Singapore is one of the most productive economies in the world, yet only 14 per cent of its workforce is engaged at work. This phenomenon has been estimated to cost the economy US$73.6 billion according to a recent study. The problem is not capability but what we measure and what we do not. And what we do not measure simply does not get managed.
Every system we rely on records what a person has already produced and cannot see what they might become; a blind spot GDP measurement has carried this for decades by excluding the informal economy. The same boundary appears in skills indices and performance reviews. Closing this billion-dollar gap does not need a new framework; it may just be thirty honest minutes between the managers and the employees.
Quick Takeaways
- Employee engagement is relational and hard to quantify, so it sits outside what our systems normally capture.
- It is not a surprise that despite having a productive economy, 86% of the workforce feels disengaged. This phenomenon is costing the economy billions of dollars.
- Left unaddressed, this is what we risk building: a workforce trained to follow precedent and procedure, measured only on output, and unequipped to think or judge when the procedure stops working.
- Rigour is not the problem. Singapore ranks 12th of 30 on skills-first progress, yet none of the index’s 25 indicators asks whether anyone knows what their people are becoming.
- The ask is simple and straightforward: thirty uninterrupted minutes with one person, and the willingness to keep giving them.
Table of contents
The Imperfect KPI System that We are Used to
Many will have heard this before: a person rarely leaves a job; they leave because of a bad manager. The notion survives because it points at something no appraisal form has a section for. Employee engagement is relational, hard to quantify, and therefore largely absent from the systems we use to judge whether an employee is engaged with his job – not just doing his or her job.
A recent study substantiates this, only 14 per cent of Singapore’s workforce is engaged at work; below the Southeast Asian average, below the global average, and falling to 10 per cent among workers under 35, according to the Singapore Workplace Report 2026. This phenomenon has been estimated to cost the economy US$73.6 billion according to a recent study. The report, by Gallup and the Singapore Institute of Directors points to a common failure in management quality: good leaders who actually engage with the people working for them are few and far between.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are number-based. As far as the workplace is concerned, it is good enough for tracking output, but numbers alone rarely paint a complete picture. Consider the case of gross domestic product (GDP) at the national level. The method that became the global gold standard for measuring a national economy, was devised nearly eighty years ago on a single assumption: production means paid, market-based transactions.
However, that assumption is not inclusive. Excluding the informal economy and unpaid household labour from the ledger did not mean that labour had no value. It meant the ledger had a blind spot. Eight decades and several rounds of reform later, most of it is still unaccounted for. The care work, the informal work, the labour that keeps a household running and never touches a market: none of it appears in the number a country uses to judge its own prosperity and progress as a nation.
As a training provider, we see this firsthand: human judgement still matters. AI can help draft plans and teaching programmes, but it still takes a trainer to notice when someone is disengaged in a session, and to find a way to bring them back. Now imagine that same disengagement in an office, where nobody is watching for it. Left unaddressed for years, it stagnates a career quietly, and the cost compounds for the employer and the employee alike. Take this down to the executive level. Here’s what the day-to-day of a salesperson looks like: work the pipeline, prioritise the leads most likely to convert, pitch, propose, negotiate, coordinate, prepare the contract, get the signature, get the payment. On to the next one.
If growth and progression are only measured in numbers, which portion of this workflow do we find room for evaluation and professional improvement? There is no room, because the system was never built to measure anything beyond numbers. It was built to measure revenue growth. But there are many kinds of growth: the kind that shows up in a quarterly figure, and the kind that shows up years later when someone handles a decision making problem. How much room is actually left for evaluation and professional improvement, when grinding someone through a system that only tracks numbers is the only “growth” we care about? Scale that up and that becomes an imperfect system on a national scale. And the impact of this imperfect system shows up nowhere in any measure across organisations.
The real question we need to ponder: are we truly ready for developing Singapore’s most valuable asset – human capital at scale?
The Root Cause May Be Cultural
This blindspot of focusing on numbers as growth is not something that the workplace invented, the root cause may be the race to live The Singaporean Dream. A good education equals better prospects, which secures a high-paying job, and that is how we define ‘a successful career’. So what is our education really nurturing? On the current evidence, people who are very good at jobs as they are presently defined: the same process, performed repeatedly, with the most efficient performer winning.
The systems that govern our education have simply taken on a different shape: from schools to offices. Eighteen years of doing the same thing, and after graduation, the grind continues. That is meritocracy. But is it truly developing our human capital? By the time someone walks into a first workplace, they have already spent eighteen years being measured the way GDP measures a country: on what was produced, not on potential.
Arguably, systems designed with rigour for the sake of revenue growth would lead to a production of a workforce that is good at ‘following precedents and procedures’, but may not be as good at questioning (not so much on I think, therefore I am). The systems also want careers and progression to be predictable, measurable. But what does being good at following orders really mean in an AI-driven era, where disruption constantly happens? Processes of this kind produce reliability. It does not produce active thinkers, and active thinkers are what an organisation needs to draw on when facing potential disruptions posed by technology and macroeconomic shifts.
