The Leadership, Talent & Professional Development Committee in conversation with Charlie Ferguson, General Manager Asia of Globalization Partners, our Future of Work Official Partners

Interview led by Joe Tofield & Don Rapley. This article is an extract from a forthcoming BritCham Singapore podcast episode.

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Don Rapley 

So Charlie, we know that you spent most of your very long career in Asia between Singapore and China and that Singapore has been home for you for a long time. And we're curious about that journey. What on earth brought you to Asia all those years ago? And could you share with us maybe what some of the highlights have been of that journey?

 

Charles (Charlie) Ferguson 

It's been a pretty long and expansive journey here in this region. I originally came out here as a kid, actually, when I was about 10 years old, and moved over here with my father who had a consulting business for the Indonesian government and moved to Bogor in Indonesia, and then into Jakarta. I spent my high school years in Jakarta, went back to the United States and did my Uni. And as soon as I graduated basically the gravitational pull of coming back to Asia Pacific was extremely strong. I came back to the region and lived in Thailand, in the Philippines, Hong Kong, Shanghai and as you mentioned in the preamble, I've been here in Singapore for nigh on 20 years now in three different stints. So the vast majority of my formative years and certainly my career almost in its entirety, have been here in this region.

I'm actually a Singaporean citizen now. I became a Singaporean about a decade ago. My wife is from Shanghai and both of my children are born and raised here in Singapore. So, as you said, it is well and truly my home and ironically, my father who unfortunately passed away last year from COVID, which we can discuss the ramifications of the pandemic when we get to the conversation, he was living in the Philippines and my brother recently just relocated back to the US after decades in Thailand. So, at one point, we had this nexus of Southeast Asia covered by the Ferguson clan.

 

Joe Tofield 

So, Charlie, in your role as General Manager of Globalization Partners, a specialist in human capital management, you are driving to remove barriers by enabling companies to hire and retain talent and team members no matter where they are. Can you share us what that actually means in practice?

 

Charlie Ferguson 

It's a great question. The company premise was designed to solve for a very particular problem, which I'll give you the high level overview of it quickly and then tell you how it's evolved over the decade we've been operating. Essentially 10 years ago our founder, Nicole Sahin, was involved in a company that was helping businesses to expand into new markets in the traditional way. And the traditional way, for the listeners, and for the folks who might be reading the article is a tried and true classic methodology of determining where you wanted to go during the due diligence. So for that particular market, and then going through the machinations of establishing your legal structures, your entity, perhaps enrolling into a payroll, execution programmes so that you can hire people, filing with the tax authorities, etc. The challenge that she saw, which I think is still apparent today when folks go down this path, is that it is very time and labour intensive and very resource intensive, such that you feel very constrained. Typically, lots of these processes are done in serial, rather than in parallel. And particularly if you want to hit more than one market, you've got an inordinate amount of effort that needs to be made. The challenge is not only that initial effort, but if you think setting up is hard, if it doesn't work out for whatever reason, it's the unwinding and the stepping back out that can be even more time consuming than getting it in in the first place. So she came up with a solution to this - what if I could go around the world, particularly the markets where my clients more often than not are saying we want to go to, and establish a vehicle, a compliant structure in these countries, and provide that back to the customers? So they in turn can hire people locally without having to go through that process of setup. The idea being that, if I can let's say in this first use case, kick the tires on a market and see if it's got product market fit for me, see if there's successful traction, then I can make the determination as to whether or not I want to go all-in. And if it doesn't work out, then I don't have this entanglement that might prevent me from being able to be agile with market opportunities by exploring other markets. So that's where it came from.

What that means in practice, it's not only just what it looks like on the tin, which is just a vehicle to hire people through, we extend our capabilities in the solution by virtue of basically acting as your HR on the ground. So all of the compliance changes and benefits administration and maybe escalations or things of this nature that might happen in a day to day human resources environment are taken care of by us. It's a really fast way for a company to either acquire and retain talent, or potentially explore a new market without really having to go through a lot of the old school machinations. Does that make sense?

