Singapore Airlines: Managing Human Resources for Cost effective Service Excellence
“In Singapore, we always want to be the best in a lot of things. SIA is no different. … a lot of things that we have been taught from young, from our Asian heritage … filial piety, the care and concern, hospitality, and, of course, the most important part is trying, if we can, to do whatever we can to please the customer. And how do we do it? Sometimes, people just wonder, ‘How do you guys manage to do it with limited time and resources on a flight?’ yet we manage to do it somehow. Call us magicians.”
Lim Suet Kwee, Senior Rank Trainer, Singapore Airlines Training School, and Senior Flight Stewardess

SIA’s new business class has the widest seats in the A …show more content…

The first round of interviews includes group interviews for an initial overall assessment and an English passage reading test to assess language competency. The next round involves a one-on-one, in-depth interview aiming to evaluate whether the applicant possesses SIA’s required core values and competencies, and then a psychometric test is administered to further confirm the earlier results.

Figure 1: The five core elements of SIA’s HR strategy.
(5) Motivating Staff through Rewards & Recognition (4) Empowerment of Frontline Staff to Control Quality Leadership for Service Excellence & Cost-effectiveness (1) Straight Selection & Recruitment Processes

(3) Successful Service Delivery Teams

(2) Extensive Investment in Training & Retaining

EXTENSIVE INVESTMENT IN TRAINING AND RETRAINING
SIA places considerable emphasis on training, which is one of its focal points in its HR strategy. According to Ms. Lam Seet Mui, Senior Manager for Human Resource

Master of Human Resources & Organisational Development
Development, “SIA invests huge amounts of money in infrastructure and technology, but, ultimately, you need people to drive it. At SIA, we believe that people actually do make a difference, so the company has in place a very comprehensive and holistic approach to