There is a new trend sweeping across some of the largest companies around the world: the four-day workweek. While a four-day work week may seem like something out of reach for the notoriously overworked Singaporeans, Parliament has been mulling the idea since 2020.

But why is the concept of shorter work week gaining traction and who is set to benefit the most? We explore below.

Companies who tested the four-day workweek?

A number of companies including Microsoft Japan, American-based fast food company Shake Shack, New Zealand-based financial services company Perpetual Guardian have experimented with the four-day workweek in different ways. Some companies have kept the same working hours and gave employees a day off for a total of 32 working hours per week, while others kept the 40 hour work week but condensed it into four days.

The companies that tested out the shorter work week conducted the experiment for a couple of months before deciding whether to implement the changes permanently.

The experiments yielded a few surprising results. Despite the shorter week, companies saw improvements in employee engagement and productivity. Employers also saw more cost savings and less turnover. However, there were also some negatives.

For example, some employees felt more stressed and pressured to get work done in a shorter period of time. Others felt like they had to work much longer hours to make up for the work that would have been done on the day that was taken off. Furthermore, businesses with clients who expect on-demand customer service found difficulty in balancing customer service and the extra day off for the employees.

That being said, most of the companies who did the experiment and found success deemed the improvements valuable enough to permanently implement the four-day workweek.

Also Read: Looking beyond the crisis: Top 5 trends that will characterise work-life in 2021

Benefits for employees

Some of the most notable benefits for employees were that they reported better work-life balance, less stress and improved productivity. One experiment done by the New Zealand company, Perpetual Guardian, also found that employee engagement increased 20 per cent, which is a good indicator that a 4-day work week boosted employee morale and participation.

These results can be very useful for Singaporeans, who work very long hours and experience high levels of burnout and some of the highest rates of stress-related illnesses.

Another important benefit that a four-day workweek provides is for older employees who have more errands than their younger counterparts. For instance, employees who are 50 years of age and older will need to take care of their children as well as their elderly parents.

The extra day can give them the necessary time to run important errands like doctor appointments, which aren’t always available on the weekends.

Benefits for employers

One of the greatest concerns of the four-day work week is that productivity will plummet due to the loss of the extra day. This could be especially concerning for SMEs who are concerned that any time lost can risk significant losses for their company.

However, the opposite happens. When Microsoft Japan tried the four-day work week experiment for the summer, productivity actually rose by 40 per cent. Perpetual Guardian in New Zealand also found a 20 per cent increase in productivity after running the experiment and made the changes permanent.

Also Read: Why work doesn’t happen at the workplace

Even more, a UK-study of companies that had implemented a four-day work week found that the benefits associated with the shorter work week saved them a combined GBP92 billion a year.

There are also other benefits, like reduced company costs and less waste. For instance, Microsoft Japan also experienced a 23 per cent reduction in electricity costs. Furthermore, with employees less stressed, Singaporean employers may be able to save on sick leave, which currently costs them upwards of S$125 billion per year.

It may even help tackle the multi-billion dollar problem of presentee-ism, which presents itself when sick (but stressed out and devoted) employees show up to work and are less productive.

Everyone wins if shorter weeks are implemented thoughtfully

Based on the results from the latest shortened work week experiments, the employer actually ends up gaining more than most bosses may think. The improvements in productivity and employee morale and engagement is significant enough to, at the very least, reduce costs associated with high employee turnover and sick leave.

In the best-case scenario, employers may find that the improved work flow of their employees even ends up increasing profits. Thus, while the employees benefit from spending more time doing things they love, reducing burnout and feeling more engaged at work, employers may see substantial improvements in their bottom line.

That said, it is important to note that a four-day work week won’t benefit every company. Companies with a focus on customer service or those that work with clients who don’t follow a four-day work week rule may end up disappointing their clients.

Furthermore, industrial, manufacturing, construction jobs and certain finance jobs may not be able to implement four-day work-weeks since their revenue is tied to external factors.

