Singapore Airlines

Singapore Airlines is the national airline of Singapore established on 1 May, 1947. The original name of this company is Malayan Airways. According to the world’s largest airline review site Skytrax, Singapore Airlines (SIA) gets the highest estimation several years running. This means that the company provides the best service for the low price. SIA has a deserved reputation of the developer of service rules in the airline industry. For example, Singapore Airlines’ “Raffles Class” service is positioned as a perfect example of business-class flights all around the world. Famous Asian hospitality and cleanliness in the cabin are the calling cards of Singapore Airlines for many years. Passengers, who are using the services of Singapore Airlines, notice the extraordinary beauty and grace of flight attendants, excellent cuisine (with a big choice of delicious food, wine and drinks), high quality serving, and excellent entertainment.

Singapore Airlines is famous for its highly professional service. This company has developed its own vision of recruiting, selecting, training, motivating, and retaining processes. SIA Company’s approach made this company desirable for employees to work. The SIA personnel’s approach is based on the reaching the leader position of service excellence and cost-effectiveness. These are the main goals of the company that SIA struggles for. The five core elements of human resource strategy are highly strict process of employees’ selecting and recruiting, personnel training and retraining strategy, teambuilding strategy, empowerment of personnel to provide high quality services, big role of motivation through the rewards and recognition.

Therefore, the first core element is straight selection and recruitment process. The selection process of candidates is very long and straight. There are several selections steps in order to find only those who can support the company’s philosophy and policy. The interviewing steps are listed below. Firstly, group interview, which includes the overall assessment of candidates (cheerfulness, friendly, personal characteristics) and the assessment of English level in order to understand candidate’s language competency. The next is one-on-one interview that helps to determine whether the applicant possesses company’s core values and competencies. A candidate goes the psychological test to confirm previous results. The third interview is uniform test, where managers determine how candidate is posted in the SIA unique uniform. Selected candidates have to pass the water undertaking test. This test is very important for the successful company performance because employees have to know how to help passengers in case of emergency evacuation on water. The next stage is a personal interview of candidates by senior managers. The final round is the informal tea party that gives an opportunity for managers to observe their new staff. This element of the SIA HR strategy is very important for service leading, because personnel are the people that interact with customers and create service. Having only best people working for company made SIA the leader of Airline service.

The next core element of SIA HR strategy refers to extensive training and retaining of personnel. Training is the process of empowering people to make their job better through the new skills developing. Continuous improvements of the employees’ working skills make confident that the company will work better and better from day to day that fully satisfy the SIA strategy. SIA trains its personnel in different spheres: informational technology, security, flight operation, commercial, and leadership courses, etc. The third core element is successful service delivery team. SIA creates working teams with every 2 years personnel rotation in order to make personnel solid. This provides staff collaboration, positive working atmosphere, working division and as result rise of productivity (Rousseau, 2006). This element of SIA strategy increases the proficiency of the staff and their participation in the service quality improving. The next element refers to the frontline staff empowering to control quality. The empowerment of personnel is a good strategy to motivate staff to work better and put first customers’ needs. In SIA, empowerment is appeared by the staff desire to make as much for a client as he/she needs that go beyond their responsibilities (Whiteley, 2002). This post AIS service to the highest level of service providing. The last one is motivating staff through rewards and recognition. Motivation is about encouraging personnel to work better, and SIA HR strategy is all about this. This company motivates its personnel in such way that SIA is continuously improving and has the best service among airlines companies.

Other companies do not use the SIA HR strategy because they have their own approach of human resource management. They want to develop and improve their strategy to be unique in the market and not to be associated with SIA Company.

There are no full-service airlines in North America that have positioned themselves as the SIA do, because it is a long term strategy to reposition the company, and it is very costly. One of the reasons is also the uniqueness that companies want to promote. To position the company like SIA means always to be comparable with it, and this can make people think why they need to use the follower if they can use original company. The follower will be always associated as the second company, and it would be difficult to change this stereotype.

To my mind, it is hard to work in the company that focuses so intensely on customers and cuts costs to the bone internally. Personnel is always under pressure. The employees have to improve their work continuously. The service he/she provides should be better than it was yesterday. Every cost cutting causes new responsibilities for employees. However, employees are always involved in the process. They understand that the company relies on them. Everyone wants to improve, and this gives people chance to show how good they are. Therefore, this question is all about motivation. If  personnel is motivated better, it will work and feel less pressure. Some people may like to work under pressure of continuous improvement, because with each new improvement not only service that the company provides becomes better, but the person becomes more proficient in what he/she doing.

Singapore Airlines is well known company that provides excellent service for low prices. It has high quality service because of the HR strategy that was specially developed in order to make the company’s service improve daily and cut its costs simultaneously.

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