 

Joe Tofield

That makes a lot of sense. And since COVID hit last year, how has any of this changed? Has it become more complex doing this? Or more streamlined perhaps?

 

Charlie Ferguson 

That's a fabulous question. Because in many instances, particularly in more, let's say emerging market type environments, the heretofore heavily administrative processes that I just alluded to have become maybe more interrupt-driven, a little bit more down into the minutiae, there's a reason behind that. So practically speaking, pragmatically speaking, many countries around the world, as we all know, have had to write some significant stimulus cheques to get the economies moving again. And those stimulus cheques were heavily predicated upon tax revenues, obviously. But, moreover in order to protect the local citizens in the markets that are making these sorts of changes and stimulations in the economy, they've had to issue new types of, perhaps its stipends or different types of labour taxes, or different sorts of policies, in order to ensure that their citizens are being taken care of. If you go into a country kind of unknowingly, not truly understanding how to navigate these changes in these nuances, you can expose yourself to a lot of risk. And a lot of these things are happening domestically, but they're not necessarily being communicated coherently or transparently outside of the country. So having somebody on the ground to help you to navigate those things prevents a lot of risk.

 

Don Rapley 

Well, that sounds like a good transition to our next question around this hugely challenging topic of the Future of Work. It's not simple is it? Organisations across the globe have been addressing this urgently since the start of the pandemic. And the dialogue is gradually emerging, but still the Future of Work is not five years down the road, we're right in the middle of it. The pandemic has changed most of our preconceptions about what the workplace is going to look like. There's lots of different angles to this. From the discussions that we've had, between Joe and I, and our Leadership, Talent and Professional Development committee, we're very involved in providing new perspectives for our members. And, as our new Gold partner for the Future of Work, it would be really interesting if you could share your insights about the key trends that are happening in the Asia Pacific region as you're really, really close to that. What is this challenge of the Future of Work from your lens?

 

Charlie Ferguson 

We've been talking - I'm sure within the construct of the Chamber, as well as if I extrapolate beyond the Chamber and just talk about the general industry - with respect to human resources and human capital management. The spectre, if you will, of the Future of Work has been in the dialogue now for I reckon a good decade, in sincerity. And if I could hark back to the beginning of that theme, I think that one of the key elements that instigated this conversation was really about a sudden realization of the nexus point of multiple generations, from a demographic perspective converging into the workplace, where let's say, the baby boomer Gen X generations, and then the ones quickly falling behind, are all going to be working together in the workplace. And so we did a little bit of hand wringing, and a little bit of prediction over the past decade. What's exciting to me is the confusion or simply lack of touch for the newer generations of workers coming into the workplace. What their expectations were seems so disparate, and foreign, to what was considered to be the status quo or common sense as we entered into 2020, and they have now because of the accelerated impact of the pandemic become table stakes for every demographic, every worker in the workplace. And by that, I mean to say things like wanting to be able to work from wherever they want to work. Wanting to be able to consume training and get access to information from any device, anytime that you wish. And frankly, wishing to deploy their skills and experiences in an environment which provides them with a sense of purpose. These are three key pillars that I would suggest to you have become now part of the vernacular whereas before they were sort of foreign concepts. But that's not the Future of Work. To answer your original question, that's more evolution of work.

I would suggest to you that the conversation now, which has become very mainstream, and I allude to earlier that was a little bit esoteric previously, is around mental health, and the transparency and consistency of conversation and trust in the workplace which have become incredible progenitors of transformation. What's interesting about that is that the heretofore, sort of prevailing telltale of the future of work was digital, right? It's all about digital transformation, digital tools, etc. Again, that whole concept has become like table stakes. Of course digital, what else is it going to be? So it really does come back to the human element, which is what I just I just spoke about - the trust, safety, communication, effectiveness of design, etc. The digital is just the grease on the skids.

