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IHRP x Smarte Carte: Learning Journey – Post Event

Date & Time
4 October 2019

About 50 IHRP-certified professionals embarked on an inspiring learning experience at Changi, where Smarte Carte Singapore shared their progressive and inclusive HR practices for mature workers.

Recently celebrating their fifth year in Singapore, Smarte Carte is proud to showcase its well-rounded HR system and supportive programming for is mainly mature workforce.

Almost one quarter of their employees are aged 70 to 79 years old, making the average age of workers a whopping 63 years old.

However, as with many young companies, Mr Anthony Lim, Managing Director at Smarte Carte Singapore said that there were challenges when they first started;

  • Talent attraction and retention challenges
  • Poor health and attendance of its employees
  • Strenuous work and low productivity
  • Resistance to change and lack of purposefulness

To combat these challenges, Smarte Carte constructed an ‘Age-inclusive Practices’ framework, whereby they put in place some initiatives and redesigned some of their work processes to better support their older workers.

Smarte Carte ensures that there are equal opportunities for everyone–regardless of age, should an employee do well, they will have a chance at a leadership role. With that being said, one of the oldest team leaders is 70 years old.

While the many communication sessions, quarterly reviews and awards celebrations with employees may seem like a lot of work for the HR and Ops teams, Smarte Carte’s efforts in promoting and initiating age-friendly practices succeeded in allowing them to better engage employees, increase employee productivity and service standards.

After only three years since their establishment in Singapore, Smarte Carte won Changi Airport’s ‘Service Partner of the Year’ and was cited by Senior Parliamentary Secretary for Manpower Ms Low Yen Ling in Parliament earlier this year as an example of how companies have restructured jobs to better support the employment of older workers.

To prove to our IHRP-certified professionals that the work of these ‘aunties’ and ‘uncles’ is no walk in the park, our members got a workplace tour, including hands-on demonstrations of the equipment where they got the chance to try pushing 10 to 12 luggage trolleys and lugging up to 24 trolleys using an automated pushing device.

What our Certified Professionals said:

“The sharing session by Anthony and team was very insightful and I have gained new ideas and perspectives in the management of mature workers. The hands-on session was great. I really think Smarte Carte is a role model for a caring and employee- centric organisation. It was indeed a fruitful and educational learning journey for me.”

By Irene Tan, IHRP-SP, Head NSF Centre, MINDEF

“It was a great learning experience. SmarteCarte has shown that potentially all employees, despite their age or background, would still be agile enough to transform to meet business needs, given the right interventions. Kudos to SmarteCarte!”

By Vincent Tan, IHRP-SP, Vice-President of HR, ComfortDelGro Corporation Ltd

We would like to express our gratitude to Smarte Carte for co-hosting the learning journey together with IHRP.

The IHRP Learning Journey is part of the on-going initiatives to help certified professionals learn the best practices and gather insights from industry leading companies, as well as earn Continuing Professional Development hours for recertification.

Have a question? Check out our FAQs. If not, get IHRP Certified here.

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