UP Your Service! Singapore:
A Service Rally for the Nation

NewsRadio 93.8FM
06 July 2006

Over the past year, Singaporeans have been made well aware of the importance of good service. We've had the Go the Extra Mile for Service, or GEMS, movement since October last year. It encourages those in the service industry to perform their duties with a smile. But did you ever think that your school teacher too is a service provider? Yasmine Yahya was at the UP Your Service Rally to speak to some surprising candidates for the good service award.

When you hear the phrase "good service", would teachers be the first thing that comes to your mind? Probably not -- and that's where Tanglin Secondary School hopes to make a difference. The school is one of three educational institutions that have signed up for the UP Your Service! training programme. Its principal is Karen Oei:

"Well I think we are part of public service. It is service. It's just that we are specialised in education. I think what is interesting in this UP Your Service! provision is that he actually goes beyond much more than just trying to meet expectations. He actually gives us a route to joyful service, a spiritual service, because you are not doing it for any specific material benefit. You are doing it because there's so much fun in doing things well. It is yourself, what you are capable of, in serving our fellow human beings."

The training programme is the brainchild of self-proclaimed "service guru" Ron Kaufman, who sits on the committee of the GEMS movement.

Tanglin Secondary School now has an in-house service trainer and has started placing all their staff on the programme. One of the teachers who has undergone the programme is Miss Solastri Suyot. Even before attending the course, Miss Solastri often went beyond the call of duty. She was so concerned about the performance of her Normal Academic students that she often scheduled her own meet-the-parent sessions. Whenever her students did well in tests, she threw a party and encouraged the parents to chip in for gifts. She even brought together all her students' parents onto an online mailing list, so that they could share ideas on how to boost their children's performance in school. She was presented with an UP Your Service! award at the rally for her efforts.

It seems Miss Solastri already knew everything about being a dedicated teacher. Nonetheless, the service training course still taught her some new things about herself, she says:

" Well I learned that I'm personally responsible for the happiness of the people that I work with and that is self-efficacy, that it has to come from myself. That I don't have to wait for things to happen but I make things happen. And that is one skill that we need to teach our students. Because we are role models. So when we are self-efficacious, then our kids will know, we have to stand on our own two feet, and these are the values that we're trying to communicate to our kids. The discipline to learn, the motivation to succeed, the passion to innovate."

In a bid to induce these very qualities in their students, Temasek Polytechnic has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Ron Kaufman. The polytechnic hopes not only to train their staff but their students too. The polytechnic's Deputy Principal Edmond Khoo elaborates.

"Well if you talk about service in schools, of course we have our students -- our own internal customers. Then we have people who come to visit us, and we have people who come to our counters. But more than that, I think more importantly really, is what we do to educate our students in the area of service because they are going to go out into society later. So we want to have our students trained and give them the opportunity to be trained in service quality areas such that when they go out into industry they will have an edge and they would be able to position themselves well with employers."

The training programme won't be made a compulsory subject; Mr Khoo says the school plans to introduce it into the curriculum as an elective module. The MOU will allow Temasek Polytechnic not only to conduct the UP Your Service! training course internally, but also to offer it to secondary schools.

Other organisations who have signed up for the service training course come from a wide variety of industries. They include hospitals, government bodies and even manufacturing companies. Mr Kaufman, who has conducted training seminars for representatives of these 42 organisations, explains how service affects every facet of Singapore economy.

" So in the area of medical services, if you're doing a certain level of insurance, or if you're encouraging students who are coming from other countries to come here, you want to be able to motivate them to do well -- care, compassion, concern, those are all fine. But service can also be flexibility in terms of policy. Service can also be things like responsiveness to specific requests. Service can also be a general policy of recovery when something goes wrong. So those aren't just the soft sides, so there are also some hard sides. And you can't do just one without the other. Otherwise you have very nice people, but inefficient. There are countries in Asia that do that. And there are other countries, very efficient but no warmth at all. And there are countries in Europe that do that. Singapore wants to be both."

Mr Kaufman, who calls Singapore his first home, organised the UP Your Service! Rally after a Reader's Digest poll ranked service in Singapore among the bottom 5 out of 35 major global cities. With the IMF and World Bank meeting just around the corner, his aim is to catapult us into the the top 5. It seems Singapore needs more than just four million smiles to do that.

Copyright, Ron Kaufman. All rights reserved.
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