to deliver the shoes to their hotel, or even to the airport.

Similarly, retail outlets in Singapore have to go the extra mile to bring in the sales, which will add to productivity.

For those who require training, there are national programmes such as the Customer-Centric Initiative, which inculcates a service mentality in workers and the company.

Having made use of the programme, department store Metro has started having 'greeters' outside its stores to welcome customers - just like some Japanese stores do.

'We have started on these three sectors and we are quite determined to see how government agencies like Spring can come in to help them to adopt the best practices, invest in technology and showcase pioneers who embrace the technology,' he says.

'After that, they can be replicated to the others, many more others.'

Changing the mindset

AS THE task force collects more information on productivity-boosting measures, it is also thinking about setting up a resource centre for companies.

'Such a centre will serve as a think tank to collate and digest best practices and research findings, and then disseminate them in a user-friendly way to the industry,' says Mr Lee.

But while the national effort to raise Singapore's output levels is useful to companies and the country, there is a nagging feeling that something is still not quite right.

Why do companies here have to be cajoled into doing so, unlike firms in other countries which take their own initiative?

Mr Lee smiles and then replies: 'We accept the world as it is.

'We accept that they are high (in productivity) in the US, Japan. And even in Hong Kong, they are marginally higher because the companies are more innovative.

'We have our own way of doing things and the Government is here to facilitate, to catalyse some of these.'

But he adds that 'if our companies can take more initiative, take more ownership on the issue of productivity, I think we will really progress faster'.

It is a cultural mindset, he says.

Japanese car manufacturer Toyota produced a book called the Toyota Way which describes the company culture as one in which employees go to work every day thinking about how to improve the product and processes.

'Imagine a plant of 7,000 people all thinking at the same time how to improve it. It's no wonder they produce the best- quality cars,' he says.

'You need a very different mindset in wanting to improve and wanting to have higher productivity. That would take time to inculcate.'

Perhaps Singapore's Bumblebee - if the mascot becomes a reality - could put some buzz into the process.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.