Workplace and culture change

There seems to be a blind spot whenever there is any discussion about culture in Singapore. It is bad enough that the discourse is heavily weighted towards the ethnic or religious angle with the occasional reference to media, especially imported media, and then mostly in a negative light.

There is almost no discussion about how our workplaces breed culture change.

Yet the very fact that we spend half our waking hours at work, and that for most people, the majority of their friends originate from the workplace, would indicate that this cannot be a cultural void.

A simplistic view would be that people bring their culture into the workplace and that the culture in the office or factory merely reflects that of the external environment. It may not be culturally void, but it is culturally neutral.

Yet it is so easy to recount the ways in which work practices, and the general environment promoted by managers, have led to culture change at large. If it has happened in the past, it must be happening right now, and will continue to happen in the future.

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Take the position of women in society. It has changed tremendously in the last 2 or 3 generations. Partly it is through better education; girls have traditionally been discriminated against in schooling, but partly also, it is because huge job opportunities have been created for them. One does not necessarily follow the other. Japanese girls get good schooling, but Japanese managers in many companies enforce some rather male-centred rules about job roles and career advancement.

In Singapore, the first big wave of female employment, outside of family enterprises, came in the sixties, when industrialisation took off. Texas Instruments, Fairchild and other semiconductor companies, together with mass-producers of garments, employed young women by the hundreds at a time. It was a social revolution of sorts for Singapore. Young women with not a lot of education, who up till then did not have many career options beyond housemaids, shop assistants or as helpers in the family's hawker stall, found themselves instead in a modern sector of the economy, with money they could call their own, albeit something like four dollars a day. Suddenly the daughters were not liabilities for the family to marry off, but income contributors to the household, helping to pay for the television set and a new refrigerator.

Young Chinese women in samfoo

But culture change occurred in ways more subtle than money. The hordes of young women were put into company uniforms, often fairly skimpy dresses, in keeping with the Western taste at that time, and where their mothers would not be seen dead in anything other than samfoo, the young women got used to showing thighs.

They had to work shifts -- many factories ran three shifts -- and the traditional notion that it was improper for women to be out alone late at night had to give way to economic reality. Even now, most parts of the world would still not have accommodated this change. Just a year or so ago, a well-educated woman from India, on her first visit to Singapore, remarked to me that among her greatest astonishments was seeing Singapore women walking about in the city well past ten o'clock. Partly, it has to do with the low crime rate here. Crime alone will very quickly deter women from going out after dark. But Singapore's determination to maintain a low crime rate sprang partly from the need to make this place attractive to investors, the very factories that employed women in shifts, and so what we have is a mutually reinforcing cycle, generating changes in habits and expectations.

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Next, take something radically different from women. Take tobacco. Smoking has always been a predominantly male habit. It is associated with a lot of macho-ness. If the smoker is also the head of household and main breadwinner, he is very unlikely to moderate his habit no matter how much his wife or other family members hate it.

In public, till recently, he continued to smoke whenever and wherever it pleased him. Other people around, given the way Singaporeans avoid confrontation, would not even dream of asking him to desist.

No doubt, the anti-smoking attitude originated from the West, but where was the beachhead in Singapore? In the workplace, in parallel with the government's anti-smoking campaigns.

Well before laws were enacted to enforce smoke-free spaces, culture change was already happening in small ways in the workplaces. Some managers began to ban smoking while in office meetings. The smoker who got his way at home and anywhere else in public, did not get his way in the office. The manager's action planted the seed that would grow into today's culture of intolerance. He emboldened other non-smoking employees. Instead of smoking being a matter of your preference versus my preference, the balance shifted, and anti-smoking became the norm and smoking the transgression.

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Now look at race. Singapore has been multi-racial since our beginning, but until recently we have been a patchwork of racial ghettos, divided by language. People lived within their closed communities which had their own schools and businesses, even their own hospitals. Intermingling with other races happened mostly through impersonal transactions, like grocery shopping, or public transport, or dealing with the authorities.

The rise of English enabled the lowering of barriers between communities. Deliberate administrative policies to mix the various language streams in the same schools, and mix the races in public housing helped a bit more, but really, not much. How many of us know our neighbours even after 10 years?

For the great majority of Singaporeans, the one place where we have learnt to appreciate other races as persons (rather than as stereotype) has been the workplace. It is where one speaks to someone of a different race, on a regular, daily, hourly, basis. You have to persuade and make requests. You may have to butter him up or trade favours. But you also get invited to his wedding, and to his Hari Raya open house.

But workplaces are not multi-racial by chance. They are multi-racial because employers make them so.

At this point I have a personal anecdote of how I made one place change.

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In the mid-eighties, I had the challenge of taking over a small factory (about 50 workers). It had been a family business, but the founders were getting old and the sons were not interested in it. The company that I worked for acquired it, and I was posted there to manage the transition.

I had anticipated that it would be a very Chinese place but I was still surprised at what I found. They kept very detailed personnel records, and one of the most important pieces of information recorded for each employee was his dialect group. Teochew, Hakka, Shanghainese. The race was not recorded. It was simply understood! Which meant that that place had no room for non-Chinese.

I was young and sure of myself then. I immediately instructed that all non-essential information, particularly the dialect group, were to be purged from the personnel records. Nor did I allow that field to be changed to "race". I did not want race to be recorded anywhere.

