HRM Magazine Asia November/December 2022 Issue

SENIOR JOURNALIST

Shawn Liew JOURNALIST Josephine Tan GRAPHIC DESIGNER Adrian Taylor adrian.taylor@mac.com

SALES DIRECTOR Luke Kasprzak

ACCOUNTS MANAGER Edwin Lim

MARKETING DIRECTOR Yee Ling Chua

MANAGING DIRECTOR AND PUBLISHER Joanna Bush

Dear HRM Magazine Asia readers,

With change likely to remain a determining factor in the way we work in 2023, many organisations are beginning to consider the challenges and opportunities that a new paradigm of people and work is likely to bring.

What are the HR and business strategies that your organisation is planning to implement to gain business continuity and success in the new year?

For a start, how about making yourself “irresistible” to employees, customers, and shareholders alike?

Being “irresistible”, says Josh Bersin, Global Industry Analyst and CEO of the Josh Bersin Company, is now an essential strategy that will further differentiate companies and help HR and business leaders deal with the challenges ahead.

In this issue, Bersin highlights seven key principals that will allow organisations to excel and thrive, drawn from his mustread new book, Irresistible: The Seven Secrets of Enduring, Employee-Focused Companies.

If that piques your interest, be sure to join Bersin at HR Tech Festival Asia 2023, which is taking place from May 10-11 in Singapore. With the theme of Engage. Sustain. Thrive. Navigating The New Paradigm of People and Work, HR Tech Festival Asia 2023 will feature a lineup of global and regional thought leaders and HR luminaries such as Bersin, Ray Wang, Principal Analyst and Founder of Constellation Research; Tim Sackett, President, HRU Technical Resources, and Diana Wu David, Work Futurist and CEO,

Future Proof Lab, as they provide key insights into what is shaping the way we work.

In this issue, we are also celebrating the best and brightest HR and HR technology solution providers in Asia Pacific with the first in-person HRM Asia Readers’ Choice Awards 2022 to be held in three years.

This year, 23 worthy and unique winners were recognised across 19 diverse categories for their commitment and innovations, which have empowered organisations to successfully navigate the constantly changing world of work.

HRM Magazine Asia would like to congratulate all the winners of Readers’ Choice Awards 2022, as well as you, the CHROs who have successfully led your organisation through the challenges of 2022.

As we look forward to the new year, and as you devise your business strategies to navigate a new paradigm of people and work, HRM Asia will continue to strive to remain your source of information and market-leading content for HR across Asia.

We wish you a very successful 2023 ahead and look forward to seeing you in Singapore in May for HR Tech Festival Asia 2023, the largest HR technology and workforce management event for Asia’ HR community.

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Read something you like? Or something you don’t? Perhaps there’s some insight we haven’t considered? Have your say on HRM Asia’s news, features, and contributions by emailing: info@hrmasia.com.sg

SHAWN LIEW, Senior Journalist, HRM Asia

SENIOR

Shawn Liew Senior Journalist shawn.liew@hrmasia.com.sg

Josephine Tan Journalist josephine@hrmasia.com.sg.

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WORKFORCE OPTIMISATION: HR’S NEXT BIG PRIORITY

Workforce optimisation is a critical lever in driving business continuity and profitability through any type of change, highlights Pannie Sia, General Manager, ASEAN at Workday.

WHY COACHING IS THE MOST EFFECTIVE L&D TOOL FOR ORGANISATIONS TODAY

Nick Goldberg, CEO of EZRA, suggests that the future of L&D is coaching, which is a more effective tool that training, mentoring, or consulting.

BE CREATIVE – HOW TO BREAK FREE FROM TRADITIONAL LEARNING

Gavin Russell, General Manager, APAC, Docebo, explains why organisations must break free of traditional learning experiences to deliver the workforce of the future.

20

REDESIGNING EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE FOR THE FUTURE OF WORK

Mallory Loone, Co-Founder of Work Inspires, provides tips on how organisations can redesign the right employee experiences for their employees.

REIGNITE THE GLOBAL ASIAN LEADER AGENDA IN 2023

Sunil Puri, Senior Director and Head of Research, APAC, Centre for Creative Leadership (CCL), details the actions organisations must drive in 2023 to drive global Asian leader development initiatives.

HR TO HD: HOW THE PANDEMIC HAS ACCELERATED THIS SHIFT OVER THE LAST TWO YEARS

HR is pivoting to Human Development (HD) with stakeholder management becoming more paramount than just delivering profits, writes Nadiah Tan Abdullah, CHRO of S P Setia, and Chair of the ASEAN Human Development Organisation (AHDO) Malaysia.

AUSTRALIA

AUSTRALIA TO BAN WAGE SECRECY CLAUSES IN JOB CONTRACTS

AUSTRALIA IS SET TO BAN WAGE SECRECY clauses in employment contracts under industrial relations changes by the government, in a move that it hopes would be able to create a level playing field and narrow the country’s gender pay gap.

Large financial institutions and corporations have traditionally used pay secrecy clauses to stop co-workers from comparing their wage package and pushing for pay hikes. The Secure Jobs, Better Pay Bill, said Australia’s Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke, will help close the country’s 14.1 per cent gender pay gap, and protect women through “security, fair pay and proper protections”.

SECRET

JAPAN

JAPAN’S TOP BUSINESS LOBBY URGES FIRMS TO RAISE WAGES

JAPAN’S TOP BUSINESS LOBBY, Keidanren, has urged member companies to raise workers’ wages next spring to offset rising prices.

Keidanren has called on its members, which include Japan’s biggest companies, to consider price trends and “take forward-looking action that maintains and strengthens the momentum of wage increases.”

It identified young employees, workers with children, and non-permanent employees as those who are most vulnerable to inflation. Keidanren also highlighted alternatives businesses could take besides raising monthly pay, which include providing cost-of-living allowances and special bonuses.

CHINA CHINA DOLES OUT MORE SUPPORT FOR FEMALE EMPLOYEES

CHINA WILL BE GIVING MORE SUPPORT to female workers, after its top legislative body passed a newly amended law.

The revised law underlines that employers must not restrict female employees from promotion or obtaining technical skills due to circumstances like marriage, pregnancy, maternity leave, or breastfeeding.

The law, which comes into effect January 1 next year, also forbids the sexual harassment of women via words, text messages, physical acts, or any other means. Under such circumstances, women are encouraged to report to government departments or public security authorities or initiate a civil lawsuit if they are sexually harassed.

MALAYSIA

EMPLOYERS IN MALAYSIA URGED TO PRIORITISE EMPLOYEES’ MENTAL HEALTH

THE MALAYSIAN TRADES UNION CONGRESS (MTUC) has recommended that leave be granted to enable employees to deal with the mental stress they feel at work. MTUC president Effendy Abdul Ghani said employers must understand that their employees have other responsibilities outside of work, too.

“There is a stigma surrounding mental health and psychiatric problems and this should be dealt with immediately. The attending physician who assesses the employee should be the authority to recommend time out to rest,” he said, while highlighting the importance of work-life balance.

NEW ZEALAND

HYBRID WORK INCREASES PRODUCTIVITY IN NEW ZEALAND

ABOUT 83.2% OF NEW ZEALAND employees say the ability to work from anywhere has made them happier and more productive, according to a Cisco study, which highlighted how hybrid working has helped to improve employee wellbeing, work-life balance, and performance across the world.

However, more needs to be done to build an inclusive culture and fully embed hybrid work arrangements to boost readiness levels and enhance employee experience.

While 61.3% of New Zealand employees believe that the quality of their work has improved because of hybrid work, only 26.1% think that their company is ‘very prepared’ for a hybrid work future.

SINGAPORE EMPLOYEES IN SINGAPORE URGED TO IDENTIFY CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

AS THE SINGAPORE GOVERNMENT invests in schemes to reskill and train workers, they must also learn to identify career opportunities in the economy, set long-term career goals and take proactive steps towards achieving them, said Manpower Minister Tan See Leng. He added that the government plans to utilise data and artificial intelligence (AI) to generate personalised career insights, so workers have information on what opportunities are available and the pathways to get there.

US CALIFORNIA TO INTRODUCE FOR NEW PAY TRANSPARENCY ACT

CALIFORNIA GOV. GAVIN NEWSOM has signed a new pay transparency act that will require significant changes in how employers draft hob postings and how they report pay data to the state.

Starting January 1, 2023, employers in California with 15 or more employees must include a position’s salary or hourly wage range (not including bonuses or equitybased compensation) in any internal or external job posting.

Organisations with 100 or more employees must also report the pay data of their employee and contractors by race, ethnicity, and gender.

US EMPLOYEES IN THE US LACK CYBER SECURITY AWARENESS

JUST OVER A THIRD (35%) of employees in the US express little-to-no concern about data theft at work, and 20% believe they cannot be targeted at all by cyber criminals, a survey of 1,500 US employees has found.

Conducted by Ipsos and Terranova Security, the research also highlights that businesses in the US are not doing enough to protect their organisations from cyber threats by not providing proper cyber awareness training and education.

Only 41% of employees say they work in a company where cyber security awareness training is mandatory, 43% have not participated in any cyber security training, and nearly a third (31%) say their company does not offer any relevant training.

GLOBAL WORK FLEXIBILITY CAN ADDRESS EMPLOYEE BURNOUT

FLEXIBLE SCHEDULES CAN REDUCE BURNOUT, increase employee engagement and loyalty, and promote business success, according to a recent study by Future Forum, a consortium that is focused on building a way of working that is flexible, inclusive, and connected. According to Future Forum, while 80% of workers said they want flexibility in where they work, 94% indicated they want flexibility in when they work.

Employees with schedule flexibility showed a greater ability to focus and have a better work-life balance. On the other end of the spectrum, employees with no schedule flexibility are more than twice as likely to look for a new job in the coming year, compared with employees with moderate schedule flexibility.

AUSTRIA

IRELAND

RIGHT OF EMPLOYEES TO WORK REMOTELY SET TO BE STRENGTHENED IN IRELAND

IRELAND IS REPORTEDLY CONSIDERING NEW LEGISLATION that will give employers fewer grounds to turn down applications for home working.

If passed, the right to request remote working bill will also bolster employees’ rights to appeal any decision that does not permit them to work remotely to the Workplace Relations Commission.

Other changes being considered include reducing the amount of service a worker must have clocked up before they can submit a request for remote work. This is expected to be altered to 12 weeks’ service or less, from the original 26 weeks.

STARTUP FUND SUPPORTS FEMALE ENTREPRENEURS IN AUSTRIA

FEMALE FOUNDERS, an Austrian organisation supporting women entrepreneurs through accelerator and leadership programmes, events, and networking, has announced the first close of its new €20m fund dedicated solely to female founders.

Fund F, which has raised €12.5m so far, is the first ever fund specifically for female founders in Austria. Over the next four years, Fund F will invest in 25-30 pre-seed and seed stage companies that have at least one female cofounder, and focus on areas such as climate tech, femtech, healthtech, fintech, insurtech, and HR tech.

MODELS FOR

HYBRID WORK

COMPANIES IN NORDIC COUNTRIES countries are embracing workplace transformation and are strategising to make workplaces more flexible while maintaining organisational culture and employee engagement.

According to a new report by Information Services Group (ISG), digital workplace initiatives are playing a key role in the overall transformation of companies, even as employers continue to facilitate remote work to compete for talent.

To meet the varied work expectations of different generations of employees, companies are evaluating individual, team, and organisational needs to craft hybrid work policies, rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach.

IRRESISTIBLE: THE MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES FOR TODAY’S COMPANIES

ver the last 25 years, I have been studying management and HR practices in companies around the world. As I expanded my work into areas such as learning, compensation, employee experience, and productivity, I kept asking myself, “Which of these practices actually work?”

OBY JOSH BERSIN

What I found was that despite the best intentions of HR and business leaders, many management practices are institutionalised and outdated. Job descriptions, performance management methods, bonuses and rewards, and even the functional hierarchies of business structures are based on old practices developed in the industrial age when work was essentially divided into two categories: labour (people who performed the actual work) and management (those who told people what to do).

This categorisation worked well when most companies sold widgets or industrial services. But the world has changed. More than 70% of all jobs are now service related and companies are becoming increasingly digitised, service-centred, and innovation-focused. Enduring companies need employees who create, collaborate, invent, and problem solve every day. As smart as managers may be, it is not enough for them to simply tell people what to do.

My latest book, Irresistible: The Seven Secrets of Enduring, Employee-Focused Companies, is focused on the principles used by companies that endure and adapt, have created trusted brands, and sustain profitability.

The research behind the book

The practices described in my book were distilled from my years of research into workforce trends and the HR practices that have biggest business impact. I also wanted to find a way to assess employee sentiment and to do this, I poured through years of Glassdoor data to look for trends. What I found was quite profound. No matter how I broke down the data (by industry segment, company size, region), I came up with a bell curve. About 10 to 15% of employees rated their companies and managers between 4 and 4.4 on a five-point scale. About 15 to 20% rated their companies in the 2s or lower. And then 65 to 75% of employees rated their company in the middle – around 3.2.

