For more than 10 years, Randstad Singapore has been conducting the Randstad Employer Brand Research to find out the latest key insights to changing talent expectations and job search behaviours. Respondents in the same study also get the opportunity to vote for the most attractive employer that they want to work for in Singapore.
A household name in Singapore, Income, one of the city’s leading providers of life, health, travel & car insurance as well as savings, investment and retirement plans.
In 2022, 88.79% of respondents said that they would like to work for the organisation because of the company’s financial health, corporate reputation and work environment.
how income attracts and retains talent
We spoke with Income’s Chief People Officer, Juliana Ang on Income’s talent attraction and workforce strategy and why life at Income is the best it ever has been.
tell us a little bit about the different teams and business units that the company is investing in next and how that will impact your talent attraction strategy.
At Income, when we look at our talent attraction strategy, we don’t assess it based on individual teams and business units. Instead, we adopt a more holistic approach to ensure that our talent strategy is relevant in meeting business needs and solving challenges, as well as staying abreast with the changing times.
Our talent attraction strategy is anchored on building multi-functional teams with people from different backgrounds, disciplines and expertise, who are well equipped to tackle these 3 key focus areas:
1. customer experience
Constantly review processes to improve the end-to-end customer journey, and incorporate new agile ways of working in order to change the way we approach problems, and solve customer’s issues (instead of what we thought their problems were)
2. leveraging the digital landscape
Innovating new digital products, services and expanding our footprint, improving processes through automation, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning capabilities. In addition, it is key to ensure the whole workforce is adequately equipped with the necessary data-driven skill sets, in order to remain relevant in today’s evolving environment and stay future ready.
3. product innovation
Harnessing technology to innovate to ensure we remain competitive in seeking like-minded partners locally and regionally to localise and scale digital-first offerings.
Our holistic approach drives our talent attraction strategy in terms of the types of people we are looking for to form multi-functional teams. We ensure that various roles are filled by the right talent with the right expertise fit. This is unlike taking a silo view with hiring only one person who is able to solve an enterprise challenge. As such, we look for talent who are customer-oriented, outcome-driven, collaborative and not afraid to challenge the status quo.
on the culture front, would you be able to explain what life in Income is like?
Life in income is exciting and the culture we continue to build is dynamic, collaborative and forward-thinking.
We are constantly strengthening our foundation and organisational culture, which is driven by the right mindset, attitude and behaviour. Our employees are agile in adapting to the changing landscape and sharpening their skill sets as innovative problem-solvers.
We encourage a collaborative culture with bottom-up innovation amongst multi-functional teams to provide different perspectives and expertise to create solutions. For example, we invite staff to IdeaSmash - our annual internal hackathon - to experience design thinking and better understand customer-centricity as our way of working.
We always ensure that we are customer-oriented, and in Income, our customers are both internal and external. Over the years, we’ve learnt the importance of cross-collaboration and using customer insights to resolve issues.
We are also Outcome-Driven, because being busy without focusing on the results that we want to deliver, will just mean ‘busy work’. However, being outcome-driven ensures that our activities bring us closer to the goals that we want to achieve.
And last but not least, we continue to stay externally-focused - to benchmark, gain market insights, and put ourselves out there, so that we don’t make assumptions of what our customers actually need.
Our recent corporatisation has also opened doors to new opportunities that we have not explored before but are now possible. As Income ventures abroad, we’ll be able to hire regionally through partnerships across Southeast Asia such as Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand.
with the changing talent expectations and demands over the past two years, how do you keep track of them and make sure that you remain agile and adaptable in your employee benefits and engagement strategy?
We conduct an annual Organisational Health Survey to ensure we have a pulse on the ground and create measurable plans to act on the voices we hear. We also conduct focus groups to deep dive into certain viewpoints, to better understand our employees’ needs.
We believe in grooming our people both professionally and personally and we advocate them growing on the job through upskilling as well as internal mobility. We are also open to supporting our staff in external courses that can sharpen their skill sets and better support them in fulfilling their job responsibilities.
Externally, we continuously benchmark our benefits and policies against the industry to ensure we remain competitive.
do you effectively communicate, engage and attract talent to work for Income over your other competitors? What are your most successful strategies and tactics?
