Introducing Employee Wellbeing: sharing in our growth, with someone always in your corner

Today Singfung Group launches Employee Wellbeing. It is two things. First, everyone who has been with the company for a year receives dividend shares at the end of each financial year, sized to how the company has done. Second, we have set up a fully independent wellbeing committee, so that whatever you face at work or in life, there is a group of people who are on your side and nobody else’s.

This post explains why we are doing it, how it works, and the part of the journey that was anything but smooth.

Why: a company is people, not a spreadsheet

Most of Singfung’s leadership did not study computing. We got here out of love for it — taking machines apart and teaching ourselves one line of code at a time. The early days were not easy. When a server room failed at midnight, someone always went without being asked; when a customer was waiting in another time zone, someone always took a laptop home and kept watch. The people who stayed through those years built more than the business. They built the company’s character.

As the company grew, we kept asking ourselves one question: whose growth is this? The answer was always clear. It belongs to everyone who has given this place their time, their energy and part of their life. If the company does well, everyone should do well with it. And if someone is going through a hard time, the company should not look away.

“A company should feel like home” is easy to say. We wanted it to be more than words: a promise written into how we are run, and kept every year.

Sharing in what we achieve

The employee shareholding committee looks after this, and the rules are deliberately simple:

• Everyone is eligible automatically after one year, whatever their role — there is nothing to apply for.
• At the end of each financial year you receive a legally binding electronic notice explaining how the company has done, the new dividend shares you have been granted and what they are worth.
• Dividend shares can be traded or transferred within the company, or simply left to build up year after year into savings for later.
• You can take your shares or leave them with the company. By default, held shares are invested steadily by our partner banks within controlled levels of risk; colleagues who prefer to decide can choose from options the banks prepare just for Singfung staff, within limits the company sets.

We did not design it as a year-end bonus. A bonus is spent and gone; shares stay, build up and grow with the company. Ten years from now, we want a long-serving colleague to be able to look back and say plainly: part of this company is mine.

A committee that answers to no one

Sharing in the results is about doing well together, but life is not always kind. Someone faces a sudden upheaval; someone has carried a worry for a long time without being able to say it; someone disagrees with a company decision, or has been treated unfairly at work. At times like these the hardest part is often not the problem itself, but not knowing who to tell — or what telling might cost.

That is why the wellbeing committee was designed to be independent from day one:

• It belongs to no office or department. No manager can sway it, and none can see what you have told it.
• Every case is given a neutral member with no stake in you or the matter.
• We acknowledge within 2 working days and give a first formal answer within 10, and the case stays open until you are satisfied.
• When needed, the committee can arrange financial help, health or counselling support, and speak up to the company on your behalf; where there is unfair treatment, it investigates independently and takes substantiated complaints straight to the company’s decision-makers.

Alongside it, we wrote equal opportunity and reasonable support into the same framework. People with disabilities, long-term conditions or mental health conditions, people of sincerely held faith, neurodivergent people, people who need pregnancy-related support, and LGBTQ+ people can all ask for the support they need, in recruitment and in everyday work — and that information is used only to arrange support, never in decisions on hiring, reviews or promotion.

The part that wasn’t easy

To be honest, not everyone was in favour.

Some worried that a company still finding its feet was giving shares to too many people, too early. Some felt that a legally binding notice every year meant tying ourselves to a promise we could never take back. Some managers said frankly that a committee even the leadership could not control would make teams harder to lead. Outside the company, people said it was a burst of enthusiasm that would not last two years.

We listened to all of it, and it changed a good many details. We set eligibility at one year so the scheme could be generous and sustainable. We kept investment within controlled levels of risk and put every held share with professional banks. We wrote down the committee’s powers and deadlines so it would be independent without being mysterious. But on the two things at the heart of it — sharing in our growth, and always having someone in your corner — we did not give way.

Today it starts. We cannot promise that every decision we have made is right, but we are willing to let time — and every one of our colleagues — be the judge.

History will judge whether we got it right. What we can do is keep at it, carefully, year after year.