Hello Future: Perfecting the fit in fashion roles
Workforce Singapore
Workforce Singapore (WSG) promotes the development, competitiveness, inclusiveness, and employability of the workforce.
Whether you are a smaller fashion label hoping to go global or a traditional stalwart seeking to embrace an omnichannel approach, success often hinges on tailoring roles to match those ambitions.
Broadening roles to meet growing ambitions
It’s tough to expand when employees barely stay 12 months.
To realise its dream of taking its brand overseas, a local fashion start-up needed to grow its team from 20 to 100 over the course of a year. Instead, it found itself replacing staff who were quitting 6 to 12 months into the job.
The children’s fashion label believed a digital employee handbook that spelt out its missions, policies and benefits would somehow draw everyone closer. And it was with this idea that they approached Singapore Polytechnic’s School of Business’ consulting team.
Industry Engagement Manager June Li Ng, who led the SP consulting team, disagreed. “What they needed wasn’t a handbook, but a system,” she says. Expansion requires having a structured and consistent approach to hiring, onboarding, and measuring and rewarding performance. And while the owners didn’t feel they lacked one, their staff did. “If you cannot see how you will progress, how can you imagine a future with a company?”
Scaling a business can be messy – and employees crave structure, says June Li. They need to be clear on their roles and expectations, rewards, and development opportunities. There must also be a clear and fair system for recognition in place. Without this, churn soon makes its way to the list of challenges.
Besides having a process in place, people management also needs a person in charge. “Someone has to be the custodian and driver for the project, so employees also know that it is more than a paper exercise.”
The current HR professional was double hatting, managing onboarding and resignations while overseeing company administration.
The team’s idea was to makeover the HR role in 2 ways: first, by putting into place a system that gave employees greater clarity while providing the owners with concrete insights that they could use to guide decision-making; and second, by training the HR professional to manage that system easily and effectively.
With freely available cloud software and Robotic Process Automation, onboarding, performance management and appraisal systems were digitised, and put on a simple dashboard. Employees could complete work-related processes with a click, and with a week of training, HR could accomplish in 5 hours tasks that used to take 5 days. The HR professional now had time to focus on what was more important – employee engagement – and is, unsurprisingly, happier at work.
It is too early to assess the full impact of the solution on attrition, says June, but the resulting HR ecosystem has helped the company grow its online reach into overseas markets, where it is now looking to build local teams.
Refashioning job scopes for a changing retail landscape
For another fashion retailer, it was digital borders that were harder to push through.
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Its major brands had a strong physical retail presence in the region, but the company needed to find a way to keep up with the omnichannel pressure amplified by the pandemic, explains Chua Ke Le, Senior Associate Consultant for Human Capital Solutions (Southeast Asia) at Aon.
“They had started improving their websites but were struggling to merge their current operations with their digitalisation strategy. The brand experiences were not uniform, information was siloed, and teams were not structured in a way that facilitated any alignment in offline and online operations or campaigns. It led to a lot of duplication,” she explains.
In the meantime, brands like Decathlon and Love, Bonito had charged ahead in offering customers seamless experiences and drawn on digital solutions to better manage data and inventory. Their teams had been fashioned to work across channels, maximising the impact of their campaigns and sizing up their profits. Companies that get omnichannel right see incomes grow by an average of 9.5% each year, Ke Le explains, and getting it right often starts by relooking at how people work.
Over the second half of last year, Aon unpicked the relevant roles, such as store manager and marketing and communication (marcom), and proposed ways to refashion them to facilitate collaboration across offline and online channels. It resulted in more seamless customer experiences, better inventory management, and a greater use of data to drive better decision-making.
Low-value and duplicated tasks were streamlined and replaced with higher value work, while digital solutions were meaningfully incorporated. Skills gaps were also identified and training options to plug those gaps were suggested.
Ke Le acknowledges that making a complete omnichannel transition is a “giant leap” and can require a significant investment of both time and money, but in the meantime, ways of working could already be changed. Its staff could be loosened from out-of-date retail practices that no longer served their purpose, and trained in competencies that did, says Ke Le.
The employees were excited about that, she says. “Given the changing retail landscape, they knew these were critical skillsets they needed – and that they would have the right support from the company as they developed them. From a career development perspective, that was important.”
And by operating more effectively, the company would be able to stay competitive despite the changing market landscape, and continue to grow.
“Industries are rapidly evolving, so roles need to be adapted and new skills and competencies acquired. That’s how you remain relevant.”
Singapore Polytechnic and Aon are among the consultants pre-approved by Workforce Singapore (WSG) that can help companies redesign jobs and tackle manpower and productivity issues. Up to 70% of the cost can be funded through the Support for Job Redesign under Productivity Solutions Grant (PSG-JR). For more information about PSG-JR, click on the link below.
Read more in our Hello Future series