Next, I dug into the companies at the top of the scale to learn more. I found that these top-rated companies had three things in common:

• The capacity to survive and thrive throughout good and bad business cycles and market shifts.

• Profitability over time.

• Respected, enduring brands.

In other words, they are “irresistible” to employees, customers, and shareholders.

I then dissected the ways these companies excel and the practices they employ and summarised my findings into seven distinct principles. While these seven “secrets” sound simple, they are quite complex when it comes to real-world implementation. Chapter by chapter, I describe each principle and its history along with examples of how various leaders put the principle into action. Comparison charts help readers see what the practice would look like when implemented. I end each chapter with recommendations for putting these practices to work in your own organisation.

The seven secrets summarised 1. Teams, not hierarchy. Irresistible companies rely on interlocking, empowered, and collaborative teams for agility and innovation. Leaders facilitate and support teams, which are often cross-functional, and allow employees to move from project to project to best utilise their skills. Rigid organisational hierarchies, designed to protect executive power and control decision making and career paths, no longer work. Underlying effective teamwork

“BECOMING

is an emphasis on agile work practices; the chapter explains how the principles of agile software development have helped companies embrace empowered, agile teams to react quickly to business changes.

2. Work, not jobs. Routine jobs, those which require defined skills typically applied in very defined ways, are disappearing. However, non-routine jobs, comprised of tasks performed at irregular intervals and often executed in different ways dependent on the situation, have exploded. This trend is creating better jobs, higher paying jobs, and jobs that require new skills. Rather than confining employees to specific job descriptions, leaders should focus – and develop – employees for the high value work. This chapter explains why I think the nine-box grid must go and why pay should be based on work, not just position or tenure. I also go into new ways to assess the potential fit of job candidates.

3. Coach, not boss. In human-centred organisations, the primary role of leaders is to coach, empower, support, and care for their employees. The “command and control” approach to management just does not work anymore. Some companies blend their leadership ranks with managers who have functional expertise and those who excel at coaching to provide the information and background employees might need with performance support and facilitation. Annual performance appraisals, based on goals set at the beginning of a performance cycle, are obsolete. I discuss the importance of continuous performance management and new ways to look at goal setting.

4. Culture, not rules. Rather than structuring work around rules, irresistible companies design work strategies that elevate employee safety, health, inclusion, and wellbeing and give employees agency. Employees look forward to coming to work and are inspired to do their best. While a company’s culture must be driven from the top, everyone in the organisation must take a caretaker role. This is especially important now as we see more flexible and remote work arrangements. The chapter delves into the importance of fairness and transparency in decisions and pay, the importance of really listening to employees (different than the traditional satisfaction and engagement surveys) and taking a hard and honest look at how your company’s current practices move the needle on diversity and inclusion.

5. Growth, not promotion. Opportunity for personal growth is

one of the strongest drivers of employee engagement. People need to feel they are learning all the time – not only to help them do their jobs better but also to further their career goals. Irresistible companies do not tie development programmes and resources to certain job levels or job types. Realistically, promotions are limited to only a few employees; personal and skills growth should be available to all. Offering ways and resources in which employees can learn continuously should now be part of every company’s learning strategy. Course catalogues are not enough. Employee growth occurs in four ways: formal training, experience (projects, assignments, jobs), exposure (mentors, coaches, peers), and a supportive learning environment that gives people time and space to learn, rewards the acquisition of new skills, and offers new opportunities.

6. Purpose, not profit. Profits matter but without a distinct, clear purpose, a company can often lose its way or its competitive edge. The chapter starts with a description of how purpose has shaped and facilitated the growth of Unilever, the multinational consumer goods giant. In a purpose-driven company, all functions and practices of the company reflect its purpose, from R&D to sales and marketing, to customer relations. A clearly articulated purpose is also important when it comes to attracting and retaining employees. Research shows that people want to drive positive change and value meaningful work.

7. Employee experience, not output. I have been writing and talking about the importance of employee experience for years. Too often, employees spend hours every week on workarounds, navigating approval processes, or dealing with work tools and systems that make their jobs harder, not easier. Designing positive experiences into every aspect of an employee’s journey and workday not only drives retention and engagement, but it also has significant impact on productivity. I discuss in the chapter how technology, when selected carefully and implemented well, can do much to resolve bottlenecks and increase collaboration.

Conclusion

Many HR and business leaders are currently grappling with employee burnout, hiring and retention challenges, hybrid work strategies, or preparations for an economic downturn. Becoming “irresistible” is an essential business strategy that will even further differentiate companies and help leaders deal with whatever is ahead.

Making work better for people and organisations has been the most important undertaking of my career. I truly believe we, as HR professionals, have the power to help our organisations thrive, grow, and inspire people. My goal is to help you make your own work, your teams, and your company more productive, fulfilling, and yes, even fun.

About the Author

Josh

is a

author of the new book, Irresistible: The Seven Secrets of Enduring, Employee-Focused Companies. He will also be joining HR Tech Festival Asia 2023 as part of a lineup of global and regional thought leaders and HR luminaries to provide key insights into what is shaping the way we work.

Bersin

Global Industry Analyst, CEO of the Josh Bersin Company, and

Why HR leadership is the key to organisational change

Whether by design or through circumstance, many organisations have been offering flexible work arrangements to their employees over the last few years and are likely to continue doing so in the foreseeable future.

The question many HR leaders are asking themselves as they seek a winning formula for flexible work, is, “How can we boost employee experience in a flexible working environment to create more productive employees?”

The pandemic has proven that work can be done from anywhere and at more flexible times, and more importantly, allow employees to enjoy a better work-life balance, said Suyin Enriquez, Vice President, International HR, Ceridian.

Speaking to HRM Magazine Asia, she added, “Having been on flexible work arrangements for the past two years, employers need to find the best way to deliver a great employee experience both in person and virtually. Collaboration and connection become more important and being able to do this in a meaningful way is key.”

Based out of the company’s local headquarters in Singapore, Suyin is an accomplished HR leader who joined Ceridian in September 2020. She brings a wealth of HR experience and expertise accumulated throughout the Asia-Pacific region.

For more than 20 years, she has worked with organisations such as the National Basketball Association (NBA) Asia, Procter & Gamble, Accenture, and Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, and has seen the workplace shaped and reshaped by a number of transformative changes.

All of which, could arguably pale in comparison to one of the biggest and potentially most disruptive change organisations around the world are currently having to contend with.

Suyin explained, “Employees are now looking for more flexible work arrangements where they are given a choice of where to work, when to work and how to work. If organisations can’t find a way to provide these options, the pool of candidates who are willing to work for them will be limited.”

For organisations who continue to view flexibility for employees as hyperbole, a rethink should perhaps be a pressing priority.

According to Ceridian’s 2022 Pulse of Talent report, employees in Singapore, while still valuing renumeration, identified remote

work and flexible hours as the second most important factor that will make them consider seeking alternative employment.

Yet, less than half of business leaders are building flexibility into job roles and responsibilities to help their organisations build a change-ready culture.

Suyin cautioned, “This divide sends a clear message that return-to-work plans may not align with what employees want, which could negatively impact employers’ ability to recruit and retain talent.”

To make flexible work a success, employee experience must be a top priority because no organisation can be successful unless their employees feel motivated and engaged. “This means reducing silos and creating opportunities for collaboration across teams, functions, and regions. Employees want an experience that mimics how they interact with their favourite brands as consumers, which is digital, on-demand, personalised and self-led,” said Suyin.

She also recommended mobile technology as a tool for organisations to create a tailored and connected experience for remote employees. “Whether it’s swapping shifts, checking schedules, or reviewing their pay, employees want access to their work life through their mobile devices. Employees who have greater control over their own schedules are more likely to be engaged, which can lead to less turnover.”

Why a change-ready culture starts from the top

“Having been on flexible work arrangements for the past two years, employers need to find the best way to deliver a great experienceemployee both in person and virtually.”

SUYIN ENRIQUEZ, VICE PRESIDENT, INTERNATIONAL HR, CERIDIAN.

Besides demonstrating flexibility and prioritising employees, organisational agility has been a key characteristic of organisations that have successfully navigated the pandemic.

To build and sustain organisational agility, a change-ready culture primarily driven by the behaviours and performance of leaders is pivotal to manage disruption and prepare employees for change, according to Suyin.

She elaborated, “Standards and expectations displayed by leaders are echoed and emulated by the workforce. People and culture leaders have an opportunity to cement their custodial ownership roles and create a culture of continuous value creation in the workforce.”

According to Ceridian research, organisations can build change readiness into their culture with some key approaches, including implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) strategies to foster a culture that respects and celebrates all employees.

Explaining how this is intrinsic to creating a positive employee experience, Suyin added, “What’s essential is not to think of DEI as a perk, or an add-on, but rather as a fundamental element of how an organisation operates.”

“From fair recruitment to equal remuneration for employees, to setting measurable targets for ongoing improvement, HR can also help organisations be purposeful and intentional when it comes to DEI.”

HR leaders, she recommended, should take a data-driven approach to develop DEI initiatives, beginning with using data to fill gaps.

When accessing DEI programmes, key metrics to measure include general demographic data that identifies diversity gaps, as well as employee pulse surveys that allow all employees to reflect on organisational and personal engagement.

To further drive the success of these initiatives, leaders must adopt a flexible and open mindset that adjusts to new ways of working and understand that a one-size-fits-all approach no longer works because each employee has unique needs.

In the process, organisations build up resilient leadership that is critical for success in an increasingly borderless, virtualfirst world of work. “Having strong leaders in place today and a pipeline of leaders for tomorrow are essential for an organisation to effectively weather change,” said Suyin.

Change that includes a shift in mindset from burnt-out, disengaged, and disconnected employees who have decided not to go over and beyond at work, as the recent conversations over “quiet quitting” has highlighted.

To successfully manage an increasingly diverse workforce with different beliefs and priorities, leaders need to acquire the agility and flexibility that will allow them to engage with employees under their care and to create a more productive workforce.

“This requires engagement on two levels – commitment to an individual’s goals and a commitment to the company’s goals,” said Suyin. “Clear and measurable individual performance goals, connected to a purpose-driven organisation where goals are cascaded to the individual, can create an improved employee experience, and ultimately lead to a high-performing workforce.”

Why organisational success begins with employee development

When it comes to workplace learning, many employees are facing a conundrum: While they recognise the importance of upskilling and reskilling in progressing their careers and making them happier and more productive workers, the rate of workplace learning, for myriad reasons, remains low.

According to a recent Randstad survey, about 97% of employees in Malaysia are interested in learning and development (L&D) opportunities, but only 36% said employers offered them training in the past 12 months.

Over in neighbouring Singapore, while most employees (73%) want to participate in both company-offered and external L&D programmes, 26% said they have not enrolled for or attended any training in the past year.

The reasons, revealed NTUC LearningHub’s (NTUC LHUB) State of Workplace Learning (SWL) Report 2022, include lack of time (52%) and heavy workload (45%), which are clear impediments to learning, said Tony Tran, Lead People Scientist, Culture Amp.

Speaking with HRM Magazine Asia, he elaborated, “Time is certainly a significant barrier that prevents employees from focusing on L&D, especially when they are expected to squeeze development into their day-to-day work or even outside of work hours.”

“If employees are time-poor, traditional manual individual development plans (IDPs), static libraries, and linear career paths that are clunky, time-consuming, and uninteresting lower engagement and ultimately drive talent out and toward other opportunities.”

Tran also identified three challenges presented by traditional approaches to talent management. Employees find a lack

of motivating development opportunities and managers struggle to have meaningful growth conversations with their direct reports.

Additionally, HR teams have insufficient visibility into development activities, making it difficult for them to help managers and employees, or to demonstrate the effectiveness of L&D to leadership.

Aligning organisational success with employee development strategies

When effective employee development is not present, it is almost inevitable that organisations are facing an uphill struggle to retain their best talent.

According to exit survey responses studied by Culture Amp, employees who do not feel they have access to L&D opportunities are twice more likely to leave in the next 12 months. Employees are also likely to be more engaged, innovative, and productive when they develop skills relevant to their interests.

The challenge for people and culture teams, said Tran, is to align the growth and development of employees with the broader organisational strategy and the skills and capabilities needed to drive future success.

“While growth and development needs are highly individual, people and culture initiatives need to be developed in a way that scales across the entire organisation,” he explained.

This is where people leaders step up to lead the development conversation with employees and to co-create a learning experience by tailoring the L&D experience of every employee.

Tran continued, “This micro level of development customisation allows organisations to integrate the business

context and goals with individual development. People leaders can work with their direct reports and align their L&D wants and needs with the needs of the organisation, allowing both the individual and organisation to be successful.”

Creating a motivating future for employees

While much has been said and debated around the Great Resignation and its causes, developing a successful employee development strategy is likely to go a long way towards organisations winning the war for talent.

To help organisations embark on their employee development journey, Culture Amp is offering an easy and guided approach to employee development through its Develop solution, which helps retain, grow, and upskill employees with personalised development plans and goals setting for ongoing growth.

Tran highlighted, “Employees can set and update development goals in the platform and managers can celebrate their progress in in performance reviews. By making growth clear, actionable, and rewarding, organisations can help employees and their managers paint a clear future for growth.”