Rigour Without Translation
Without human resource and corporate leaders taking active steps in job redesigning, the expectation may still be for employees to perform the same corporate processes over and over, and whoever is more efficient at it wins. This also means that most workers are not equipped for uncertainty. Job redesign is the practical translation step, and it is the one most organisations skip. It means examining what a role actually consists of, deciding which parts a machine should now absorb, and rebuilding the remainder around the judgement only a person can supply. Done properly, it changes what a job is for, not merely how fast it is done. Skipping this process which is the more common outcome, the role stays frozen in a shape designed for a market that has already moved. Workers are then held responsible for adaptability inside roles that were never redesigned to permit it.
Companies in 2026 audit almost everything: their AI stack, their data readiness, their training spend. Singapore does this better than most. The country was recently benchmarked against 30 countries on its progress towards a skills-first economy and ranked 12th overall, above average on how skills are recognised and how learning is delivered.
Look closely at what the index contains. A shared skills language, data on skill supply and demand, public support for training, business adaptability. Twenty-five indicators, and not one asks whether anyone inside an organisation knows what their people are facing and potentially becoming.
That is not a flaw in the index. It is the boundary of what any index can reach, and the same boundary shows up inside companies. Performance reviews record what a person has already done with the capacity they were already given. The true potential of somebody with trust they have not yet received is much harder to score, so conveniently it goes unscored. And what cannot be counted slowly stops being seen.
What Employee Engagement Can Look Like
Employee engagement is the word this piece keeps returning to, but it can be vague and look different for everyone. Here is what it can look like, the two times I received it.
Early in my career, two leaders paid me a kind of attention I have thought about ever since. It came in three parts.
Belief came first. Praise costs my manager nothing. Belief puts my manager’s own judgment at risk: he vouched for me before I had results to justify it. That is the one currency a salary cannot replace.
Space came second. Room to work beyond my role, with no ceiling on ambition but clear guardrails on risk. Nobody develops judgment by following a workflow. It forms when you are given room to try, permission to be wrong, and boundaries that make being wrong survivable.
Discipline in private came third. Standards enforced quietly, away from any audience. Public recognition is easy. It rewards the manager too. Private discipline benefits only the employee, and costs time nobody will ever see or credit.
Take any one of the three elements away and the other two stop working. Belief alone is a gamble; space alone is a neglect; and discipline alone without the belief and space that came before it, is just correction, and correction without belief behind it reads as punishment. It is these three that built engagement for me. Together they made me feel seen, and that is what kept me committed to the work.
This is not ‘my personal story’. Inside the same Singapore Workplace Report sits the counter-proof: a leader who made a point of knowing his lowest-status workers beyond their tasks, and properties where managers worked that way saw turnover fall below the industry average. The Institute for Adult Learning (IAL) Singapore reached a similar conclusion from the research side: across 86 learning interventions with 762 workers, it found that workers become more adaptive only when the managers around them can hold better conversations. Meaningful connection is what matters here, something that numbers cannot capture.
Most of the time, employees don’t need a better-performing quarter. They just needed someone to notice what they are already capable of, before the numbers said so.
The Simplest Audit that Organisations Should Conduct This Year
At Vertical Institute, we build capability for a living, which is exactly why we can say this plainly: courses build skills, and skills matter, but a skill that nobody notices changes nothing. Employee capability is only half the equation (in other words, hiring the right person only solves half of the problem). Employee engagement is the other half, and no numerical framework, subsidy or curriculum can supply it. Only a supportive leader can. And it is worth being honest about the price: belief means staking your own judgement on someone unproven, and private discipline costs hours that will never appear on your own appraisal. That is precisely why it is rare, and why no system will ever do it for you.
So here is the simplest audit many organisations can conduct this year. Somewhere in your company is someone filed under ‘meeting expectations’, on the strength of a first impression or a steady stream of acceptable output. Open that file. Extend belief before there is proof. Give space with guardrails instead of caution with limits. Hold them to a standard in private, where they are empowered and safe to fail.
Leaders, you do not need a framework to start. You need thirty uninterrupted minutes with one person to engage and understand him or her better, and the discipline to keep giving them. And to answer the question this piece opened with: no, we are not yet ready to develop human capital at scale, because scale is not how this particular thing is built. Fourteen per cent is the sum of several million individual instances of nobody looking closely enough. It moves the only way it can move. One manager, one person, one conversation that was never going to appear on anybody’s dashboard.
References
1. Gallup. Powering Singapore’s Future: The Case for a National Engagement Infrastructure.
2. International Monetary Fund. What Is the Informal Economy?
3. The Business Times (August 2026). Why HR holds the key to Singapore’s most exciting economic chapter yet.
4. Institute For Adult Learning Singapore. Future-Oriented Learning: Equipping Workers for Uncertainty.
5. Skills & Workforce Development Agency. Institute for Adult Learning Launches New Centre to Elevate Skills-First Practices in Singapore.
6. Institute For Adult Learning Singapore. Future-Oriented Learning: Equipping Workers for Uncertainty.
