DBS announced that it will be rolling out a series of initiatives to adapt to the future of work by addressing the massive changes brought about by COVID-19.
These initiatives are a result of insights gathered from research, deep-dive experiments and employee surveys conducted by a cross-functional regional Future of Work (FOW) Taskforce which the bank convened six months ago.
With DBS‘ distributed workforce model, all employees will be given the flexibility to work remotely up to 40% of the time. The FOW Taskforce found that over four in five of the bank’s 29,000-strong workforce are able to work seamlessly remotely.
Close to 3,000 employees in Singapore indicated that while they are still productive while working remotely, staying engaged and connected with colleagues was challenging. As such, they prefer hybrid work arrangements over a pure ‘remote work’ or ‘work in office’ approach.
The bank will also be implementing a formal job-sharing scheme to better support employees who need more flexible work arrangements. The scheme will enable two employees to share the responsibilities of one full-time role.
Employees on this scheme will retain all existing medical benefits in full and continue to be covered under the bank’s insurance plans. At the same time, the bank will also introduce more part-time work arrangements.
In addition to that, DBS will accelerate its transition to operating models characterised not by conventional functional departments but by project-specific data-driven squads formed with members from different functions and relevant areas of expertise.
While agile squads are already commonplace in some parts of the bank, primarily in the technology space, this approach will now be extended at scale to other parts of the bank.
DBS will also be doubling down on its efforts to upskill and reskill employees. Employees will be trained in emerging areas such as design thinking, data and analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning and agile practices. Over 7,200 employees across the bank will be upskilled or reskilled and of this group, about 4,300 are in Singapore.
Over 80% of employees across key markets indicated that they prefer to have more open collaboration spaces to facilitate informal discussions and cross-team ideation, which they found difficult to do remotely.
Building on its experience in developing ‘JoySpaces’, or activity-based workspaces since 2016, DBS will further reconfigure its workspaces to enable greater collaboration and ideation. The bank will also be launching a 5,000-square foot ‘Living Lab’ that aims to blend the best of physical and virtual work space configurations.
Piyush Gupta, DBS CEO, said,
Piyush Gupta
“We are prepared to radically transform the way we work by introducing a comprehensive range of measures which include implementing a permanent hybrid work model, flexible work arrangements and deploying more agile squads while creating workspaces that will help to supercharge ideation and collaboration.
We will also accelerate our employee upskilling agenda at scale and ingrain the use of data-driven operating models across the bank. By implementing these measures, we believe that Team DBS will emerge as a confident future-ready workforce.”
Fintech News Singapore recently spoke with Jeremy Soo, Head of Consumer Banking at DBS Bank for our “Redefining Finance for Good” interview series where he outlined how the bank has responded to the pandemic.