Develop is also designed to empower managers to support employee development by providing an easy and guided approach to more meaningful and frequent growth discussions.

With the tools provided by Develop, managers can better understand what motivates their direct reports and more effectively identify key development opportunities. When priorities or goals change, managers and employees can easily access development plans to make changes.

“By upskilling your managers on the skills they need to help their direct reports, and ensuring a consistent development planning experience, you enable both parties to meaningfully grow,” Tran said.

Develop also allows the effectiveness of L&D to be measured, or as Tran described, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”

He added, “Develop makes it possible to track development initiatives and show positive impact. Using Develop, organisations can access a consolidated view of development activity, development impact, and development insights.”

Click here to find out how you can grow and retain your people with Culture Amp’s Develop.

“While growth and development needs are highly individual, people and culture initiatives need to be developed in a way that scales across the entire organisation.”

TONY TRAN, LEAD PEOPLE SCIENTIST, CULTURE AMP.

Make employee development__________________ a top priority

Learn how employee development is a key driver of engagement, retention, and business success. Tips and best practices from our people scientists. Download

Workforce optimisation: HR’s next big priority

To thrive in a tight labour market, organisations are focused on optimising their workforce to be resilient by building a culture that supports talent mobility and empowers employees to embrace agility.

Workforce optimisation, said Pannie Sia, General Manager, ASEAN at Workday, combines the efficiency of automated workforce management with the flexibility of an agile, skills-based talent approach to create improved employee engagement, business continuity and profitability.

She continued, “Even in pre-pandemic times, jobs were changing quickly, forcing employers to be more flexible and fluid with employee roles becoming transformed as they moved across different teams and tasks. Also, HR leaders were already in a critical role helping their organisations manage the work and successfully steering their companies through change.”

The pandemic accelerated this change, as organisations rethought how they operate, including placing a renewed focus on health and safety. With old planning and forecasting models becoming obsolete, the need for rapid upskilling and redeployment came to the fore.

The workforce optimisation challenge

During unpredictable times, workforce optimisation is an approach that allows organisations to adapt and quickly pivot the workforce to support change and new opportunities.

Sia illustrated, “For instance, when employers do not have a complete, accurate view of their workforce skills and costs, when they cannot continuously plan and execute in an environment of rapid change, and when they cannot support growth at a pace needed to sustain the business, significant risks are potentially lurking around the corner.”

“Without the ability to fully optimise their workforce, employers cannot keep pace with supporting changing business initiatives, including launching new business models, redeploying employees,

supporting employee expectations, or transitioning to remote work if processes, data, and teams are not connected and running smoothly.”

For organisations to achieve workforce optimisation, gaining operational agility is a business imperative through achieving three key objectives.

1. Build the workforce operations foundation needed for administrative excellence

Organisations need to digitise administrative tasks and eliminate the tedium of paper and spreadsheets. This requires a single data source leading to accurate payroll and a clear understanding of workforce metrics, as well as driving connected processes and workflows.

2. Gain the operational agility to quickly flex and adjust the workforce to change Employers need systems to help them flex and adjust the workforce to change, as well as to better control labour costs by automating time-consuming manual tasks and decision making. It also entails clearly understanding the workforce skills available so they can accurately and quickly adjust, while also addressing skills gaps and planning for the future.

3. Optimise the full value of the

workforce to

drive business

continuously optimise and drive more value from their workforce. For employers with a large hourly workforce, for instance, they need predictive abilities to forecast labour demand and needed skills, as well as the ability to continuously upskill and reskill their employees. The employee experience must also allow employees to designate when and where they would like to work, take additional learning, sign up for additional shifts, communicate with their managers, and generally have more say and control over their work lives.

Driving business continuity with workplace optimisation

As the pandemic has demonstrated – for better or for worse – organisations must be prepared for a more resilient future, one in which there could be continued shocks from disruptions like natural disasters or health crises.

They also need to be able to create new revenue streams and business models, with a workforce ready to support them, Sia highlighted.

The goal, she added, is to protect the business and increase resilience to better withstand, and potentially capitalise on, future marketplace disruptions, fluctuations in business demand, and changes in business strategy.

goals

A fully optimised workforce is possible to achieve, but organisations need to

Technology is likely to have a key role to play as workplace optimisation focuses on using artificial intelligence (AI) to automate time-consuming tasks, provide critical information to employees and managers right in the flow of work, and make it easier to create and adjust new organisational structures to support change and times of unpredictable disruption.

As talent competition becomes more intense, it is also critical to balance the needs of the business with the needs of individual employees. The ability for HR and operations to adapt the workforce to change are now strategic differentiators in the marketplace.

Sia added, “Workforce optimisation is a critical lever in driving business continuity and profitability through any type of change. By adopting the previously ‘hidden strategy’ of effective workforce optimisation, employers can do more than just navigate business disruptions, no matter how unexpected. They can emerge even stronger.”

Click here to learn more about workforce optimisation that makes every employee count.

“Workforce optimisation is a critical lever in driving business continuity and profitability through any type of change.”

PANNIE SIA, GENERAL MANAGER, ASEAN AT WORKDAY

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Why coaching

most effective learning and development tool for organisations today

As an ongoing priority, learning and development (L&D) teams are consistently identifying skills gaps to develop and deliver training to foster more engaged and productive employees.

The disruption to the way we work over the last few years has heightened this challenge, leading organisations to ponder what is required to succeed in the future. For founders of EZRA, a digital learning and leadership coaching platform, the specific question on their minds three years ago when setting up the company was, “What is the future of L&D?”

The future of L&D is coaching, and it is a more effective tool than training, mentoring, or consulting, as Nick Goldberg, CEO of EZRA, told HRM Magazine Asia, “We’d seen the power of coaching applied to the C-suite to transform leaders to great effect, and knew that if more people had access, we could transform the entire workforce.”

EZRA defines coaching as a personal learning and performance development tool that creates a goal-oriented relationship through a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires participants to maximise their personal and professional potential.

Above all, what sets coaching apart from other L&D tools is personalisation. “We know that employees are more engaged in their growth journey if their individual passions and goals are heard and prioritised,” Goldberg said. “People aren’t answering emails during a coaching session like they are during a two-hour training video. They’re working one-on-one with a professional coach who is dedicated to helping them achieve their personal objectives.”

Beyond helping individuals grow their skills and become better leaders, coaching implemented at scale also transforms organisations. Coaching, he explained, helps to create better managers and develops leaders’ diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) competencies, which in

NICK GOLDBERG, CEO OF

turn expedites growth needed to retain and engage talent.

Creating a culture of learning by democratising coaching

Realising the potential benefits coaching can bring to organisations, the goal of EZRA over the last three years has been to make coaching more accessible and affordable for everyone.

Goldberg revealed, “Coaching comes with a time-high price tag, which is why it has traditionally been reserved for the C-suite or larger organisations with bigger budgets. When we set out to democratise coaching, we knew that part of increasing accessibility was increasing affordability.”

Building a digital platform and leveraging their access to industry-leading through their parent company LHH of The Adecco Group, EZRA has been able to provide coaching ondemand at a more accessible price point and helped customers enact change at every level of their organisation through.

“From entry-level to middle management and beyond, the more employees that are engaged in a coaching programme, the more an organisation can drive company-wide

initiatives such as increasing customer service skills or collaboration among teams,” Goldberg elaborated.

“EZRA was really born from my experience as a CEO within LHH, where I encouraged every member of my team to leverage our world-class professional coaches. I saw how it changed the way our people showed up at work and for our clients, it’s helping to create culture with greater work-life balance, engagement, retention, collaboration, and equity.”

Drawing on narratives such as the Great Resignation and “quiet quitting”, he is also keen to highlight how for myriad reasons, many employees today are not engaged and how coaching can rectify that.

Working with industry leaders such as Lazada and Standard Chartered, EZRA found that implementing coaching at scale can drive up to 28% improvement in prioritisation and up to 72% improvement in engagement.

Recent data from EZRA further shows that when organisations invest in tools like professional coaching, 77% of employees display more loyalty towards their employers because growth and long-term career progression are assured.

Coaching can also encourage more active employee participation because instead of telling employees what to do, coaching gives them opportunities to examine what they are doing with what they want.

Within a workplace setting, coaching can be used as a long-term tool to empower DE&I, manage organisational change, develop better managers, improve the new-hire onboarding process, and perhaps, more importantly, create happier teams.

“Today’s workers won’t tolerate jobs that are toxic or unfulfilling, which is a good thing. It has prompted companies to make better investments in their culture and their people, and as you can see, it pays off,” Goldberg concluded.

Click here to find out how EZRA can unleash your organisation’s potential and establish a coaching culture.

is the

“We’d seen the power of coaching applied to the C-suite to transform leaders to great effect, and knew that if more people had access, we could transform the entire workforce.”

EZRA.

traditional learning

Asia’s workplaces are changing. Recent research from PwC has shown that only 57% of employees are satisfied with their jobs and at least a third of employees are intending to ask for a promotion or a raise in the next 12 months. Employees also associate diverse learning opportunities with attractive employers, and they are interested in reskilling with tech skills, given the emerging and dramatic shortfall in tech talent across Asia.

However, workplace learning is still dominated by traditional, face-to-face education, and traditional certification systems. The pandemic taught us all that remote working was not only possible, but it could also be productive. It is interesting that comparatively few organisations have shifted their learning strategy to reflect the changes in attitude among employees, and to futureproof their organisations.

There is nothing wrong with traditional, face-to-face learning. But in a world where resilience and agility are crucial to competitive advantage, traditional learning may be too slow and too cumbersome to meet the immediate needs of both businesses and employees alike.

Blended learning

Probably the most logical transition from traditional workplace learning is the blended learning opportunity, where self-paced online training is combined with peer-topeer learning in formal seminars. While learning managers may be underprepared for blended learning, there is an opportunity for companies to grow their L&D teams with experienced blended learning practitioners.

Blended learning takes advantage of technology-based solutions to facilitate “learning in the flow of work”. Learning takes place in the context of everyday tasks, using technology-mediated collaboration and communication. This kind of embedded learning into workplace practice can reinforce formal training sessions and help speed up decision making and skills development.

The advantage of blended learning is not just the speed of delivery of learning, but also

the opportunity for companies to customise problem-solving activities offered in workplaces. Employees, too, can customise their own learning experiences and because they engage with business problem solving, they become more invested in the interests of their employer.

Social learning

It may seem counter-intuitive, but the emerging trend of social learning is best conducted remotely. Not only does it improve employee communication and improve the visibility of remote work, but it can be conducted in an asynchronous fashion and can act as a team building tool for remote workers.

Gamified learning, remote events, and coaching and mentoring all act as mechanisms to improve a sense of connection and cohesion in increasingly distributed and divided workplaces. People-to-people interactions enable a more personalised and less formal learning experience, and they encourage employees to try new skills.

Microcredentials

Many microcredentials are offered as remote learning programmes, with assessment being conducted through more traditional exams and assignments, or increasingly through a combination of project development and peer review. The advantage of microcredentials is speed of delivery of skilled workers and the opportunity to combine different microcredentials into a formal certification or traditional qualification over time.

Mobile learning

A workforce that is often on the move, or is focused on customer engagement or manual labour, can be limited by desktopbound online learning experiences and face-to-face training programmes. Mobile learning that takes advantage of the social and communication attributes of mobile devices offers employees a more flexible and adaptable learning experience.

Mobile learning is instantaneous, and the preferred option among people trying to solve a problem in place. From YouTube videos to social posting, the opportunity to learn on the fly is much more powerful through portable connected devices. Mobile learning expands access to learning for employees that might not generally work before a computer screen, as well as tapping into natural curiosity and employee interest.

Summing it up

As alternatives to traditional learning programmes, technology-based learning management systems are commonly used, but it is important not to assume that the technology alone delivers a modern learning experience.

Learning managers need to think about how they can facilitate social engagement and performance tracking to ensure that learning experiences meet the needs of employees. Learning managers should be pairing content in the online learning platform with company strategy, and with the way that employees interact.

Employees are seeking high engagement experiences, and development of a full scope ecosystem of learning, career development and strategic purpose can help them understand how they are valued, and how they contribute to the future of any company.

We have an opportunity to lead the world with learning experiences that drive employee loyalty and improve company performance. This is the time to break free of traditional learning experiences and to help deliver the workforce of the future. All it takes is a little creativity.

Be creative - How to break free from

Gavin Russell is General Manager, APAC, Docebo

About the Author

“This is the time to break free of traditional learning experiences and to help deliver the workforce of the future.”

GAVIN RUSSELL, GENERAL MANAGER, APAC, DOCEBO

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REDESIGNING EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE FOR THE FUTURE OF WORK

What do “The Great Resignation” and now “quiet quitting” have in common? It stems from poor experiences. Now, employee experiences have been a common topic for years, so why address it now?

According to the World Economic Forum, most companies will have about 25% of their workforce comprising of GenZs by 2025, which means a company on average will have at least four generations in the workforce at the same time. The generations that are mostly affected by movements like “quiet quitting” are Gen-Z and Millennials.