 

"[The Future of Work] really does come back to the human element... the trust, safety, communication, effectiveness of design, etc. The digital is just the grease on the skids." @asiacharlie of @GlobalPeo https://bit.ly/2WW283j #futureofwork via @britchamsg

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Don Rapley 

Absolutely. It's an interesting point you make, the fact that there are now five generations working side by side in organizations, the retirement age is being raised or abolished in some companies and people are going to be working and living longer. Leadership teams need to get their heads around this challenge, as their managers could be in their mid-60s, as well as in their early 20s. We talked about this recently - building trust, giving people a sense of purpose, being able to develop empathy, these are key enablers for a thriving business in this context. And you're right, that digital is just an enabler for that, but it's not the solution.

 

Charlie Ferguson 

That's exactly right. I would take that a step further and tell you that based on the experiences that we're having in our business, with the customers that we're working with, this whole evolution towards remote work, and in many instances, one could argue hybrid, where there's kind of a mixed of physical reality and virtual reality, has been a very progressive step for a lot of companies to truly deliver on the diversity, equality and inclusion agenda. Because I think that in many instances perception is reality. When you are able to tap into a global talent pool, you have the ability to not only leverage that as a differentiator and include new perspectives and new experiences and new voices into your workplace, but moreover, age becomes highly irrelevant. If someone is in their 70s and living in the UK and has an un-replicable type of experience that they can bring to the table even if it's for a point project, there's an incredible amount of inherent value to that. And I think heretofore if it was a physical scenario where someone might come into the office, you have these preconceived ideas and notions and biases, even if they were unconscious, but now that it's all through a screen it just doesn't matter.

 

Don Rapley 

Are you seeing these trends play out differently in the Asia Pacific region compared to other regions where you're operating?

 

Charlie Ferguson 

I would suggest to you that the advent of this remote construct and particularly not just through the technology angle which we just spoke about, but also the business models, is adding fuel to the fire around the intra-regional business expansion that we're seeing. If historically whether you're speaking from the context of the UK or the United States as an example, Asia was viewed through basically two lenses, one was low cost labor arbitrage, and the other was maybe to exploit domestic opportunity in China and India. That's the historical frame of references for APAC expansion. Now, with the effervescence and the lens globally focusing on the Southeast Asia region, you start to see a whole new perspective around the opportunity. So I think lots of very progressive and very aggressive and assertive businesses in this region are expanding across the region, independent of influence from outside the region. Which is creating a lot of diversity and interesting opportunities for businesses globally.

 

Joe Tofield 

Before we move on to skills and talent, I wanted to come back to one thing that you mentioned about company culture and purpose. I was reading last week about how people that have joined companies during the pandemic have only experienced their company culture over Zoom, and they're actually more likely to leave because they haven't experienced that company culture, they're not within the company, and they're not inside of the company, as much as someone who was traveling to work. So a lot of companies are getting very concerned about people just not being part of the company culture like they were previously. I'm wondering if you have any thoughts around that? How do we, in this new hybrid world, get people to have a stake within the company culture and be part of their team?

 

Charlie Ferguson 

This is an excellent point that you raise Joe, and what I'll share with you is something that I've been seeing happening in a lot of different types of companies at a lot of different stages of growth. There is this school of thought that in order for us to retain our culture we have to go as quickly as we possibly can back to the core competencies that got us to this point that we're at today. Meaning, let's go back and capture what we had, and alter the edges to be applicable to the current circumstances. That's a school of thought and judge not lest you be judged, right? But where I'm seeing a lot more sort of future-proofing of culture, as relates to the hybrid environment we're all operating in are the companies that say what got us here is fantastic, we don't want to disown that. But this is a unique opportunity for us to sit down with our employees and with our leadership, and revisit who we are.