Despite some of these drawbacks, these experiments can help pave the way to other ideas on improving work-life balance. For instance, it is possible to rotate days off for different groups of employees to avoid a full-scale shutdown for the one extra day.

Another idea is to implement a four-day work week every other week to reduce the pressure on employees who may feel stressed out by the one less day they have to reach deadlines. However, what these experiments found is that regardless of how companies tackle improving work-life balance, it’s clear that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing contributions from the community. This season we are seeking op-eds, analysis and articles on food tech and sustainability. Share your opinion and earn a byline by submitting a post.

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“If you could, would you make the world a better place?”

When US startup Eat Just developed the first plant-based egg alternatives, it was nearly ten years ago. Until now, the company hasn’t achieved its profitability milestone. But last December, the first lab-grown chicken produced by Eat Just, which is now a unicorn valued at US$1.2 billion, has been given the green light to be sold in Singapore, following its plan for the last capital raising before an initial public offering.

“Companies like ours can help meet the increased demand for animal protein as our population climbs to 9.7 billion by 2050,” Eat Just CEO Josh Tetrick said when the company earned the world-first regulatory approval of slaughter-free meat in Singapore.

Apart from the initial success of Eat Just this year, the shares of Beyond Meat Inc., a Los Angeles-based producer of plant-based meat substitutes founded in 2009, have also more than doubled.

Those are definitely not quick achievements, explaining how patient investors should be when investing in a typical “impact startup” – company that satisfies environmental, social, or governance (ESG) targets while pursuing a scalable financial return.

Also Read: Impact-tech investor ADB Ventures in talks to raise US$100M debt fund

“If you’re looking for an impact investor, it’s someone who understands either the domain [the industry] or understands the need for ‘patient capital’,” said Pratap Raju, founding partner of the Climate Collective Network based in India.

Keith Ippel, co-founder and CEO of Spring Activator, an impact accelerator located in Canada, listed cleantech, foodtech/agritech, medtech, edutech, and the industrial manufacturing industry in a circular economy as the best high-return impact investing domains.

“That’s the future. That’s where all the money is going to be made,” he said.

In Climate tech or Cleantech, venture capital firms’ investment has increased from US$418 million per annum in 2013 to US$16.3 billion in 2019, which is three times higher than the growth rate of investment into Artificial Intelligence over the same period, according to a new study conducted by PwC.

In the last few years, we have also seen a surge in impact innovations among big corporations, including Tesla, Nest, Amazon. Especially, global fashion brands such as H&M, Ralph Lauren, Lululemon Athletica are highly involved in sustainability startup financing. Those capitals serve as considerable funding for later-stage impact startups.

BlackRock, one of the world’s largest asset management firms, noted in its recent report that sustainable investing would be no longer a niche area but turning mainstream without compromising financial goals.

Also Read: A better way to make impact: Why we decided to start a social impact network

International investors are expecting that this millionaire opportunity would prevalently occur within developing countries.

“People in developing countries are very committed to improving their standard of living,” said Ippel, while underlining that these countries account for three-quarters of the world’s population. “They are more committed to growth than entrepreneurs in North America or Europe.”

As IDG Ventures, one of the first movers in the gaming ecosystem in Vietnam 15 years ago, reaped a bonanza with its early-stage investment in gaming unicorn VNG, foreign investors could apply it to the nascent impact startup ecosystems in developing countries.

“This is the right time for investors to explore this risk-return trade-off because it [impact startup ecosystem] will change in five to ten years,” stated Raju.

Although Raju expressed his concerns over the lack of connection with broader funding sources for this field in the region, several recent events have shown positive signs.

In December 2020, UOB Venture Management, a wholly-owned subsidiary of United Overseas Bank Limited (UOB), announced that it had completed the first closing of its Asia impact fund at more than US$60 million.

One month earlier, APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC) Indonesia has teamed up with venture capital firm Mandiri Capital to establish a fund to invest in startups with social impacts.