Does that mean organisations need to shift their entire workforce to “accommodate” these changes? Not necessarily. The United Nations’ Human Development Index comprises of three key

dimensions:

1. Long and Healthy Life (Well-being experiences) 2. Knowledge (Learning Experiences) 3. A decent standard of living (Working Experiences)

Currently, Singapore stands at number 12, whilst Malaysia stands at 62 with the leading top three countries being Switzerland, Norway, and Iceland.

With these foundations in place, let’s see how we can redesign the right employee experiences.

Creating effective well-being experiences

We are aware that mental and emotional well-being has been prominently talked about since the pandemic. Some best practices that have been implemented include in well-being engagements and inhouse mental health first-aiders.

So, what is the missing piece? Let’s look at the root causes of why stress and burnout happen.

a. The choice of working style

Yes, emphasis on the word “choice”. We understand that some industries or businesses are always at their peak and workloads are never-ending. However, it can be the choice of companies and leadership to still emphasise the right culture and being a purpose-driven organisation.

It can also be the choice of leaders to have healthy engagements and conversations with their team members, listening to frustrations and working together to create solutions.

Lastly, it is also the choice of the employees - we can choose to complain or choose to be part of the solutions being offered.

b. Go beyond the “talk”

I am sure you have attended more than enough talks and workshops on well-being. It is time to go beyond that. More often than not, we have seen repeating issues raised about policies, transparency in information, and working arrangements. Aligning with DEI and ESG, how can companies start creating actionable policies and initiatives that can help close the gaps?

There are no “perfect” policies that would fit all, but in the end, it comes to what each company needs. For example, having standard “maternal or paternal” benefits would only suit a certain demographic. What about those who choose not to have kids? Similarly, have “gym benefits” to promote health, but what about those who choose other sports?

Cultivating effective learning experiences

As we live in an ever-changing and agile world, the question we need to ask is, “Can we remain relevant?” The relevance here goes beyond just attending conferences or learning about the latest trends. How do you make changes based on that knowledge and how can companies facilitate such learning experiences?

a. Create a learning culture

Training is merely a learning method and does not necessarily equate to actual learning. Cultivating a learning culture can be as simple as having a learning session with the team, being a mentor when there are questions asked, being encouraging for the team and being a mentor who guides.

Yes, it sounds simple, but organisations need to have a certain framework or structure to make facilitate learning.

Here are some key practices you can use:

• Have an internal mentoring programme where peer-to-peer learning is practised.

• Create a customised measurable learning journey based on developmental needs, that is, what is next after the management trainee, and effective talent/ succession planning.

• Consistent leadership alignment to ensure that the gaps between hierarchy are closed.

b. Sandbox for innovation

Every company wants to innovate for the future, and they preach creativity and agility. However, there are also countless times when we work with our clients, and we hear ideas rejected because they are “more work” or because it is unconventional. Some ideas did not even have a chance to be shared merely because there are differences in opinions, positions, or the lack of a platform.

To improve this, you can put in place these practices:

1. Create a space to allow for collaboration among departments, where it can start as a problem-solving space to help improve efficiency and effectiveness.

2. Hackathons or dialogues for employees to brainstorm ways they see as the “future of work” for the business.

These will cultivate a sense of ownership and belonging, which leads to the retention and development of talented

employees. It also serves as a motivation for employees to be more proactive and invested in the company’s business.

Practice healthy working experiences

Finally, we come to our day-to-day practices. Here are three simple ways organisations can create a healthy workplace.

a. Tie culture to performances

Have clear values that are advocated from the management all the way to the tea lady and most importantly, allow them to relate it back to their own needs and work. If you are going to do a relaunch of purpose, mission, vision, and values, do it right and ensure that it ties back to performance measurements.

b. Call out unconscious biases

We know the importance to have a “whistleblower” but let us all practice calling out those that show bias and favouritisms at work. This, in fact, is one of the most frustrating problems employees faced.

c. Tying personal goals to career development

All of us spend most of our lifetime working. So, help make it meaningful by tying employees’ personal goals into their career development plan. For example, financial freedom would be popular, so how can we use an employee’s job crafting to achieve that?

In summary, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to create employee experiences. But if we do not do anything about it, we are losing an opportunity. So, let’s practice the concept of “just one more” by starting with one key action - the rest will likely fall in place.

About the Author

Mallory Loone is Co-Founder of Work Inspires, a people engagement company that focuses on sustainable results through interactive and customisable L&D, team bonding, and employer branding solutions.

Reignite the global asian leader agenda in 2023: 3 Actions organisations must drive

At a projected growth rate of 5.6% in 2023, Asia is growing at a more rapid pace compared to the rest of the world (estimated to grow at 3.6%), offers the largest market through its huge middle-class population, is a potential catchment area for talent with more young people in the region than anywhere else, and is a hotbed for innovation and entrepreneurship.

Any organisation that does not have a mature Asia strategy has perhaps already ‘missed’ the Asia bandwagon! Global organisations therefore need Asian leaders to not only grow their operations in Asia, but to inform the headquarters how to win business in a culturally different region. Besides, Asian leaders bring unique strengths of empathy and humility to the table, two attributes that are in unprecedented demand in the post-pandemic world.

According to The Center for Creative Leadership’s (CCL) Global Asian Leader: From Asia, For the World research study, despite a slew of favourable attributes Asian leaders bring to the table and a strong business case to groom talent in Asia, there is a very limited representation of ethnic Asian talent in global C-suite and executive roles.

In top 200 organisations headquartered in Americas or Europe, leaders of Asian ethnicity (and/or nationality) represent only about 4% and 3% of the executives respectively. As compared to 2017, when CCL estimated the same data, Asian representation in executive teams has fallen marginally, possibly due to the tighter work visa norms or the growing sentiment of nationalism that may translate into having more local leaders at the helm in organisations

headquartered in North America or Europe.

The Global Asian Leader research refers to this phenomenon as Asian leaders hitting a “bamboo ceiling” at some stage in their career, often as they are at the cusp of graduating from country roles to regional/ global positions.

As we reflect on the year gone by and as we prepare for 2023, what can global organisations do differently to move the dial on their global Asian leader development initiatives? CCL research suggests three actions organisations must kick-start or re-energise.

Understanding the root causes holding back Asian talent in your organisation

To be able to make it to the C-suite in a global organisation, Asian leaders need to get the “right” breaks at appropriate stages in their careers, and then they need to be prepared well enough to be successful in those roles. In a way, Asian leaders need better “access” to global roles and need to be set up for “success” as they transition into such roles.

Further, some experiences, attributes, and situations could enhance Asian leaders’ access to global career paths. These “enablers” could be a supportive manager, a global secondment programme, leadership team having a global mindset, demonstrating global leadership attributes, or attending global leadership development programmes. In contrast, some situations, experiences, or manager/senior leadership mindsets may make leaders’ access to global roles harder or set them up for failure. These “blockers” may be the lack of leader mobility or lack of global aspirations of the employer organisation, or absence of a learning mindset.

Although enablers can mainly be attributed to nature or nurture elements, CCL research attributed the “blockers” to obstacles created due to the country environment in which the leader grows up and operates, or the organisation culture, policies, leadership, or individual skill and will issues.

Help leaders build the ‘right’ mindset, skill set, experiences

To succeed in global roles, Asian leaders must develop key attributes and mindsets, get global experience, and initiate appropriate actions. Global Asian Leader research identifies 5 critical traits and capabilities that an Asian leader must demonstrate to be successful in global roles.

Courage to overcome the fear of facing unknown or unfamiliar situations and having the ability to express one’s opinions freely; Curiosity or hunger to learn something new, seek different experiences, ask questions, and genuinely wanting to know more about different people and cultures; Trust (trusting people and being trustworthy) to establish and develop deep credibility

of one’s authenticity and capability within and outside of the global enterprise; ability to influence decisions via compelling communication, managing the “political” landscape in the enterprise, negotiating skills; and finally, strategic thinking, or thinking global, thinking long-term, and looking at situations with a CEO lens.

Research also highlighted a hygiene element – aspiration to embrace a global career.

Asian leaders must also work on inculcating an increased learning agile or growth mindset, which may appear as a constant hunger to learn, even from challenging situations.

Research also suggests that some experiences are invaluable or must-have to prepare talent for global roles. Multi-cultural, -country, -function, -business roles often lead to increased “comfort with discomfort.” Even unpleasant experiences serve as great “teachers” in shaping leaders’ ability to deal with adversity and complexity. There are four must-have experiences in particular - global rotations or cross-border assignments, multi-function exposure, crucible or stretch assignments, and non-obvious jobs or career roles make leaders more learning agile and make them comfortable with discomfort.

Engineer a multi-stakeholder approach

It takes several stakeholders to build a strong pipeline of global Asian leaders. Key initiatives to break the “bamboo ceiling” must be headquarter-sponsored. If organisations try to solve for the global Asian leader challenge in Asia (only) through local initiatives, it may

be a very long journey. Six different stakeholder groups need to work in tandem.

Global executive leaders must be executive sponsors of the Asian leadership agenda, set clear accountability around talent development in Asia, drive the diversity agenda, and even personally mentor Asian talent.

Global HR must partner with the leadership team to implement the diversity agenda, while also tag-teaming with regional HR to structure developmental rotations.

Regional MDs must be local sponsors for Asian talent, liaisoning with the headquarters to ensure a constant spotlight on Asian leadership development.

The regional HR function needs to work with the regional president and global HR to ensure that the Asian leadership development agenda is top of-themind for the enterprise.

The managers of Asian talent must create stretch opportunities to push Asian talent out of their comfort zone, helping them overcome cultural constraints. Finally, Asian leaders themselves must aspire to get into global roles, verbalise their aspiration(s) to their managers, and work toward overcoming global leadership gaps, if any.

About the Author

Sunil Puri is Senior Director and Head of Research, APAC, Center for Creative Leadership (CCL).

HR to HD: How the pandemic has accelerated this shift over the last two years

Back in 1998, I attended a programme at London Business School (LBS) and Professor Lynda Gratton, then of LBS, said, “HR will be a diminishing species if we do not shift towards being an internal consultant to the business”. Fast forward to 2022, and there have been great debates as to the shift of Human Resources (HR) to Human Development (HD).

HD is more holistic than HR and covers beyond the capitalistic gains of the business. HD hones into the larger picture and adds value to the business by using people as the means to an end. Whilst HR focuses more internally within a business or organisation, HD takes on an all-round perspective on human contribution to the business and analyses the impact of the ecosystem in facilitating the delivery of the output, taking into consideration the social, geopolitics and more importantly the value creation from channelling all the available resources and focus on the People element.

The United Nations introduced the idea of Human Development Index (HDI), which emphasises that people and their capabilities should be the ultimate criteria for assessing the development of a country, not economic growth alone. HDI looks at three key elements and essentially these can be seen in the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which is a benchmark used by all businesses. HD is about enriching the lives of people and communities, where equal access to education and resources will then empower individuals with personal choices that bring about personal independence.

The role of organisations evolve as HR is now pivoted to HD with stakeholder management becoming more paramount than just delivering profits. There are multi-stakeholders which include multiple dimensions covering the whole range of the life cycle of an employee in the workforce and across all segments of the population within a nation, cutting across all areas of interest, including ethical issues.

The UN Sustainable Development goals clearly state the 17 goals to be achieved for us to have a better planet to live in and these require several interventions from governmental level to the macro level of large corporations and the role of non-government organisations in work involving micro- organisations across a national economy. If we are to analyse the 17 SDGs, we can see that in each of the goals there are HD elements being reflected upon.

National policies have a big impact on HD, and we have seen how the two years of the pandemic has either broadened the “Digital Divide” between the different segments of society or sustained a greater awareness of the need to have government interventions in ensuring there is equity in wealth distribution, which in turn leads to the enrichment of communities. The fact that some countries are doing better in their social and economic indicators speaks of the importance of weaving in the HD element in nation building, which can be manifested in the areas of education, health and social.

Organisations can no longer just exist based on delivering profits as a main contributor to the business, as stakeholders around them are looking beyond this in every angle. Large banks will no longer approve loans to companies who are not ESG compliance, and this will have a domino effect on the way we do business. The “S” (Social) component of ESG is a key driver in the sustainability of an organisation. The enhanced interest to raise standards in the areas of workplace health and safety during the pandemic has now presented organisations with a new landscape and if not carefully managed, can present a cost issue. Organisations also need to pay more attention to ethical issues that can potentially draw the attention of whistle blowers.

The future of work has also dictated the way we manage the workplace and the changing landscape in the marketplace has now forced multiple parties to collaborate, build alliances and be aligned to the changing expectations of employees who now have different priorities. The gig economy has also disrupted the way we design organisational structure and manage employee engagement. HD will continue to take centre stage for nations at a macro level, and for how organisations manoeuvre as they look to balance profits, people, and the planet.

Nadiah Tan Abdullah is CHRO of S P Setia and Chair of the ASEAN Human Development Organisation (AHDO) Malaysia.

