Transforming HR to enable scaling
How we helped a solution provider identify the right culture fit and transformed their HR capabilities to improve retention and support their growth strategy
About NewGens
NewGens is an established solution and service provider for financial institutes regionally with offices in Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia offering a comprehensive suite of services including project management, business consultancy, market infrastructures, STP implementations, solution architecture, financial message flows, SWIFT products and services, business continuity plan, cyber security, AML and risk management.
Problem
Rapid hires, unpredictable retention
Over the last few years, NewGens’ headcount doubled. As the pace of hiring increased, NewGens encountered challenges retaining new hires long enough to develop them into productive members of the team.
Competing in a fierce talent market, NewGens needed to find a solution to attract the right talent and develop robust retention strategies to support their growth goals.
Solutions
Balancing the aspirations and needs of mature and young workers
NewGens face a challenge common among Singaporean SMEs: balancing the differing aspirations and needs of mature and younger employees. Addressing this required a clear understanding of employee motivations across age groups, roles, and tenure.
We conducted an employee engagement survey using TeamSight, complemented by in-depth data analysis of staff interviews, and a review of existing HR collateral. The insights generated revealed clear patterns that informed the development of a targeted people strategy for NewGen’s workforce challenges.
Attracting the right candidates with a clear Employer Value Proposition
One key issue identified was the lack of a standardised candidate screening process. Hiring managers were not aligned on the type of candidate profiles they were seeking, and recruitment collateral was limited to job responsibilities and requirements. As a result, the organisation attracted a broad and unfocused applicant pool. This lead to a trial-and-error hiring process that contributed to the unpredictable retention rates.
Using the data from TeamSight+, we supported NewGens in crafting a clear Employer Value Proposition and defining an Ideal Candidate Profile. These were then translated into targeted recruitment messages that act as filters for candidates at two stages: first, by attracting the right applicants at the application stage; and second, by enabling hiring managers to assess the right attitude and aspirations more effectively during interviews.
Creating Organisational Blueprint and expanding Career Pathways
Creating clear growth opportunities was a core strategy to retain the right talent. Insights from our TeamSight Survey showed that new hires were strongly motivated by job stability and career growth. To support NewGens’ scaling ambitions while improving early-stage retention, its career structures needed to be strategically expanded.
We developed an Organisational Blueprint to align business growth objectives with the evolution of roles and manpower over the next three to five years. Building on this, we designed structured career pathways across key job tracks, clearly defining role levels, accountabilities, and required competencies.
Outcomes:
- Clear job progression, creating visible growth opportunities aligned to long-term strategy
- Defined competency expectations, enabling more objective development and progression tracking
- A foundation for a formalised learning and development strategy, supporting systematic capability building as the organisation scales
Evolving Performance Management
As NewGens scaled, there was an opportunity to strengthen how performance was assessed and communicated across the organisation. While leadership had a clear strategic direction, these priorities were not formally translated into shared organisational goals, and performance assessment was largely competency-driven and not performance driven.
We evolved their Performance Management approach to retain its strong competency assessment while incorporating individual performance and organisational alignment. Working with the management team, we established organisation-level goals across a three-year horizon, balancing goals across financial performance, productivity, employee engagement, and customer outcomes. These goals were cascaded to departments, with selected objectives intentionally designed to drive cross-functional collaboration.
To embed this approach, managers were trained to set clear role-level goals, supported by an updated Performance Management framework that combined individual performance metrics with competency assessment. To improve consistency and clarity, scoring was standardised to a five-point scale with clear baseline definitions, providing a more objective and transparent basis for evaluation.
Outcomes:
- A scalable Performance Management framework to support future organisational growth
- Clear alignment between individual performance, departmental objectives, and organisational strategy
- More consistent and objective performance evaluations through standardised goal-setting and scoring
Adopting a Total Rewards Strategy
We developed a Total Rewards Strategy to align compensation, benefits, and incentives with NewGens’ organisational growth and updated HR frameworks. The strategy integrated base pay, performance-linked bonuses, and non-financial benefits to support expanded career pathways and reinforce the new performance management approach.
As part of a benefits review, underutilised benefit categories were rebalanced to better reflect employee needs and evolving career pathways. Insights from the TeamSight Employee Engagement Survey highlighted strong employee interest in learning and development, enabling the introduction of a learning and development benefit within the existing benefits budget.
To support performance differentiation while retaining flexibility, we designed a bonus calculator that allows the management team to adjust variables, factor in organisation-wide performance scores, and allocate bonuses based on strategic priorities, including discretionary adjustments. In parallel, salary benchmarking was conducted for current and future roles outlined in the Organisational Blueprint to strengthen pay competitiveness and workforce planning.
Outcomes:
- A unified Total Rewards Strategy, aligning salary, performance-linked bonuses, and benefits
- Flexible and bonus allocation, supporting performance differentiation and management discretion
- Enhanced employee value beyond salary, through a better-aligned benefits mix, including learning and development support
As organisations grow, informal people practices that worked at smaller scale can quickly reach their limits. NewGens’ journey highlights the importance of intentionally connecting strategy, performance, development, and rewards to create scalable practices to support growth.