Currently, impact startups in these countries have increasingly contributed to addressing the world’s most pressing challenges, such as pollution, climate change, poverty, gender inequality, and health shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It’s not one is better than the other. It’s finding the right capital that matches that mission,” Raju said.

An Do, principal at Patamar Capital, a venture capital firm (VC) with over ten years of experience investing in Asia’s mass market, said at Techfest Vietnam 2020 that the VC firm assesses three sustainability aspects when investing in an impact startup, which are measurable impact, scalable impact, and long-term impact.

Also Read: ‘Global demand for plant-based meat products will be driven mostly by flexitarians: Next Gen COO Andre Menezes

“The most successful ones seem to be those that can combine both technologies and social impacts, which make them much more ready for growth and attract more investment opportunities,” added Lan Phan, Head of Exploration at UNDP Accelerator Lab.

This combination could be in line with the advancements of breakthrough technologies listed by the World Economic Forum, including AI, CRISPR gene editing, quantum computing, 5G networking, Blockchain, Robotics, Virtual Reality, and Ubiquitous storage.

Alán Aspuru-Guzik, professor of chemistry and computer science at the University of Toronto and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Vector Institute, said that the connections between these revolutionary technologies and the world’s issues would form “a matrix” of future impact solutions.

“This is where I think your new deep tech startup will lie,” he added.

“The future return opportunity is far higher in impact than in regular investments,” Ippel stressed. “Who wouldn’t want to make the world a better place for themselves and for their kids?”

If any investor said yes and want those opportunities, Ippel said that we could congratulate him or her. “You are already an impact investor!”

“Whatever your return target is, that can be achieved while making the world a better place.”

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing contributions from the community. This season we are seeking op-eds, analysis and articles on food tech and sustainability. Share your opinion and earn a byline by submitting a post.

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My philosophy when it comes to building up engineering teams in Southeast Asia can be summed up in two words: intentionality and pragmatism. Five years ago when I first began scaling up the engineering team in this region, I had only the vaguest ideas of the frequently irreversible decisions that lay ahead of me.

Some of the painful results from these misguided decisions include my Indonesia engineering team quitting one after the other due to disengagement, simmering tensions and frustrations due to inter-country teams’ language barriers and persistent underperformance in remote teams left to fester over quarters.

I had some abstract ideals about the perfect team I wanted to build. But at the end of the day, I am at a company with a budget, hiring against a tight timeline in a constrained talent market with a thin history.

There are realities to contend with, many of which are unique to the fragmented and multi-cultural context that is Southeast Asia. If I could hop on a Zoom call with that eager hiring manager from five years ago, here’s where I would focus his precious and soon-to-be-frayed attention.

Reid Hoffman famously quipped that building a startup is akin to assembling an airplane in mid-flight. While flying by the seat of your pants is frequently the optimal strategy for finding product-market fit, designing and building a high-performing engineering organisation takes a great deal more intentionality.

Here are a couple of things I learned in building an engineering team in Southeast Asia.

Also Read: Glints snags US$22.5M Series C to expand full-stack career platform

Work out the nature and scope of engineering

Critically, the time to scale the team is after you have found product-market fit, which is also the time to plan out a longer-term product roadmap. Armed with this product roadmap, walk up the dependency graph to chart out the corresponding engineering roadmap, from which you can work backwards to figure out the engineering bandwidth and skill set required. This is necessarily a blunt operation, but the broad strokes alone will give you much-needed clarity downstream in the hiring.

A word of advice here is to be clear-eyed about the actual engineering bandwidth and skill set needed. While many startups pride themselves on proprietary, cutting-edge technology, don’t underestimate the long shadow of relatively ho-hum infrastructural and product engineering that trails behind these core asset developments. Plan for the manpower accordingly.

Split teams by communication lines

If you plan to scale the team past eight people, you will almost certainly need to split them up into sub-teams. The best way to do this is to group members with the most frequent and complex communications into the same teams. Frequently, you will find the most natural seams between teams to be product scopes.