About the Author

HDI dimensions and indicators

United Nations Development Programme

People-first approach a priority for HR in 2023

To suggest that Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter has created global headlines is perhaps an understatement. After months of wrangling, Musk’s first act upon gaining ownership of the social media platform is to announce that half of Twitter’s global workforce will be laid off.

With a potential global recession on the horizon, Twitter is the latest tech company that has announced layoffs and hiring freezes, joining the likes of Amazon, Apple, and Meta. Is this indicative of more job cuts to come across multiple industries, or will 2023 continue to be an employee’s market?

In the US, for example, unemployment edged up to 3.7% in October 2022, sparking fears that the wheels have already been set in motion for a debilitating recession in 2023. However, at the same time, 261,000 jobs were added in the same month, surpassing the 205,000 Dow Jones estimate.

While it may be near impossible to predict the direction the employment market is heading towards in 2023, perhaps less ambiguous is how organisations are likely to prioritise a people-first approach.

If events of the last few years have taught organisations anything, it is arguably that the key factor for organisational success lies with their people. Attracting and retaining the best talent, clearly, is on the agenda of every HR and business leader heading into 2023.

Days after dispensing with the services of half its workforce, Twitter has reportedly reached out to an unspecified number of these employees, claiming that they were either fired erroneously or are “too essential” to the changes that Musk wants to make to the company.

Even if external circumstances dictate that employees are no longer looking to quit their jobs as readily as they did at the height of the Great Resignation, what can organisations do to ensure that they keep their best employees?

Prioritise their people, would seem to be the obvious answer. Speaking to Human Resource Executive, HRM Asia’s sister publication, Susan Tohyama, CHRO of Ceridian, said, “I want our organisation to continue its focus on talent, leadership development, career development for employees and more.”

In this issue, we also spoke exclusively to Suyin Enriquez, Vice President, International HR, Ceridian, who discussed a wide range

BY SHAWN LIEW

of topics, including how organisations need to find the best way to deliver a great employee experience both in person and virtually.

For flexible work to be successful, she added, employee experience must be a top priority because no organisation can be successful unless their employees feel motivated and engaged.

In many ways, employees today are looking for more than just a job, at least in the most traditional sense. Factors that will contribute to employees feeling motivated and engaged will continue to include, but also transcend renumeration.

Besides focusing on pay equity, organisations must also prioritise issues such as employee wellbeing, DE&I, and ESG. For those looking to mandate a rigid return to office in 2023, it may be worth considering if offering employees the flexibility to choose how, when, and where they work might be more beneficial for the organisation.

Increasingly, employees are also looking for opportunities to development and advance their careers. According to a recent report by McKinsey, 40% of employees are leaving their jobs due to a lack of career advancement. Organisations that are not investing in L&D are not only risking losing their best employees but are also missing the opportunity to equip their workforces with the skills needed for the future of their organisations.

Last but certainly not least, organisations will be looking to utilise technologies that can help them increase efficiencies and streamline processes, while putting their people first. For those of you based in Asia and would like to gauge how well you are doing in this space, we cordially invite you to join us in Singapore next May for HR Tech Festival Asia 2023.

Taking place from May 10-11, Asia’s largest HR technology and workforce management event returns in-person for its 23rd edition, bringing together Asia’s biggest HR community, global influencers, and industry experts to learn, collaborate, and inspire.

As a new paradigm of people and work begin to emerge, join us at HR Tech Festival Asia 2023 and be part of the discussion on how Asia’s HR community can address the people and technology challenges of 2023.

We continue to disrupt the market and set higher standards for delivery both in terms of satisfaction and ROI. We offer flexible blended solutions, that give sustainability through more effective transformation and embedding

Warren G. Langley, CEO - Scotwork Asia

2022

Commemorative Guide

In the past 40 years, the Marketing Institute of Singapore (MIS) has provided its clients with quality executive development courses across the region. Since its founding in 1973, the institute has nurtured over 50,000 sales and marketing practitioners.

For the 8th year running, MIS has won the Gold Award as the Best Corporate Training Provider and continues to lead the category. Mr Roger Wang, president of MIS, wishes to thank HRM Asia Awards on behalf of the Institute.

“I would like to thank the judges, organising committee and readers who have selected MIS as the gold award recipient once again. The fact that MIS is standing at the forefront and reaching this milestone is also due to the trust and support from both our new and longtime clients alike.

This award is a recognition of all the hard work and commitment that the trainers

For course enquiries, call us at (+65) 6327 7580 or e-mail to seminars@mis.org.sg.

For more info, visit www.mis.org.sg/seminars.

© 2022 Marketing Institute of Singapore. All rights reserved.

229 Mountbatten Rd, #03-02 Mountbatten Square, Singapore 398007.

have put into the programs. The staff have also worked closely with the trainers to ensure that the team is able to adapt quickly to changing restrictions and provide trainees with the best educational experience.

Our dedication to education and integrity means that our quality services and solutions are designed to deliver excellent results. MIS’ Executive Development Services remains the preferred training partner of many organisations, offering over 180 public training programs in 9 specialized fields, from business and marketing to personal effectiveness. The comprehensive range of courses allows clients to customize bespoke solutions most suited to their requirements.

Training the future workforce and designing educational programs in accordance with dynamic industry needs is our top priority, and MIS is excited to offer more upcoming programmes designed to meet the needs of

the new learning space aligned with specialties needed for today’s business landscape.

MIS remains an advocate of lifelong learning through partnerships with government agencies such as Workforce Singapore (WSG), SkillsFuture Singapore (SSG) and e2i to support and nurture our local workforce.

MIS will continue to serve as a bridge that connects members to the largest guild of sales and marketing professionals as a member of the Asia Marketing Federation (AMF) — a multinational association set up to promote and strengthen the Asia marketing fraternity in the region. Through these networks and events, the institute aims to provide solutions and industry insights that will equip trainees with relevant skillsets so that they may develop to their full potential.

MIS offers a range of courses in 9 main disciplines: Marketing, Sales, Business Management, Communications, Personal Effectiveness, Human Capital Management, Event Management, Leadership and Service Excellence

We are proud to celebrate our gold award as the Best Corporate – Training Provider running... for the

CELEBRATING ASIA’S BEST HR AND HR TECH SOLUTION PROVIDERS

The first in-person HRM Asia Readers’ Choice Awards to be held in three years saw some of the best and brightest HR and HR technology solutions providers in Asia Pacific honoured in a live Gala Awards Ceremony in Singapore on November 3.

This year, 23 worthy and unique winners were recognised across 19 diverse categories for their excellence and innovations, which have empowered organisations to thrive in a constantly changing world of work.

The winners for each category were decided by HRM Asia readers (70% weightage) via online voting and a panel of independent expert judges (30%). Votes were cast over a two-week period and they were supplemented by the

judges, who meticulously studied the contenders’ case studies, research, and offerings to their clients.

Acting as the best partners for organisations looking to successfully navigate the challenges and embrace the opportunities presented in a changing world of work, the prize recipients at the HRM Asia Readers’ Choice Awards 2022 are indeed worthy winners.

HRM Asia applauds and congratulates all the winners in their unwavering commitment in providing world-class solutions to help the HR industry in the region transition to a successful 2023 and beyond.

Honour roll and index

WINNERS AWARD

Multiplier Technologies 34-35 Best HR Tech – Outsourcing Solution (Gold Winner)

BoardRoom 34-35 Best HR Tech – Outsourcing Solution (Gold Winner)

Ceridian 36-37 Best HR Tech – Human Resource Information System (Gold Winner)

Multiplier Technologies 36-37 Best HR Tech – Human Resource Information System (Silver Winner)

BIPO Service 36-37 Best HR Tech – Human Resource Information System (Silver Winner)

Ceridian 40 Best HR Tech – Payroll Solution (Gold Winner)

BIPO Service 40 Best HR Tech – Payroll Solution (Silver Winner)

BIPO Service 42 Best HR Tech – Cloud Solution (Gold Winner)

Multiplier Technologies 42 Best HR Tech – Cloud Solution (Silver Winner)

BIPO Service 44 Best HR Tech – Time & Attendance Management System (Gold Winner)

Multiplier Technologies 44 Best HR Tech – Time & Attendance Management System (Silver Winner)

ASI Asia Pacific 46 Best HR Tech – Employee Performance Management System (Gold Winner)

Multiplier Technologies 48 Best HR Tech – Talent Management System (Gold Winner)

Multiplier Technologies 50 Best HR Tech – Recruitment Platform Solution (Gold Winner)

ASI Asia Pacific 52 Best HR Tech – AI Recruitment Software Provider (Gold Winner)

Neufast 52 Best HR Tech – AI Recruitment Software Provider (Silver Winner)

EdCast by Cornerstone 56 Best HR Tech – Learning Experience Platform (Gold Winner)

NTUC LearningHub 58-59 Best Corporate – Learning & Development Provider (Gold Winner)

Ngee Ann CET Academy 58-59 Best Corporate – Learning & Development Provider (Silver Winner)

MetaMind 58-59 Best Corporate – Learning & Development Provider (Bronze Winner)

Marketing Institute of Singapore 60-61 Best Corporate – Training Provider (Gold Winner)

MetaMind 60-61 Best Corporate – Training Provider (Silver Winner)

Asia Pacific Sales & Marketing Academy 60-61 Best Corporate – Training Provider (Silver Winner)

ASK Training 60-61 Best Corporate – Training Provider (Bronze Winner)

Scotwork Asia 62-63 Best Corporate – Leadership Development Provider (Gold Winner)

Marketing Institute of Singapore Academy 62-63 Best Corporate – Leadership Development Provider (Silver Winner)

Deep Impact 62-63 Best Corporate – Leadership Development Provider (Bronze Winner)

Resource Solutions 64 Best Recruitment Firm – Outsourcing Solution (Gold Winner)

Pan Pacific Serviced Suites Orchard 66-67 Best Serviced Apartment – By Property (Gold Winner)

Oasia Residence – Far East Hospitality 66-67 Best Serviced Apartment – By Property (Silver Winner)

Adina Serviced Apartments Singapore Orchard 66-67 Best Serviced Apartment – By Property (Bronze Winner)

G-P 68-69 Best Employer of Record (EOR) Service Provider (Gold Winner)

CXC 68-69 Best Employer of Record (EOR) Service Provider (Silver Winner)

Multiplier Technologies 68-69 Best Employer of Record (EOR) Service Provider (Silver Winner)

AYP Group 68-69 Best Employer of Record (EOR) Service Provider (Bronze Winner)

Multiplier Technologies 72 Best Professional Employer Organisation (PEO) Service Provider (Gold Winner)

AYP Group 72 Best Professional Employer Organisation (PEO) Service Provider (Silver Winner)

Multiplier Technologies 74 Best Corporate Healthcare/Wellness Solution Provider (Gold Winner)

JustCo Holdings 76 Best Workspace Innovation Solution (Gold Winner)

Best HR Tech – Outsourcing Solution

In today’s competitive market, access to a global talent pool could mean the difference between stagnation and growth. Although many business leaders are starting to look outside of their borders in search of the best talent, they remain sceptical about managing a cross-border workforce, said Amritpal Singh, Commercial Director at Multiplier.

To better support businesses hiring on a global scale, Multiplier developed a user-friendly SaaS platform that enables global teams to efficiently manage their HR operations, improve productivity, and achieve greater agility.

Aside from the core solutions Multiplier provides, the company’s platform features added-value benefits such as access to a salary calculator which allows companies to easily evaluate the average salary compensations across multiple specialities. Furthermore, Multiplier has created a company explorer database to provide users with a comprehensive overview and analysis regarding employment across more than 150 countries worldwide.

GOLD WINNER

Multiplier was founded in 2020 to simplify how companies hire, pay, and manage employees in countries without a local legal entity. With over 150 entities and partnerships established worldwide, Multiplier’s platform simplifies the employment process by taking charge of the complexities involved in expanding and employing in new markets. By addressing the issues of global employment, Multiplier is helping eliminate borders to redistribute the supply and demand of global talent by providing opportunities for people and scaling companies across the world.

To this end, the Gold Award for Best HR Tech – Outsourcing Solution was jointly awarded to Multiplier, which has been supporting HR leaders in their hiring process since its establishment in 2020. Calling this recognition a testament to the premium customer-centricity and quality of Multiplier’s services, Amritpal extended his gratitude to Multiplier’s customers and expressed how the Multiplier team is “thrilled” to be presented with the Gold Award. He also reaffirmed the company’s commitment to being the best HR partner for its customers.

Amritpal continued, “As a differentiating partner for many global companies worldwide, Multiplier recognises the challenges of onboarding remote employees. The solution to that is an equipment feature which allows companies to provide laptops and other related accessories to their global employees hassle-free. This allows companies to select from a catalogue and raise a request for a specific model directly from the platform, all within a few clicks.”

