SINGAPORE: From May, small- and medium-sized enterprises
(SMEs) can tap on Government funding to outsource human resource (HR)
tasks. This is a new initiative under which enterprise development
agency SPRING Singapore will fund up to 70 per cent of qualifying costs
incurred by firms in HR outsourcing.
Minister of State for Trade
and Industry Teo Ser Luck announced this at an employee management
conference on Wednesday (Apr 22), held at the Singapore Expo.
One
SME is already planning to tap the Government's help to outsource staff
management tasks. Norhuda Rabani and her husband Ramlan Sanwan run a
small company making instant cooking pastes and have six employees under
them.
"At least I am free to actually look to other aspect of the
business like marketing, meeting of clients,” said Ms Norhuda, the
director of Asyura.
Getting external help for HR tasks is not new.
Testing solutions firm Feinmetall has already outsourced some of its HR
functions to external consultants.
Said Mr Sam Chee Wah, managing
director of Feinmetall Singapore: "We discovered that we needed a
certain professional knowledge to really go in depth, to understand the
needs of the worker and to match a different perspective of course for
them. And we really do not have this professional knowledge. So we
decided to outsource."
Under measures announced in Budget 2015,
the Government is starting a shared services initiative for HR. This is
aimed at helping small outfits, and under new details released,
Government funding will enable firms to engage HR service providers to
perform tasks like payroll processing and employee data administration.
Micro-enterprises
stand to benefit the most from the initiative. Many of them simply do
not have the capacity to set up a dedicated department to handle HR
matters.
Eleven HR service providers have been appointed to help companies with staff administrative tasks. PrimeStaff is one of them.
"Where
there is payroll, leave records, employee records and so on, there
would be a one-time set up of about S$3,000, and then after that,
depending on the number of headcount, there is a fee of about anything
between S$20 and S$100 per month,” shared Mr George R Gaspar, a
management consultant at PrimeStaff Management Services.
Government
funding will help firms defray the one-time set up cost in outsourcing,
and up to a year's worth of subscription fees. Application for the
scheme will be open till Apr 30, 2016.
More options for companies
to tap shared services are also being explored. Mr Teo elaborated: "For
example, shared reception desk ... shared conference, shared meeting
rooms. These are things that we think we can help reduce the cost of
their operations."
Singapore has five main SME Centres offering a
variety of support for companies. From June 2015, they will be staffed
with business advisors to provide HR and training advisory services.
This
is expected to help more than 700 SMEs over two years. In 2014, SME
Centres helped over 36,000 firms - a 40 per cent increase from the year
before.
Author: Dylan Loh
Sources: Channel News Asia