At this point, you also have to decide if you are going for a fully remote or a multiple-hub hiring strategy. Both have its pros and cons, the important thing is you decide, and provision supporting processes and tools. If it is a hub strategy, then ideally each team is colocated for more spontaneous and high-bandwidth communications. If it is remote, then think through language requirements and market context.

Map out the regional talent market

Though relatively young as a whole, the Southeast Asia engineering talent market differs in skillset concentration, culture and size. It is crucial that you get a sense of both the top-down view and anecdotal, on-the-ground reviews of the different talent market.

When I was sussing out both the Vietnam and Indonesia engineering pool, it was incredibly eye-opening to speak to other engineering leaders who have built substantial teams over a multi-year period over there.

It gave me a pulse of the difficulty of hiring for different skill sets, and what candidates respond to. Quantitatively, I would also research on LinkedIn where the bigger companies are building their engineering hubs, including the tech stack, functional roles and seniority levels of each hub. The output of this research and the organisational design is that I can map out the most suitable region to build out each team.

Also Read: Glints snags US$22.5M Series C to expand ‘full-stack’ career platform

Start by hiring the leader

If you realise that you can hire a full engineering team in just 1 country, you are in luck. In fact, there will be so much less complex that you should try to optimise for this arrangement if possible.

Practically, due to talent scarcity, required market context or simply cost, most engineering leaders will have to hire across at least 2 markets.

If that is your case, learn from the two painful lessons that I picked up the hard way. First, always hire from the top down, which means starting with the engineering leader.

There is frequently a huge pressure to hire individual contributors who can immediately add to product development bandwidth. Resist that temptation. I made that mistake by hiring a small team of engineers in Indonesia without a manager. In between managing the Singapore team and hiring in Indonesia, I was stretched too thin to properly manage that Indonesia team, which is crucial in the early stages of team formation.

Almost immediately, problems cropped up. The team was frequently unsure of the full product context, resulting in delays. They were also apprehensive about how to adapt to the backdrop of Singaporean workplace culture in the bigger team.

Eventually, they became increasingly disconnected from the company they were so excited to join in the first place, disillusioned that they were unable to make many meaningful contributions.

Investing the necessary time to hire the right engineering leader would have gone a long way to avoiding that outcome. Not only would they share the immense workload of bootstrapping a team, they would also help you solidify the desired cultural foundation through further hiring and personal influence.

Secondly, when building out a new engineering hub, that should be your sole focus, which almost always means you would need to be stationed there physically (after the pandemic, of course). It is already a tough sell for a candidate to join a company they have never heard of, much less a foreign one where they hadn’t even shaken your hands in person. Make that sell easier by sharing your plans for the team while looking them in the eye.

Also Read: The 4 principles of hiring an omnipotent founding team for your startup

Much as Zoom and Google Meet are great products, nothing beats face-to-face rapport when it comes to trust-building. The same goes for onboarding the first few hires. Spending a prolonged amount of time in person with your critical first hires will set the cultural tone for a long time to come.

Eventually, of course, once you are confident of the hiring bar and management capabilities of your first engineering lead, you can increasingly peel yourself off for other priorities.

Even with the best-laid plans and the benefit of hindsight, building up an engineering team, especially as a startup in Southeast Asia, will never be easy. There are times when it feels like a grind and other times when it seems like there are no good options. At the end of the day, what you need is a clear-eyed appreciation of the realities on the ground, and the very real trade-offs you have to make.

My only hope is that you make these trade-offs consciously, and not bumble through them as I did five years ago.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing contributions from the community. This season we are seeking op-eds, analysis and articles on food tech and sustainability. Share your opinion and earn a byline by submitting a post.

Join our e27 Telegram group, FB community or like the e27 Facebook page

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Social Bella, an Indonesian beauty-tech company, has raised approximately US$56 million (IDR 818 billion) in a round led by L Catterton.

This round also marks the US-based PE firm’s maiden investment in Indonesia.

Indies Capital, along with existing investors East Ventures and Jungle Ventures, also participated.

Social Bella intends to use the newly raised capital for product innovation and continued expansion across Southeast Asia.

