Singapore’s employee engagement non-paradox
- HO Seng Chee
- Jul 11
- 4 min read
Singapore excels at measuring things. GDP. Exam scores. Airport excellence. Changi Airport has won so many awards it probably has a sizeable trophy room. We are, by many economic measures, a proud success story.
Except for this minor inconvenience – Our workforce doesn’t seem to be celebrating.
Engagement optional
According to the inaugural Singapore Workplace Report 2026 from Gallup and the Singapore Institute of Directors (SID), only 14% of Singapore’s labour force is engaged at work.
Picture that – Just one in every 10 morning commuters is genuinely looking forward to their day. The other nine are mentally somewhere else – present in body, absent in spirit, clocking in and out for no reason other than that paycheque.
As it turns out, you don’t need engagement to keep an economy humming. You just need people who can’t afford to quit.
A nation that works
This is not accidental. Modern Singapore was engineered around a single animating principle: what works. Housing policy? Practical – get married to get a flat. Education system? Rigorous and meritocratic – your six year-old’s future was being stress-tested as they learnt not to eat the glue. Economic development? Incentive-driven, ruthlessly efficient, and deeply suspicious of anything that can’t be modelled in a spreadsheet. Even our civil servants’ bonuses are tied to GDP growth.
The set-up was pragmatic and results oriented. I’m a beneficiary of these same policies, and I’d be the last to bite the hand that fed me. However, might we have become pragmatic to a fault?
When we see everything primarily through the lens of tangible outcomes, people become resources to optimise. Engagement becomes, at best, a nice-to-have. At worst, it’s a leadership distraction, the soft and embarrassing cousin of the KPI.
This is not a knowledge problem nor a capability issue. Rather, it’s about two questions and a choice. And the answers are more obvious than most engagement conversations will admit.
Would you want to be Elon Musk?
By the economic measures Singapore most respects, Elon Musk is a stunning success. The world’s richest man. Builder of rockets, electric cars, and a social media platform indispensable for arguing with strangers at 2am. Based on output and results, Musk is not just a benchmark. He is the mother of all yardsticks, the benchmark which makes other benchmarks feel inadequate.
Would you, then, want to be Elon Musk? Not just the wealth. Not even the rockets. But the whole Musk package: the 4am texts to terrified employees, the public humiliations that serve as performance management, a workplace culture that may be described, generously, as bracing. Musk is results without relationships, output without humanity, and ambition just because.
I expect almost all of us would say “No thanks.” Not because we are sentimental, but because we understand intuitively that a leadership defined purely by what you can get out of people is a diminished one. And yet, despite our better senses, we perpetuate a system that repeatedly keeps us small.
The wrong question
But wait, maybe there can be a win-win for both engagement and KPIs? The Gallup-SID report, like most engagement literature, makes exactly this utilitarian case: fix engagement and you can get 23% more profitability. Which is probably true. And I can already picture the executive who reads that statistic and immediately begins a business case for caring about people, complete with projected ROI, three-year indicators, and a slide deck for the next offsite. Yes, it will be convened somewhere with a view.
The issue with this framing, however, is that it reinforces the very problem our system has created. It tells executives: care for your people because it leads to better output.
It’s engagement as an instrument. People as means to an end. Yes to feelings, but make sure it brings returns.
That’s not caring for people. That’s optimising them. Methodically.
A spectacular own goal
Finally, the report also revealed that Singapore’s executives rated engagement as a top strategic priority, scoring it 4.7 out of 5. Well, these same executives, in the same survey, rated their organisations 2.93 out of 5 in preventing chronic work overload.
Same people. Same survey. “We want engagement, but we can’t help overworking our people.” These are leaders with influence and power. Are we to believe they’re helpless in tackling burnout?
I hope the survey was anonymous, because I smell BS.
A choice
Engagement is simply highfalutin consultant-speak for “caring for people.” And caring is not the soft stuff that happens after the KPIs are met. It is the real work of real leaders.
Your choice to care will determine whether that person sitting across from you in the MRT train tomorrow morning is one of the 14%, or just another sad soul going through the motions.
OK, you drive to work, I hear you. But you get my point.
Choose care first. The KPIs will follow.
“What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works?”
— James 2:14
I am a leadership coach. I help leaders and organisations succeed by doing the one thing spreadsheets can’t measure – actually caring.
