SINGAPORE – After nine years as a housekeeper at Resorts World Sentosa, Madam Saadiah Martawi, 56, is no stranger to the hard work needed to clean up after guests who leave a complete mess in their rooms.

While her job may be tough now, it looks set to be more demanding in the near future, with Singapore’s integrated resorts pledging to pump $9 billion here, which could add another half a million yearly international visitors and create an estimated 5,000 new jobs.

But some have questioned how Singapore’s service sector workforce can keep pace with the hefty investments amid the impending cuts to the foreign worker dependency ratios for services, which force firms to hire more Singaporeans in order to recruit more foreigners.

Singapore will be reducing the service sector Dependency Ratio Ceiling in two steps, from 40 per cent to 38 per cent in 2020, and to 35 per cent in 2021, the Government announced during this year’s Budget.

With rising manpower demands on the horizon, RWS has taken steps to redesign its existing jobs, increasing productivity and creating higher value-added careers, a spokesman said in response to queries on Thursday (April 11).

The integrated resort, which runs six hotels, hires more than 13,000 staff to cope with its current 95 per cent occupancy rate on average each day, and its upcoming $4.5 billion expansion will add another 2,800 new positions.

To this end, RWS, formed a task force comprising front-of-house and housekeeping teams to brainstorm ideas on how to serve guests, while working closely with an external consultant to review its work processes through a study, said the spokesman.

This gave rise to a pilot programme at RWS’ 464-room Hotel Michael last year, which resulted in a faster turnaround time for housekeepers.

Rooms are now tidied in an average of 16 minutes, down from 34 minutes previously.

It also means that housekeepers, who cleaned each room individually at their own pace in the past, now have to try to meet the 16-minute timing. They work as a pair for each room, splitting up certain tasks to maximise efficiency.

The hotel also replaced the older push trolley with new motorised carts, which haul clean towels, and a redesigned single package of fresh room supplies. This package cuts down the number of return trips to the pantry needed to load the carts with new supplies.

Madam Saadiah, a single mother of two children, said: “At first, a lot of us thought it would be very difficult because we did not know how our jobs will change. We found out that the new processes are actually very convenient for us after trying them out a few times.”

The RWS spokesman said many briefings and training sessions were done to obtain the buy-in from staff to address concerns over how to implement the new processes effectively without adding more work.

The resort now plans to roll the streamlined housekeeping procedures out to its other hotels, he added.

The effort is part of a national drive to support the transformation journeys of lifestyle businesses under Workforce Singapore’s (WSG) Lean Enterprise Development Scheme.

Since 2017, more than 140 companies, including RWS and the Marina Bay Sands, have tapped this scheme to create manpower-lean enterprises and a better quality workforce, WSG said in an information sheet on Friday.

“Job redesign is intrinsically tied to business strategy and growth. As companies transform and adopt new business formats to improve productivity and capture new business opportunities, they must also ensure that their workforce are kept in step with the changes,” it said.

Besides hotels, WSG has also come up with job redesign frameworks for the food services and retail sectors. More than 250 firms have redesigned jobs with the aid of these frameworks, it added.

Restaurant group 8 Bar chief executive Khoo Siow Kiat, 49, said he has reduced headcount demands by around 25 per cent through the use of a tablet-based ordering, payment and customer engagement system that cost him $20,000 to implement.

The group runs seven restaurants in Singapore and two overseas.

But while technology helps to reduce reliance on manual labour, Mr Khoo said it cannot replace the human worker completely for the food and retail sectors.

“There will still be a great challenge to keep on finding more Singaporean workers in order to support our expansion. For all the technologies that we adopt, we have to also look at changing the mindsets of Singaporeans who view working in these sectors as carrying a stigma,” he said.

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