In pragmatic terms, is the market that we're operating in today fundamentally the exact same market that it was 24 months ago? By any stretch of the imagination, the answer to that is absolutely not. The entire society that we live in today, regardless where you are in the world, has fundamentally changed. So it goes without saying, therefore, that many of the values or visions or mission statements of the companies that we are operating in, if we haven't gone back to rethink who we are, how we work, how and where we want to grow, what's important, if we haven't revisited that then we're operating in a previous construct. Therefore by default, the culture does not match or map to the current circumstances, which are not in a vacuum, it's constantly evolving. Just making the effort to sit down and have that cathartic experience, the outcome from which our newly designed policies, newly designed job descriptions, newly designed competencies, newly designed what-does-good-look-like statements around who we are and where we want to go, and what qualities and characteristics are important to the organization - they might not be the same as they used to be. It’s not the panacea, but it's certainly a great starting point because just waiting for it to rain down like manna from heaven, that osmodically things are suddenly going to change, will not work. You need to take ownership and accountability for your culture, culture doesn't just manifest, it takes an effort. And so, I would suggest to you that if people start to look at that as an opportunity, then the outcome from that effort will be a more inclusive and more representative environment where you won't have people wanting to split because they're getting what they need from the environment.

 

"Is the market that we're operating in today fundamentally the exact same market that it was 24 months ago? By any stretch of the imagination, the answer to that is absolutely not." @asiacharlie of @GlobalPeo https://bit.ly/2WW283j #futureofwork via @britchamsg 

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Joe Tofield 

I think that's a great answer. A lot of companies have completely changed in the last 24 months. But we haven't really looked at competencies and leadership. Maybe it's time that we go back and have those conversations because work has changed. In that sense, I think that's an excellent point.

 

Charlie Ferguson 

I'll call out one more point to that, which is that a lot of companies have become, sometimes unwittingly, sometimes retrospectively, incredibly dependent upon a strong and focused HR program inside their companies. The HR department have become psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, nurses, travel agents, Mom, Dad, the whole spectrum of support. We need to take a moment and make some significant investments in focus and time and resource into our HR organizations as well. And there are some really key areas that when the pandemic started, as an example, were to survive that issue. Now we need to reorganize for thriving through this, and through the backside of this, and so there are things like competency frameworks around job skills that we mentioned, there are programmes of leadership that need to be designed. It's not as if the CEO somehow miraculously had the standard operating procedure rulebook on how to remotely operate a business. Everyone needs to get real about upskilling and rewriting policies, making sure that everyone's got the right kind of frameworks in place to thrive through this rather than hunker down and survive. There’s a lot of things that can be done, and I see it as nothing but opportunity and upside.

 

"Everyone needs to get real about upskilling & rewriting policies, making sure everyone's got the right kind of frameworks in place to thrive through this rather than hunker down & survive." @asiacharlie of @GlobalPeo https://bit.ly/2WW283j #futureofwork via @britchamsg

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Joe Tofield 

You've previously described that a lack of talent is going to be a huge problem going forward for lots of companies, as we've all seen. There's a lot of technology companies, banks, organizations that are looking for very specialist, highly qualified talent, but they're just not around and they're struggling. So this is a worrying threat, and a worrying trend. How do you see this moving forward? How do companies manage these kind of talent shortages?

 

Charlie Ferguson 

I think I've even called it out in other conversations that I've had as an existential threat. The prevailing wisdom was, or has, or is, I guess I should say, to get programs in place, public-private partnerships, for rescaling and upskilling the population. Let's go out to grass roots from the elementary school all the way through to, here in Singapore, the PMETs. Here here, you know, all hail the rescaling process, I think that's a great idea. The challenge with it is that you're talking about millions of people in virtually every country that we're referring to, going through these processes. And some of its going to stick, some of it's not, and it's going to take time. My suggestion is to augment that effort, not to eradicate it, and not to diminish it, keep going, and particularly as well documented and well exhibited here in Singapore, the private-public partnerships have set the bar in many instances around what's possible. When MySkillsFuturee and Google get together to create training programmes I think that's a beautiful story. But again, it takes time and it's only subsets of the population who can be addressed. So the other scenario is to realize that several billion people on this planet, not all of them live on the island of Singapore.

