SGX had 556 employees comprising 480 executives and 76 non-executives as at 30 June 2007.

We introduced a comprehensive Talent Management (TM) framework during the year with
clear definitions on talent quotient and assessment tools to focus on the following strategic human resource development areas, namely: talent acquisition and placement; succession planning and resource planning; business leadership development and retention; and domain leadership development.

Using our TM framework as a bedrock for human resource development, a new succession planning process was also designed and implemented for all senior management and unit head positions. A major intervention resulting from the framework was the formation of a Center of Excellence Council to focus on developing strategies for elevating our domain expertise benchstrength, and creating a new specialist career path structure.

SGX also played a lead role in organising the Asian Leadership Consortium. The focus of the programme was to offer like-minded companies the opportunity to train mid-level managers as well as provide a forum for inter-company dialogue and sharing in deliberating leadership challenges.

Retention was a challenge during the financial year. We realigned our compensation and rewards strategy to ensure market competitiveness, including our long-term retention programme. Special emphasis was placed on staffing, namely the deployment of dedicated resources to reduce hiring cycle time and improve the quality of new hires. A new referral programme was introduced in June 2007 to encourage employee participation and tap internal resources towards fulfilling our hiring requirements.

Work-life balance featured prominently during the year. We organised a number of events to engage our employees, for example, a movie night for the whole company complemented the ‘Eat With Your Family’ day in May 2007, a Kids@Work Day in the office. We also built conducive new nursing rooms for mothers.

We improved our new employee assimilation with the redesign of our new employee induction process. In addition, we also initiated a revised approach which centred on action learning principles for our management associates and SGX scholars.