Asia Insights with Andie Rees in Singapore

I trust that this short snippet of ‘on the ground news' from Singapore finds you all well and with high hopes that we are gradually finding our way of this – let’s just call it – a predicament shall we! 

The Odgers Berndtson APJ Technology team are launching a monthly news bytes & videos with updates from a specific part of the region on a relevant topic. I get the ‘honor’ (dumped on in reality) to author the first one, so welcome to ‘Asia Insights with Andie in Singapore’…

As I wrote this mid last week,  we were in week two of a month long lock down. Back to Phase 2 (Heightened Alert) Measures, no dining in facilities, gym’s shut and numbers restricted to groups of two. However, you could almost hear the entire island cheer when the government notified us Friday 6^th that there were to be a whole raft of easing measures starting today, August 10^th. There was definitely a sense of the ‘pressure valve’ being collectively released.

The other good news is that we are on trajectory for 80% of the population to be fully vaccinated in the not too distant future.

At this milestone, the government is setting the vision of living with this as an endemic with rules for socialising, travel and quarantine being relaxed for those that are fully vaccinated. Like every country, there is a portion of society here that is resisting the vaccination drive, the rest of us of course just want to get off the ‘hamster wheel’ and get our lives back!

So what is happening on the business front?

Well, there is no doubt that there is somewhat of an exodus of ex-pats. For many the ‘disconnect’ from family for 18 months, 2 years, more than that for some, has become just too much. There are others that have become separated for months on end as some members of the family had to travel for family reasons and have then been unable to get approval to return to Singapore as employment pass (EP) & work pass (WP) holders have to apply to return to Singapore and this can take months.

There are many cases in the tech sector, where jobs that were previously mandated to be in Singapore are now being allowed to move to Australia, or Dubai for example.

The last 18 months of zero business travel has changed the relevance/priority/dynamic of where a certain role ‘has’ to be located, particularly for more established businesses.

In my view, this trend, in conjunction with the challenges with EP & WP applications along with the perception by many that Singapore is becoming ‘anti Ex-Pat’ may well have a negative impact on the number of regional head offices being established here. I suspect that the question will be asked in many executive planning/strategy sessions in the coming months – “Do we really need to have that big of a set up/cost structure in Singapore when we can’t get the talent that we need”…