For instance, the equipment feature relieves Multiplier’s customers

GOLD WINNER

BoardRoom specialises in providing accurate, prompt, and reliable corporate solutions for every element and stage for businesses. Payroll outsourcing is an integral part of BoardRoom’s suite of services and its experience currently spans across 19 countries, including UAE, Japan, and New Zealand. Its payroll service includes professional advisory by a team of local specialists and a cloud-based HRMS platform, Ignite. With Asia Pacific’s complex and frequently changing payroll compliance regulations, BoardRoom is well-equipped with the expertise and a secured system to help businesses navigate these requirements and ultimately increase productivity in HR management.

of the hassle of purchasing, accounting, and delivering IT assets such as laptops, headphones, and mice in foreign countries themselves. Furthermore, they do not have to leave their employees in a situation by having to pay for equipment upfront and wait months for reimbursements, he said.

“Also, there is no other employment platform in the world that can customise, generate, and endorse a multilingual employment contract in 150 countries in just a few clicks, taking only a couple of minutes from start to finish. Our platform makes employment easy, efficient, and compliant,” he concluded.

Also receiving the Gold Award for Best HR Tech – Outsourcing Solution was BoardRoom, which offers payroll advisory and solutions in the Asia Pacific region.

Jonathan Ng, Group CEO, BoardRoom, said, “We are delighted to receive the Gold Award for Best HR Tech – Outsourcing Solution in this year’s HRM Asia Readers’ Choice Awards. This is an important recognition that our knowledge, professionalism and service delivery are some of the finest in the industry. It will also act as inspiration for our team to continue to deliver unparalleled payroll services to our clients.”

“Digital convergence and technological advancements have enabled seamless access between companies and talent across the globe. Our mission now is to be the backbone of our client’s payroll needs as they tap into the global workforce to combat the war for talent.”

Formulating strategies to meet complex, unique and cross-border payroll demands is no easy feat. It is often challenging for firms to

manage the end-to-end administrative obligations in-house, which drove BoardRoom to develop payroll solutions and its cloud-based human resource management system (HRMS) platform, Ignite, which are collectively designed to alleviate the administrative burden of HR teams.

Through their expertise, best practices, and dedication to delivering solution-focused services, the BoardRoom team was able to address their clients’ pain points. The team consistently runs improvement programmes, enhances compliance policies, refines and redefines processes, and innovates better methodologies to boost cost-effectiveness and scale the efficiency ladder.

People also continue to be key to BoardRoom’s continued success. The company recognises that no one individual can provide the level of technical knowledge and experience required to support their diverse clientele across a variety of business and operational needs. Hence, the BoardRoom team consists of subject matter experts and specialists in their respective fields who have years of experience and business insights to assist clients in making informed and timely decisions.

Winning this award marks a stamp of approval and is testament to the value that BoardRoom delivers to the payroll industry, as Ng concluded, “We are thankful for the trust that our clients have placed in us, the passion of our team to strive for service excellence and the faith of HRM Magazine Asia’s readers to vote for us. You have just placed us in overdrive to set new benchmarks in the industry and continue to surpass ourselves at every stage.”

Best HR Tech – Human Resource Information System

Having the right systems and technology in place is essential to business continuity and agility in today’s borderless world of work. Therefore, businesses need flexible HR solutions that empower them with greater control, reliability, and peace of mind while safeguarding their people and data.

From the perspective of Rob Squires, VP and Head of Sales, Asia and Japan, Ceridian, a modern human resource information system (HRIS) can help managers in understanding workforce trends over time, enabling them to better align their workforce with strategic initiatives and take appropriate actions to accomplish organisational goals.

He explained, “A comprehensive HRIS is tightly aligned with a positive employee experience as it helps HR teams manage the information of employees, policies, and procedures. From payroll and tax compliance to benefits administration, employee contact and personal information, attendance tracking and reporting, it’s the foundation of a company’s relationship with its people.”

“In today’s competitive labour market, it’s important to evaluate how your HRIS system will help enhance the employee experience while streaming efficiencies for HR teams so they can focus on strategic parts of the business.”

Ceridian developed the Dayforce HCM solution that combines payroll, benefits, HR, and workforce and talent management functions into a single platform. This eliminates silos in the organisation and provides employees with better access to data, which can result in a variety of benefits, including a reduction in labour costs, an increase in employee engagement and productivity, and greater organisational agility.

Dayforce allows employers to stay ahead of the curve with workforce intelligence by providing them with the data they require to make better decisions and generate value for their organisations. Data-driven insights can help them plan, hire, retain, and develop their workforce as well as forecast the future.

In recognition of the company’s innovation in the HRIS space, Ceridian was presented the Gold Award for Best HR Tech – Human Resource Information System.

Squires added, “With its single-solution architecture, Ceridian helps customers gain deeper workforce intelligence, giving them greater insight into what’s happening across their organisation. Going forward, those organisations that are able to harness their HR data will be in the best position to align their people and business strategies and maximise their chances for success.”

“On behalf of our entire team, we greatly appreciate the voters and judges for recognising Ceridian as the 2022 Gold Winner in the Best HR Tech – Human Resource Information System category. We look forward to finding new and innovative ways to help our customers in Asia Pacific and Japan find success today and in the future.”

The Silver Award for Best HR Tech – Human Resource Information System was jointly awarded to Multiplier, whose SaaS platform allows employers to streamline employee onboarding, payroll management, and international employee management. The platform offers globally expanding companies the scope to connect their staff for increased collaboration and streamline HR management.

Receiving the award on behalf of the company was Hiraash

GOLD WINNER

Ceridian is a global human capital management (HCM) company headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, with operations across North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa (EMEA), and the Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) region. Dayforce, its flagship cloud HCM platform, provides HR, payroll, workforce management, and talent management functionality to more than 5,700 customers across the globe and is used by over five million people around the world.

Thawfeek, CTO of Multiplier, who said, “The Best HR Tech – Human Resource Information System recognition is something that we’re extremely delighted about. We are incredibly proud to support and elevate HR leaders compliantly and deliver exceptional services to both our clients and their employees.”

Hiraash described HRIS as the most widely used software within HR, and suggested that a company’s HRIS must be as comprehensive and secure as possible. He explained, “As an allin-one solution provider, Multiplier promises all employee data are kept confidential and secure while remaining transparent and visible to our customers.”

“We also ensure that all employment services are compliant with local policies and regulations. More importantly, our platform

SILVER WINNER

SILVER WINNER

Multiplier was founded in 2020 to simplify how companies hire, pay, and manage employees in countries without a local legal entity. With over 150 entities and partnerships established worldwide, Multiplier’s platform simplifies the employment process by taking charge of the complexities involved in expanding and employing in new markets. By addressing the issues of global employment, Multiplier is helping eliminate borders to redistribute the supply and demand of global talent by providing opportunities for people and scaling companies across the world.

serves as a self-service hub for HR teams across the globe, allowing customisation of different processes available, from payroll to benefits administration.”

Also receiving the Silver Award for Best HR Tech – Human Resource Information System was BIPO. The comprehensive suite of solutions that BIPO offers provides employers with the convenience to manage self-service functions, which can be customised to meet the evolving needs of today’s hybrid workforce.

The company’s HRMS comprises several modules, including personnel hub, payroll, time and attendance, leave management, and more to help employers streamline and automate their HR processes.

For instance, personnel hub is a self-service portal for leave application, claims submission and e-payslips where employees can access 24/7. Employers may also share company information, organisation charts, news and updates with employees on the

Established in 2004 and headquartered in Singapore, BIPO is a global payroll and people solutions provider. Its enterprise HRMS automates HR processes, simplifies workflows, and delivers actionable insights. Complemented by the company’s payroll outsourcing and global professional employer organisation (PEO) services, BIPO supports the global workforce needs through a network of over 30 offices, four R&D centres, and business partners in more than 100 countries.

platform.

As for leave management, the platform features a multi-approval structure with various access levels tailored to employer’s business needs, and automatic pro-rated leave calculations and carry forward settings. Employers may also leverage the platform to set custom leave policies with different settings for employee groups.

Accepting the award was Zac Ma, Business Development Director, Corporate, Global, BIPO, who thanked the readers of HRM Magazine Asia who voted for BIPO, and shared, “This award belongs to our global teams. Their dedication and collaborative efforts ensure that BIPO continues to innovate by leveraging new technologies that enhance our product offerings and capabilities.”

He congratulated this year’s winners and contenders, adding, “The annual HRM Asia Readers’ Choice Awards is a fantastic platform that recognises the efforts of the HR community and service providers as we continue to evolve and adopt innovative solutions to accelerate HR digital transformation.”

Best HR Tech – Payroll Solution

“In today’s borderless, fast-changing world, the pressure to remain an efficient and cost-effective business is more challenging than ever. To thrive, organisations need to embrace modern solutions that enable smarter decision-making at the entry-level,” said Rob Squires, VP and Head of Sales, Asia and Japan, Ceridian.

As technology continues to be utilised for routine and repetitive tasks, Squires foresees the role of the payroll professional to evolve as a result. He explained, “Ceridian’s Future of Payroll Survey suggests payroll professionals are ready for this change. 78% of respondents said if their job duties were to change as payroll technology becomes more sophisticated, they would want to adapt to their new job duties and stay in their current role.”

“Now is the time to help empower payroll professionals to embrace a strategic role within their organisation. In doing so, payroll professionals will become significant drivers of value, efficiency, and transformation for their organisations.”

Squires was speaking as Ceridian was presented the Gold Award for Best HR Tech – Payroll Solution for the second consecutive year. Dayforce, Ceridian’s payroll solution, streamlines the payroll experience by enabling employers to pay accurately and efficiently while providing real-time visibility into payroll data and self-service access to critical payroll information anytime, anywhere.

He concluded, “As we look toward the future, Ceridian is laserfocused on finding new ways to help organisations navigate change while providing them with innovative solutions that create competitive advantages in a digital-first world of work.”

“On behalf of our entire team at Ceridian, I would like to extend a heartful thank you to the voters and judging panel at HRM Magazine Asia for recognising us as the 2022 Gold Winner in the Best HR

SILVER WINNER

Established in 2004 and headquartered in Singapore, BIPO is a global payroll and people solutions provider. Its enterprise HRMS automates HR processes, simplifies workflows, and delivers actionable insights. Complemented by the company’s payroll outsourcing and global professional employer organisation (PEO) services, BIPO supports the global workforce needs through a network of over 30 offices, four R&D centres, and business partners in more than 100 countries.

GOLD WINNER

Ceridian is a global human capital management (HCM) company headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, with operations across North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa (EMEA), and the Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) region. Dayforce, its flagship cloud HCM platform, provides HR, payroll, workforce management, and talent management functionality to more than 5,700 customers across the globe and is used by over five million people around the world.

Tech – Payroll Solution category. We look forward to continuing to help our customers in the Asia Pacific and Japan region drive quantifiable value and reach their full potential.”

Receiving the Silver Award for Best HR Tech – Payroll Solution is BIPO, which strives to enhance productivity and convenience for businesses worldwide through its technology and innovation.

BIPO’s cloud-based HRMS solution is equipped with an integrated payroll feature to support multi-country payroll processing on a single platform. For instance, employers may leverage the platform to make multi-currency payments, which speeds up payment processing time and avoid high currency exchange fees. Also included in the solution is a flexible payroll schedule, allowing employers to schedule different payment cycles. Employees may also access their digital payslips at any time with BIPO HRMS.

Available on the cloud and supported with a mobile app, BIPO HRMS, including its payroll solutions, are compatible with iOS and Android devices, ensuring connectivity and 24/7 access.

Sheryl Kiew, Regional Business Development Director, BIPO, said, “The award spurs our global teams to continue to innovate and champion new ways to streamline payroll and HR processes which ultimately benefit the business community. This award is made possible through the dedication of our teams who are constantly looking to enhance our payroll solutions and capabilities.”

Best HR Tech – Cloud Solution

Cloud technology continues to revolutionise the HR industry by simplifying the process of connecting and managing employees, as well as providing access to data and analysis to improve HR policies and practices.

The Best HR Tech – Cloud Solution category, which is intended to recognise cloud-based solution providers who have developed cutting-edge innovations that are driving the HR technology market forward, was awarded to BIPO for its human resource management system (HRMS) solution that is designed to automate and simplify HR processes.

Albert Liew, Managing Director, Singapore and Indochina, BIPO, said, “This is a significant win as HRM Magazine Asia readers have expressed their confidence in BIPO. The award affirms our continued commitment to helping businesses digitalise and transform their HR capabilities.”

As a provider of people and payroll solutions, BIPO supports enterprises to manage their end-to-end employee lifecycles by automating HR processes through a unified platform that integrates HR functions with innovative cloud-based technologies.

Pre-onboarding and off-boarding are among the features of BIPO’s comprehensive suite of solutions, alongside employee master data management, payroll, leave management, time and attendance, and expense claims management. These features provide employers with self-service functions that can be customised to meet the needs of companies as they evolve. Available on the cloud and supported with a mobile app, BIPO HRMS is compatible with iOS and Android devices, ensuring connectivity and 24/7 access.