A little while later, after we had reviewed the staff structure of the factory, we decided to create a new position of warehouse supervisor and replace two deliverymen. I placed the advertisement in the English press, which apparently was a departure from previous practice -- it had always been the Chinese press. But more significantly, 2 of the 3 guys I hired were Malay. For the existing staff, this took some getting used to.

Later, I brought in a production scheduler, who while ethnically Chinese, was essentially English-speaking.

Within months, the place had begun change. The Malay guys were gradually (OK, grudgingly) accepted, and the old saw, put quite forcefully to me at the time of hiring, that all Malays were lazy, was never mentioned again, not to me at least. I'm not saying the older employees did not still privately think so, but it became politically impossible to say so, or to act on that assumption.

More interestingly, English gradually became the default language for official communication. By sheer executive insistence, it had, at one stroke become the language of all documentation, but you couldn't force people to speak English. Yet the presence of non-Chinese in the workplace, and the fact that the new manager, the production scheduler and the visiting accountant from the head office were all English speaking, constituted quite formidable persuasion.

I will not claim it made that much difference in their personal lives, but even small stones thrown into a pond can make wide ripples. The smaller of the two changes was their working contact with non-Chinese. The bigger of the two changes was the revaluation of English in their minds. In subtle ways, it would impact on the priority they would give to English in their children's education, which itself would be another small stone creating wide ripples.

I knew this revaluation was happening when an accounts clerk asked me some months into my tenure, "Do you think it will be impossible in future to earn a living without English?"

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But change in the workplace isn't always the result of managers' actions -- by the way, making change happen is one of the primary roles of any manager; good managers live by it. Change can happen when junior or middle employees down the line act as role models for others, or affirm a certain point of view.

Quite a number of my friends have begun to be open about their sexual orientation to some of their colleagues. They usually start off by being open to other gay colleagues. This itself is no small matter. It has a very powerful effect on closeted gay persons who have hitherto thought themselves isolated. More importantly, the gay person begins to let other colleagues in on this aspect of himself, and this kind of first-person contact with a gay person tends to be quite a mind-opener to most straight people, especially if the gay person is someone they work alongside day after day. It is a well known fact that straight people who know gay persons as friends and colleagues tend to have far more accepting views about homosexual orientation than those who don't. And what if the gay person is your boss? That really turns the power equation around, doesn't it?

But coming back to managers of a workplace, the question I want to leave you with is this: considering that their employees spend a great percentage of their time in the workplace, and knowing full well that the practices of a workplace have an impact on the culture at large, do managers have a moral responsibility with regard to the culture they inculcate in their subordinates? Do they have a moral responsibility to set a good example?

Should the corporate culture be simply whatever leads to greater profit or whatever the owners and managers personally believe in? If they think that racial purity in a workplace promotes co-operation, is that by itself enough justification for managers to pursue a racial bias in hiring? If the owner of a business and his managers are homophobic, is it nobody else's business that they discriminate against gay employees?

Straight off, you know it isn't so simple. A private company cannot take a diametrically opposed position from the general ideas of the community, for if it did, it would create quite intolerable tensions between the owners/managers and their employees. At the very least, the company must more or less follow the culture of the society in which it operates. But the question that should exercise us is this: should a company take the lead in creating a more enlightened culture, rather than merely follow the habits and notions of the society at large?

After all, many of us agree that teachers or religious leaders or political leaders should be held to higher standards because they are role models or opinion leaders in the community. The things they say and the way they act have a disproportionate influence on others' thinking and behaviour.

Within a company, especially the larger ones, don't managers and directors play the same role? They set the tone of the place, they have privileges of persuasion and compulsion, they set policy. Should their actions and their policies, not just in business, but in the culture they promote, be held to a higher standard?

But before we go too far into this question, there is another problem, and it is that there is no easy way to agree on what this "higher standard" should be. It's clearly going to be very difficult to find any consensus on these, for example:

Equal treatment of men and women. Well then, how equal?

Active efforts at ameliorating class divisions. Exactly how much effort?

Sensitivity to racial, linguistic and religious minorities. To what extent?

Non discrimination in sexual orientation. Really? Even when 90% of the population in general are homophobic?

As a further complication, in almost all countries, the State intrudes to some extent into private workplaces to compel minimum standards, even to the extent of affirmative hiring. The State forbids exploitation of children. Labour laws prescribe maternity leave, perhaps even paternity leave. One is tempted to say that in these cases, the State has taken the responsibility for cultural standards away from the company and its managers, therefore the question is moot.

Not at all. The question is still very much alive. The State's intervention may often be to set minimum standards, not best possible standards, and in any case, the State only acts in selected areas. Many other little things that managers choose to do and which change cultural ideas can't conceivably be addressed by government action. For example, that managers should eat in the same canteen as workers, or that the whole office environment shall be on a first name basis, or that a guy's girlfriend coming along to the Company Dinner and Dance has the same standing as another guy's wife -- i.e. the equal treatment of unmarried and married couples. On the negative side, some companies turn a blind eye to salesmen winning business with a bit of bribery to their customers. Other workplaces are well-decorated with girlie pin-up posters, and well-known for the sexist jokes that circulate among the male staff, including not a few managers.

So it's back to the question. How much moral responsibility do companies and managers have in respect of the culture they set?

© Yawning Bread 

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