Let's open up the talent pool to tap into other markets around the world, where the inhibiting factor is not an option. To the talent, the inhibiting factor could be the way and means by which we set ourselves up to attract, acquire and retain that talent. Early in my career I worked for a company called ADP, which is a very large, global HR outsourcing and payroll outsourcing company. And we had this common refrain - control the controllables. By this they meant attraction, acquisition, retention, benefits, design, the fundamentals of HR, these are something that we can control. Gaining access to global talent is something that you can also control, if you have the right approach and the right business model, the right business partner. Looking beyond your backyard for your talent pool greatly increases the probability of your finding the people that you're looking for. Think about Australia, which has had phenomenal, well documented challenges around skills gaps. 26 million people on the continent, that's a little bit less than the size of the population of Shanghai, so there are huge amounts of opportunity. Yes, there are stipulations around timezone and language and other aspects. But I would again position that if you elevate the story of culture, the challenge of finding someone in a "foreign country" and bringing them into your fold is actually a differentiator, it's actually a value-add, as opposed to a challenge to overcome, if done properly and programmatically. I would suggest to you that one of the key ways to get time to value and overcome the gaps in the talent pool is to increase the size of the pool that you're that you're fishing from.

 

Don Rapley

Let's talk about the importance of Singapore and the ASEAN region to British businesses. Everybody's looking for opportunities to expand in the region. Could you tell us a bit more about this trend? And what impact is this going to have on an increasingly distributed and remote workforce?

 

Charlie Ferguson 

It's a really interesting point. I would suggest you that if we look at the two topics that you just called out. Let's look at the Singapore story in the first instance. And then let's extrapolate a little bit wider from that and look at the ASEAN connection as well. It was December of last year that the United Kingdom signed the free trade agreement with Singapore, I think it went into effect in January. And that represents, as of January, around 22 billion US dollars worth of trade. And this is the first significant FTA that was signed with a member of the ASEAN bloc. This just shows you some of the significance that the UK, particularly post-Brexit, have placed on the relationships they have with Singapore. I believe there are over 5,000 British firms represented in the business community here in Singapore, and that is an extremely significant representation.

I would suggest to you that that kind of ecosystem and the types of bilateral trade agreements that Singapore enjoys with a whole host of different blocks around not only the neighborhood, but with the rest of the broader community, manifests very clearly in the ability for the UK government at least to leverage that relationship with Singapore as a kind of a stepping stone into the CPTPP. And that that particular block of trade is a phenomenal story, but I think even pales in comparison to the other agreements that have been, again, catalyzed by Singapore as the chief member of negotiation for the ASEAN nations like the RCEP, the Regional Cooperative Economic Partnership, which is representative of literally 30% of the global GDP. It's the largest trade bloc that's ever existed. I'm a glass half full kind of guy, out of the European Union now Britain is incredibly agile comparatively, they're not inhibited by the same types of administrative challenges they might have been inhibited by in the past, and by virtue of this agility have this unique position to be able to leverage onto these bilateral trade agreements, particularly in this region, which just open up tons of trade opportunities, tons of access to favorably demographic employment, talent, manufacturing, rebalancing of supply chain. It's just an incredible amount of opportunity that would have been very obstacle laden to tap into before. To me, there's never been a more important or a better time for British businesses to be exploring Singapore as a base and ASEAN as a trade bloc.

 

"To me, there's never been a more important or a better time for British businesses to be exploring Singapore as a base and ASEAN as a trade bloc." @asiacharlie of @GlobalPeo https://bit.ly/2WW283j #futureofwork via @britchamsg

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Joe Tofield 

We’ve set the scene when we started the conversation, and as the Gold partner now with the Chamber I'm sure we're going to continue these conversations on for the next year through panels, podcasts and content. This is a great way to start things off. I've learned a ton already, just from this conversation, so thank you very much for your time.

 

Charlie Ferguson 

It's an absolute pleasure. I'll reiterate my last point - we're talking about a staggering market opportunity for British businesses coming into this region and vice versa for Southeast Asian businesses who are looking to enter into a critical market outside of this region. It is a truly unique opportunity, and I would suggest to you that talent is going to be the lever for success, regardless of wherever you want to expand your businesses. So we're in the right space, that's for sure. 

 

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