The company has introduced Workio, the alternative companion solution to BIPO HRMS. Powered by BIPO, Workio integrates with BIPO HRMS to deliver complete workforce management solutions. Workio offers a variety of modules that can be purchased ondemand, allowing businesses to focus on their core competencies while reducing costs, simplifying workflows, and scaling their

SILVER WINNER

Multiplier founded in 2020 to simplify how companies hire, pay, and manage employees in countries without a local legal entity. With over 150 entities and partnerships established worldwide, Multiplier’s platform simplifies the employment process by taking charge of the complexities involved in expanding and employing in new markets. By addressing global employment issues, Multiplier is helping eliminate borders to redistribute the supply and demand of global talent by providing opportunities for people and scaling companies worldwide.

GOLD WINNER

Established in 2004 and headquartered in Singapore, BIPO is a global payroll and people solutions provider. Its enterprise HRMS automates HR processes, simplifies workflows, and delivers actionable insights. Complemented by the company’s payroll outsourcing and global professional employer organisation (PEO) services, BIPO supports the global workforce needs through a network of over 30 offices, four R&D centres, and business partners in more than 100 countries.

business more rapidly. Users may select from payroll, time and attendance, incentive management, and expense claims modules that best fit their workforce.

Liew concluded, “Our win is made possible through the collaborative efforts of our teams who work tirelessly behind the scenes to deliver the best-in-class, cloud-based solutions to support today’s remote work landscape.”

The Silver Award for Best HR Tech – Cloud Solution was presented to Multiplier, whose cloud-based SaaS platform assists multinational businesses with managing global employment, payroll, cross-border payments, freelancers, and contractors.

Hiraash Thawfeek, CTO for Multiplier, emphasised the company’s mission to serve as a bridge between global companies and global talent by offering innovative, forward-looking solutions. With its cloud solutions, Multiplier supports its customers to create, generate, and sign multilingual employment contracts in 150 countries in just a few clicks, all through a convenient SaaS platform. This allows employers to embrace borderless, flexible hiring by empowering them to manage their international employees from a single platform.

“Our recognition in this year’s Best HR Tech – Cloud Solution is a tremendous achievement for the team. While we continue to stay focused on providing the best customer experience through our service, we are certain not to overlook the finest of details in the innovation and technology that our platform offers,” he concluded.

Best HR Tech – Time & Attendance Management System

To manage employee time and attendance, one of the best solutions is to adopt an employee time and attendance management system as it allows employers to automate the process of tracking employees’ time and attendance, as well as provide reports and analytics to better manage the workforce.

For a second consecutive year, BIPO won the Gold Award for Best HR Tech – Time & Attendance Management System, demonstrating the company’s position as a payroll and people solutions provider in the region and its commitment to helping organisations reinvent their approach to managing time and attendance in the modern workplace.

In thanking the organisers, George Ho, Head of Global Account & Alliances, BIPO, shared, “This is a proud moment for BIPO. It affirms our commitment to delivering the best-in-class, cloud-based solutions.”

BIPO’s cloud-based HRMS is integrated with a time and attendance module that features three main components. First is the multi-function attendance capabilities with flexi-roster functionality for employers to manage multiple shifts, as well as an overtime feature that links with payroll for on-time payments.

The next feature is dynamic employee self-service, which enables remote employees to clock in and out using off-site clocking functions and BIPO’s mobile app. The third component is real-time reporting where employers can view detailed attendance data like work hours, leave, overtime, and other records all at a glance.

Other features of the HRMS include tracking and updating of employees’ attendance records, support for various clocking devices, and artificial intelligence (AI) facial recognition algorithms to support today’s multi-generational workforce to clock attendance. It also supports clock-in methods like biometrics, fingerprint and staff ID for added flexibility. The BIPO HRMS is available on the cloud and supported with a mobile app that is compatible with iOS and Android devices, ensuring connectivity and 24/7 access.

BIPO offers a comprehensive suite of solutions for employee master data management, payroll, leave management, time

SILVER WINNER

Multiplier founded in 2020 to simplify how companies hire, pay, and manage employees in countries without a local legal entity. With over 150 entities and partnerships established worldwide, Multiplier’s platform simplifies the employment process by taking charge of the complexities involved in expanding and employing in new markets. By addressing global employment issues, Multiplier is helping eliminate borders to redistribute the supply and demand of global talent by providing opportunities for people and scaling companies worldwide.

GOLD WINNER

Established in 2004 and headquartered in Singapore, BIPO is a global payroll and people solutions provider. Its enterprise HRMS automates HR processes, simplifies workflows, and delivers actionable insights. Complemented by the company’s payroll outsourcing and global professional employer organisation (PEO) services, BIPO supports the global workforce needs through a network of over 30 offices, four R&D centres, and business partners in more than 100 countries.

and attendance, and expense claims management, allowing for the convenience of employee self-service functions that are customisable to meet the needs of organisations from pre-boarding to off-boarding.

“To be recognised for our efforts to support the HR community is an honour and motivates us to continue to innovate, adopt new technologies, and facilitate businesses in transforming their HR capabilities,” Ho concluded.

The management of employees’ time off and accruals is often challenging. As such, Multiplier integrated the time and attendance component within its SaaS platform to allow employers to track the attendance and leaves of their global employees in the organisation. Whether it is payroll accuracy or billable time invoices, Multiplier’s timesheets can manage the employer’s payroll and invoicing needs.

These were one of the many reasons that earned Multiplier the Silver Award for Best HR Tech – Time & Attendance Management System.

Dinesh Uruthiramoorthy, Head of Corporate Development/FP&A at Multiplier, said, “At Multiplier, being able to provide a streamlined customer experience is one of the many differentiators we are proud of. Our time and attendance management system is a digital-first, innovative solution that helps our customers automate the tracking of employees’ attendance. It also works in tandem with our other automated processes such as payroll, benefits and insurance, streamlining the entire user experience and making it a breeze.”

“It’s an honour to receive this recognition of Best HR Tech – Time & Attendance Management System. At Multiplier, we simplify global employment and take the complexities out of it. We ensure our customers are able to track working schedules accurately and run payrolls on time, which is vital for their business success.”

Best HR Tech – Employee Performance Management Solution

Awarded the Gold Award for Best HR Tech – Employee Performance Management Solution, ASI Asia Pacific has demonstrated their commitment and ability to provide employers and employees in Indonesia with a solution that helps them acquire the skills and knowledge they need to thrive in an ever-changing environment.

For instance, its SMART AC is a virtual assessment and development centre solution that includes exercises from traditional assessment centres.

Kevin Thompson, Managing Director of ASI Asia Pacific, said that SMART AC had already demonstrated its effectiveness in the market prior to the outbreak of the pandemic. He shared that the team was inspired by the 2019 annual state of the nation address by Indonesia President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo when he highlighted his vision to develop the nation’s human capital.

“Whilst initially inspired by the president, the pandemic also created obvious additional business challenges worldwide, and Indonesia was no different,” Thompson said. “We wanted to make sure that all leaders have a chance to show their true ability through case studies, inbox simulations, a wide range of role plays, and much more. All of which is further enhanced with a broad range of psychometric assessments with the integration of our SMART platform.”

Based in Jakarta, ASI Asia Pacific sees Indonesia as a core market and the company has been focusing on strengthening the leadership capabilities of Indonesia’s state-owned enterprises and helping

GOLD WINNER

ASI Asia Pacific seeks to identify future leaders with its talent management technology. Making HR Simple is the company’s vision, which it achieves by developing HR innovations, making its products more accessible through technological initiatives, and having a positive impact on its clients. Its product portfolio includes the SMART Platform, VR4HR, ONE4ONE, INIAKU, and PEEPL brands.

them become globally competitive.

Thompson concluded, “Receiving this Gold Award for the second time from HRM Magazine Asia is a wonderful way for us to show our continual commitment to the field of HR tech, and to Indonesia and the Asia Pacific region. An enormous thank you to everyone who has cast their vote of confidence in us to achieve this award.”

Best HR Tech – Talent Management System

GOLD WINNER

of HR management, and the use of technology plays a key role in facilitating this. Besides improving communication and collaboration between managers and employees, it can allow managers to identify and track employee skills and performance, thus enabling them to invest in employee development more effectively.

Dinesh Uruthiramoorthy, Head of Corporate Development FP&A, Multiplier, said, “The most important asset for an organisation is its people, but it takes an arduous process for a company to attract and retain high-quality talent. A hiccup at any stage in the end-toend talent management process, from onboarding to exit, affects employee engagement.”

“This is why it is paramount for companies to provide the bestin-class experience for their employees. At Multiplier, we simplify complex processes such as onboarding, payroll, benefits, insurance and more, so that our customers’ employees receive the best possible employee experience, regardless of where they are based.”

In recognition of Multiplier’s efforts in helping organisations hire and engage the best talent, the company was awarded the Gold Award for Best HR Tech – Talent Management System. Through its SaaS platform, Multiplier simplifies the employment process by managing the complexities associated with expanding and hiring in new markets.

“Receiving this recognition of the Gold Award in Best HR Tech – Talent Management System is a proud achievement for us. We

Multiplier was founded in 2020 to simplify how companies hire, pay, and manage employees in countries without a local legal entity. With over 150 entities and partnerships established worldwide, Multiplier’s platform simplifies the employment process by taking charge of the complexities involved in expanding and employing in new markets. By addressing global employment issues, Multiplier is helping eliminate borders to redistribute the supply and demand of global talent by providing opportunities for people and scaling companies worldwide.

believe that human capital has been and will always be the most valuable asset of a company, and we hope that businesses will continue to see how HR tech can be the single source of truth for talent management,” he concluded.

Best HR Tech – Recruitment Platform Solution

Awarded the Gold Award as the Best HR Tech –Recruitment Platform Solution, Multiplier has been recognised for its SaaS platform’s capabilities in assisting HR leaders with their recruitment processes.

Sagar Khatri, Co-Founder and CEO of Multiplier, commented, “At Multiplier, we are all about enabling businesses to hire the best talent they can find anytime, anywhere. From onboarding to offboarding, our innovative SaaS platform equips our customers with capabilities to plan and execute concisely and compliantly in accordance with their HR roadmap.”

As the first Employer of Record (EOR) provider in the world with an electronic contract generation within the solution, Multiplier integrated the signing and storage module into the SaaS platform to facilitate speedy employment and onboarding, as well as provide support documentation for both parties, said Khatri. Additionally, the platform offers a compliance tool that allows companies to align their policies with local regulations.

Multiplier also enables recruitment agencies to develop contract solutions to expand their revenues. Typically, agencies are only able to offer contract solutions within a limited number of markets, and expanding beyond that requires significant time and expense, he explained. “With Multiplier, they can now offer this solution globally without restrictions.”

“We are truly delighted to have been awarded the Gold Award in Best HR Tech – Recruitment Platform Solution, and I’m extremely proud of us as a business and what we have achieved since our

GOLD WINNER

Multiplier was founded in 2020 to simplify how companies hire, pay, and manage employees in countries without a local legal entity. With over 150 entities and partnerships established worldwide, Multiplier’s platform simplifies the employment process by taking charge of the complexities involved in expanding and employing in new markets. By addressing global employment issues, Multiplier is helping eliminate borders to redistribute the supply and demand of global talent by providing opportunities for people and scaling companies worldwide.

incorporation in 2020. We are looking forward to what the future holds as we continue to deliver world-class recruitment experience for all distributed workforces,” he concluded.

Best HR Tech – AI Recruitment Software Provider

Since the start of the pandemic, the Great Resignation of 2022, and the continuing challenge to identify, hire and retain skilled talent, companies are increasingly looking for artificial intelligence (AI) recruitment solution providers to become more globally competitive.

For ASI Asia Pacific, which has a vision of Making HR Simple, technology has allowed the company to offer recruitment solutions to its customers, empowering them to achieve their business goals. In its Jakarta headquarters, ASI Asia Pacific recognises the natural challenges its customers face. In addition to being the fourth largest population in the world with over 275 million people, Indonesia is also the world’s largest archipelago, with over 18,110 islands and islets, of which around 6,000 are inhabited.

Kevin Thompson, Managing Director for ASI Asia Pacific, explained that the SMART Platform was originally built to ensure all Indonesian organisations remain globally competitive in recruitment. To accomplish this, ASI Asia Pacific had to adapt the solution to ensure it can be successfully implemented with the IT infrastructure challenges associated with such a large archipelago.

He continued, “Being the Gold Winner of two Best HR Tech Awards in 2020 from HRM Magazine Asia was a huge occasion for us. After a trying start to 2020 with COVID-19, the awards were the affirmation we needed that we were on the right track and that we could genuinely contribute to helping organisations overcome both the geographic and demographic challenges of Indonesia.”

“But we realised we could achieve so much more. Since our last Best HR Tech awards, we further enhanced the capability of the SMART Platform by adding video recorded interviewing as well as online proctoring.”

ASI Asia Pacific has successfully integrated the use of AI in

SILVER WINNER

Neufast is an AI enterprise resource planning SaaS solution company with experience in AI, HR management, and industrial and organisational psychology. The company owns proprietary patent-pending enterprise HR information system (HRIS) SaaS solutions to support corporate clients in cross-border multilingual talent assessment and recruitment.