Launched in 2015, Social Bella has evolved from being a beauty e-commerce brand to a complete ecosystem that seeks to unlock the archipelago’s growing beauty and personal care market.

The startup claims to have created several business units and currently owns six physical stores across Indonesia. One of its major goals is to empower consumers to use local brands.

Also Read: Social Bella expands its beauty e-commerce biz into Vietnam on the back of its recent US$58M funding

Last year, it expanded its B2C business Sociolla to Vietnam. As of now, it has expanded to 21 omnichannel stores in nine cities in Indonesia and one in Vietnam.

“Social Bella has uniquely addressed the Indonesian consumers’ growing needs for beauty and personal care products by pioneering an innovative omnichannel delivery format in Indonesia,” said Pandu Sjahrir, Managing Partner at Indies Capital.

“Over the past year during the pandemic, we have seen the company grow tremendously. The team was able to drive the company with high velocity during heavy rain. Social Bella has the appealing proposition, in fact, that it owns a content, community, commerce and retail for a beauty-tech company,” added Willson Cuaca, co-founder of East Ventures.

“Last year was a challenging year for many due to the pandemic. But despite various adversities, we are extremely proud of our team for striving for the best omnichannel services to our customers. The new partnerships and investment will boost our capability to continue delivering the best-in-class technology innovations and great products for our customers in Indonesia, Vietnam, and beyond,” shared Christopher Madiam, co-founder of Social Bella.

Social Bella is also backed by many renowned investors, including Singapore-headquartered Temasek and Pavilion Capital.

The company is also part of e27’s special Luminaries list and is one of the few companies that managed to expand their business amidst the pandemic.

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Image Credit: Social Bella

 

 

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Few¢ents, a Singaporean fintech-for-media startup, announced today that it has raised US$1.6 million in a seed funding round.

Backers of the round include M Venture Partners, Hustle Fund, and angel investors including Koh Boon Hwee (ex-chairman of DBS Bank), Kenneth Bishop (ex-Managing Director, Southeast Asia, Facebook), Jeremy Butteriss (Partnerships, Stripe), Shiv
Choudhury (Partner, the Boston Consulting Group), Francesco Alberti (former APAC Regional Sales Director, Bloomberg Media Distribution), Lisa Gokongwei-Cheng (President, Summit Media), Prantik Mazumdar (Managing Director, Dentsu), Saurabh Mittal (founder, Mission Holdings) and Nitesh Kripalani (Country Head, Amazon Video India).

The company said that it will use the fresh funds for product enhancement and global expansion.

Launched last year, Few¢ents helps digital publishers monetise premium content such as articles, video, and podcasts, through a pay-per-content service that sits on the publishers’ sites. It accepts 50 currencies from around the world, allowing publishers to monetise their global audience reach.

Also Read: The news wars: Will tech giants soon be coughing up big bucks for media content?

Rich data insights also help publishers optimise price and invest in stories that resonate most with their audience.

As of now, Few¢ents is working with a variety of publishers and media platforms across Asia and Europe, including India’s Sakal and Dainik Jagran, Indonesia’s tech news platform DailySocial, and digital publishing solutions provider Quintype.

The company has also integrated with the global video streaming solution Dailymotion and entered a business development partnership with media consultancy Jnomics Media to expand into European markets.

“Few¢ents provides incremental revenue to publishers. Our pay-per-content solution gives them a complementary monetization avenue, in addition to advertisements and subscriptions. Ultimately, this helps publishers refocus efforts on producing high-quality content, move away from a culture of just maximising page views, and supporting the media and creator industry at large,” shared Dushyant Khare, co-founder of Few¢ents.

“Few¢ents offers an exciting promise of transforming revenue generation for the digital media industry globally. It provides users the ability to micro-pay for valuable content while giving publishers a much-needed incremental revenue stream. All this is backed by strong technology combining fintech and mediatech with machine learning-based analytics,” said Joachim Ackermann, Director at M Venture Partners.

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Image Credit: Few¢ents

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