Overall, our work environment, culture and the innovative work we do are the key employee value proposition factors that have attracted talent to join us.
We nurture our workforce to be future-ready. We encourage our staff to upskill, learn, explore and design their own career path. As a digitally driven insurer, a key area for us is to build a data-driven learning culture for employees so that they are empowered to understand and handle data meaningfully.
We started our data curriculum last year where every employee attended 16 hours of workshops and training relevant to their needs at work such as data visualisation, understanding AI and making data-driven decisions. We believe that learning is a continuous journey and will be continuing the data curriculum in 2023.
We have also been organising design-thinking workshops every year to help employees be adaptable, nimble, and innovative problem solvers.
Over the next few years, we aim to deepen learning for employees through functional specialisation certifications, as well as create a community learning platform to connect with one another and improve learning outcomes.
As a social enterprise, we believe in doing well in our work while also doing good by contributing back to society in supporting education for youth-in-need, seniors’ well-being and the environment. This also helps attract like-minded individuals whose values align with our causes.
Lastly, our industry-first innovative offerings, such as our lifestyle embedded insurance, SNACK, as well as our insurance-as-Service regional model - HIVE by Income - have drawn interest from skilled candidates who are interested in Fintech and Insurtech.
would you say that your hiring requirements have changed over the past few years? what do you look for in talent post-COVID that you may not have prioritised in the past?
Over the last few years, there has been a huge shift towards Data and tech talent – a trend we have observed across various sectors in Singapore as well.
Since we started our digital transformation more than four years back, business demands for these specialised roles have surged and they have become a critical asset in our transformation journey.
Apart from technical competencies, key attributes we look for in talent are servant leadership and self-directed learners and interdependent workers. As we moved into agile transformation, ownership and accountability have become increasingly important to the organisation. Every staff should be a self-directed leader who takes ownership of their roles and deliverables. They should be able to see challenges and roadblocks as learning opportunities and innovate to resolve them. Coupled with a hybrid work environment, the discipline to connect, relate and support one another are essential qualities that are key to their success at Income.
On the HR front, we are looking at future technology applications to sharpen HR work, such as modernising our HR Information System (HRIS). These technologies will deepen our HR analytics capabilities to improve employee onboarding experience, enhance employee development tracking as well as introduce a HR Chatbot to our employees that will make HR processes easy and intuitive.
Further down the road, we would also look at using AI predictive analysis to better understand and design more customised staff engagement activities to enhance our talent attraction and retention efforts.
what would people applying for jobs in Income need to know about?
Income is a digitally driven and progressive insurer that believes in harnessing technology and streamlining processes to solve pain points, while also driving bottom-up innovation.
We take on an open and agile approach in the way we innovate our product, services and experiences which is also embedded in our way of working at Income.
We have adopted a hybrid working model, which provides employees the freedom to work from any of our offices or remotely. The work flexibility support their agility and productivity, but also accelerate innovation and improve collaborations across multi-functional teams
Change is escalating and transformation is a continuous journey. While Income has set its sight on agile transformation, there are still lots of work to enable every part of the organisation to sign up for the change.
So for new hires coming on board, the thrill is that you will be standing in the middle of the transformation journey, to experience the good, the bad and the ugly, and have the opportunity to chart your own growth journey. This invitation is extended to all who are bold and want to be part of the catalyst for change.
about the randstad employer brand award
The Randstad Employer Brand Award assesses the attractiveness of Singapore’s 75 largest commercial employers known by at least 10% of the population. The results of the Randstad Employer Brand Award is based on public perception and focuses on two main areas:
- overall company or brand awareness
- absolute employer attractiveness
The awards are not open to nominations and the results are solely based on the opinions of the local workforce, making it the only award that truly represents ‘the people’s choice’.
The respondents were asked to identify companies whose names they recognise and indicate how much they wanted to work for them. This was followed by an evaluation of employee value proposition drivers, such as salary and employee benefits, work environment, job scope and more, for each of the commercial companies surveyed.
A strong employer brand is important in every business in order to attract and retain talent. Connect with us to learn more about employer branding, industry insights, hiring outlook and latest talent trends. To hire your future talent with a competitive edge, get in touch with our specialised recruiters and learn more about our bespoke HR solutions.