GOLD WINNER

ASI Asia Pacific seeks to identify future leaders with its cuttingedge talent management technology. Making HR Simple is the company’s vision, which it achieves by developing HR innovations, making its products more accessible through technological initiatives, and having a positive impact on its clients. Its product portfolio includes the SMART Platform, VR4HR, ONE4ONE, INIAKU, and PEEPL brands.

both the employee assessments of its SMART Platform, as well as effectively using the advantages of AI that come with the online proctoring capabilities that it has integrated into its solution.

“A huge thank you to everyone who voted for us. We are proud to represent Indonesia in the field of HR technology and are committed to continually innovate,” Thompson concluded.

Joining HRM Asia Readers’ Choice Awards for the first time was Neufast, which bagged the Silver Award for Best HR Tech – AI Recruitment Software Provider.

Agnes Wun, Co-Founder, CEO, and Director for Product, Strategy and Finance, Neufast, said, “Neufast is honoured to be recognised by the panel of HRM Magazine Asia and HR professionals in the Asia Pacific market as creating business values with Neufast’s HR tech innovation. This award marks a new milestone for Neufast for our plans in Singapore and the ASEAN markets.”

Over the past year, Neufast has had conversations with HR leaders of leading MNCs, NGOs and government agencies and learnt about their pain points in talent attraction, candidate experience, talent retention and DEI objectives, Wun revealed. To date, over 7,000 job applicants have completed their video interviews on Neufast’s HR SaaS platform.

Wun added, “The Neufast tech team has put in hundreds of engineering hours to create North Asian and South-East Asian languages including Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Bahasa Indonesian, Malay, and Khmer. The end goal is to enable job interviews to be conducted in the mother tongue of job applicants. This allows them to express the full version of themselves to their employers in their most comfortable languages with the audio transcription of the native languages analysed by Neufast’s debiased AI.”

Best HR Tech – Learning Experience Platform

Talent and skill development initiatives seek innovative, adaptive, and scalable solutions that enable personalised learning, re- and upskilling, and career mobility for organisations. With EdCast by Cornerstone, organisations can modernise HR systems and prepare their workforce for the future so they can contribute to their success. That ethos led EdCast by Cornerstone to clinch the Gold Award for Best HR Tech – Learning Experience Platform category.

Roger Chen, Senior Regional Sales Manager, Asia, EdCast by Cornerstone, said, “We are thrilled to be recognised by HRM Magazine Asia as a Gold winner in the Best Learning Experience Platform category. This recognition is only reserved for the industry’s elite HR solutions and partners, and we are honoured to be included in such a prestigious circle.”

“The EdCast by Cornerstone learning experience platform (LXP) is essential to a modern learning and development ecosystem that intends to create an employee-centric learning culture. Organisations across Asia are realising the incredible impact a digital learning experience can have on developing a future-ready workforce that both supports individual growth and enables long-term business success.”

Cornerstone’s solution portfolio recognises and delivers on the key functions of a modern L&D ecosystem by enabling organisations to reskill their employees, facilitate better talent mobilisation, improve talent acquisition, and enhance HR digital transformation.

For instance, its EdCast LXP is an independent solution available to any organisation regardless of the various learning management

GOLD WINNER

EdCast, now part of Cornerstone, offers a unified learning experience platform (LXP) designed to enable endto-end employee journeys spanning learning, skilling, and career mobility, in the flow of work. Its award-winning platform is used internationally by organisations ranging from large Global 2000 companies to small businesses and governments.

technologies they might be using. It has been recently upgraded to provide an enhanced user experience. Improved accessibility standards and a new design create a seamless connection between mobile and desktop.

Enhanced learner and manager dashboards allow for more intuitive connections and the ability to personalise and track progress. Managers can have a clear view of actionable insights, allowing them to provide timely and relevant new learning content when needed.

“Organisations across Asia realise the incredible impact a digital learning experience can have on developing a future-ready workforce that both supports individual growth and enables long-term business success,” Chen concluded.

Best Corporate – Learning & Development Provider

In the two years since the pandemic, digital transformation has transformed the way people learn in hybrid workplaces. For its continued efforts to embrace these changes, NTUC LearningHub (NTUC LHUB) has been awarded the Gold Award for Best Corporate – Learning & Development (L&D) Provider for the second consecutive year.

Jeremy Ong, CEO of NTUC LHUB, said, “NTUC LHUB is honoured and humbled to receive the Gold Award for Best Corporate –Learning & Development Provider for two consecutive years. This achievement is an attestation of the continued trust and confidence placed upon us by our clients as a L&D provider and a trusted partner in lifelong learning.”

“We will continue to help workers uplift and stay employable, and help companies transform and thrive by making learning accessible to all, with the objective of habitualising lifelong learning.”

NTUC LHUB has strengthened its digital offerings and embraced new methods of learning such as blended learning that incorporates virtual and in-person classes, as well as bite-sized programmes that use modular and asynchronous learning.

“We are continuously improving our NTUC LHUB Learning eXperience Platform (LXP) launched last year, to ensure that learners have access to industry-relevant training content,” Ong elaborated. “We have expanded to provide L&D mapping and employee training for companies through LXP Enterprise. Bite-sized and on-the-go learning on the app enables employers to take a practical approach to

SILVER WINNER

Established in 1985, Ngee Ann Continuing Education and Training (CET) Academy has been the driving force behind Ngee Ann Polytechnic’s efforts to offer adult education and training. Its mission to help adult learners navigate the ever-changing world through skills upgrading and reskilling has enabled more than 180,000 working adults to gain new skills, stay relevant, and remain employable in today’s global economy.

GOLD WINNER

NTUC LearningHub (NTUC LHUB) is a continuing education and training provider in Singapore while aims to transform the lifelong employability of working people. Since its corporatisation in 2004, NTUC LHUB has been working with employers and individual learners to provide learning solutions in areas such as cloud, infocomm technology, healthcare, employability and literacy, business excellence, workplace safety and health, security, HR and foreign worker training.

L&D while making learning accessible and convenient for employees to learn at their own pace in their own time.”

Another key component of NTUC LHUB’s commitment to human capital development is the enhancements made to its Career Agility Hub (CAH), which supports both learners and adult educators. This artificial intelligence (AI)-powered app identifies skills users need to prepare for the future and analyses their skills gap based on their career aspirations. The app will also be extended to NTUC LHUB’s trainers to encourage professional development, ensuring its adult training andragogy remains of the highest quality.

He concluded, “With the global economy’s rapid pace of transformation accelerated by the pandemic, job roles and skills requirements have evolved. As a result, there is now an urgent need for our workforce to upskill and reskill to remain employable and grow professionally.”

“Being a strong advocate for workers’ training and skills upgrading, NTUC LHUB remains committed to equipping them with in-demand and emerging skills to stay competitive and resilient, and,

in turn, contribute to building new capabilities for companies.”

Awarded the Silver Award for Best Corporate – Learning & Development Provider was Ngee Ann Continuing Education and Training (NP CET) Academy. Established in 1985, NP CET Academy has been the driving force behind Ngee Ann Polytechnic’s efforts to offer adult education and training with a focus on upskilling and reskilling working adults to enable them to remain pertinent and competitive as an employee of choice in the fast-changing workplace.

As part of its commitment to talent development through training, NP CET Academy partnered with leading companies to ensure that the programmes are industry relevant. Providing learners with curated learning and training experience has played a crucial role in securing them a place in the future economy, as well as supporting companies and businesses with their learning and development needs.

Christy Chung, Director of Ngee Ann Polytechnic CET Academy, said, “We are honoured to have won this award. This award is a testimony to the trust we have built with our partners and learners. We would like to thank all who have supported us, including our colleagues at Ngee Ann Polytechnic, over the past 37 years.”

“We will continue to do our best to provide training programmes and courses that open up better employment outcomes for our learners, and a productive workforce for companies to transform and succeed in the evolving global economy.”

The Bronze Award for Best Corporate – Learning & Development Provider was presented to MetaMind.

BRONZE WINNER

MetaMind strives for leadership transformation that creates culture change and employee engagement. It offers leadership programmes that include Authentic Leadership, Inspirational Leadership, Inclusive Leadership, Diversity and Inclusion, Women in Leadership, and Intercultural Intelligence, as well as a broad scope of communication and presentation skills. It also offers individual and group coaching sessions.

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Best Corporate – Training Provider

The Marketing Institute of Singapore (MIS) has been providing executive development courses across the region for the past 49 years. Since its founding in 1973, over 50,000 sales and marketing professionals have been nurtured at this institute.

This is the eighth consecutive year MIS has won the Gold Award for Best Corporate – Training Provider, affirming the institute’s position in the training and development field. Receiving the award on behalf of the institute was Roger Wang, President of MIS, who expressed his gratitude to HRM Asia Readers’ Choice Awards.

He said, “This award is a recognition of all the hard work and commitment that the trainers have put into the programmes. The staff have also worked closely with the trainers to ensure that the team can adapt quickly to changing restrictions and provide trainees with the best educational experience.”

MIS offers a comprehensive range of executive development programmes that address executives’ and managers’ skills upgrading and professional development needs, ensuring that they remain abreast of current industry trends, knowledge, and skills. By designing a curriculum to specific training requirements and goals, MIS also enables organisations to identify skills gaps in their workforce competencies and optimise training ROI.

Additionally, MIS provides executives and their organisations with the connections and expertise they need to steer them in the right direction, whether they are looking to expand their network of like-minded peers or build their knowledge in the dynamic marketing field.

As a member of the Asia Marketing Federation (AMF), MIS will continue to serve as a bridge connecting members with the organisation, Wang added. The AMF is a multinational association established to promote and strengthen the Asia marketing fraternity. Through these networks and events, the institute establishes itself as a hub where marketers congregate, network and exchange knowledge to provide trainees with solutions and industry insights, enabling them to develop their full potential by providing relevant skills.

“Training the future workforce and designing educational programmes in accordance with dynamic industry needs is our top priority, and MIS is excited to offer more upcoming programmes designed to meet the needs of the new learning space aligned with specialities needed for today’s business landscape,” Wang concluded.

The Silver Award for Best Corporate – Training Provider was jointly presented to Asia Pacific Sales & Marketing Academy (APACSMA), a sales enablement provider offering consulting, corporate training, and skills development services.

Zeenath Kuraisha, CEO of APACSMA, said, “Sales will always remain as the blood and lifeline of any organisation, and we all play a part in ensuring consumers continue to believe in and get value from sales professionals.”

“We foresee a huge need for professional training and alignment to industry standards. Sales do not stop with sales executives alone but there is an ecosystem of existing and emerging roles in sales like sales operations, sales enablement, sales management and leadership, sales engineers, pre-sales, and many more.”

The Corporate Solutions Division of APACSMA offers simplified

GOLD WINNER

Founded in 1973, the Marketing Institute of Singapore (MIS) is the national body for sales and marketing and has provided training to countless students in the areas of sales, marketing, and business. Through its diverse series of talks ad events, it has also provided networking opportunities for many of its members. Today, MIS has nine major disciplines spanning across business management, communication, personal effectiveness, human capital management, and more.

and automated frameworks, methodologies, solutions, services, and sales certification and courses to help organisations adopt, transform, and enhance virtual, digital and inside sales functions. On the other hand, APACSMA’s Sales Academy provides holistic sales education across various fields of sales disciplines along with sales assessments and audits to verify sales mindset, skills, and knowledge.

“APACSMA is honoured to be recognised by HRM Asia Readers’ Choice Awards and we will continue to mint more professional talents and possibilities for the sales industry. This is not possible with the belief and support of our clients, partners, and team members,” she concluded.

Also receiving the Silver Award for Best Corporate – Training Provider was MetaMind, a training consultancy that focuses on leadership transformation, culture change, and employee engagement.

Mette Johansson, Founder and Owner of MetaMind Training,

SILVER WINNER

BRONZE WINNER

Asia Pacific Sales & Marketing Academy (APACSMA) is a leading authority and preeminent global sales academy. APACSMA has supported enterprise sales organisations to adopt, transform, enable, and enhance virtual, digital, and inside sales functions through sales advisory and education services.

SILVER WINNER

MetaMind strives for leadership transformation that creates culture change and employee engagement. It offers leadership programmes that include Authentic Leadership, Inspirational Leadership, Inclusive Leadership, Diversity and Inclusion, Women in Leadership, and Intercultural Intelligence, as well as a broad scope of communication and presentation skills. It also offers individual and group coaching sessions.

ASK Training is a provider of training programmes for individual learners and corporate clients, and is recognised by SkillsFuture Singapore as an Approved Training Organisation since 2014 to provide WSQ Training and Assessment. ASK Training specialises in providing training for Microsoft Office tools and is a partner of ICDL (International Computer Driving License) in the provision of IT skills courses. It also provides soft skills training in the areas of communication, management, motivational skills, and other areas of personal effectiveness for government agencies and corporate clients in Singapore.

said, “It’s an honour to have achieved the Silver Award for Best Corporate – Training Provider, and I consider this recognition to be a reflection of our efforts in Authentic Leadership, Inclusive Leadership, Inspirational Leadership, and Diversity and Inclusion in our Women in Leadership programmes.”

“We are certain that this award will take us to new heights and help us create inspirational and inclusive leaders that will make a positive impact in the corporate world.”

The success of the Women in Leadership programmes is that it provides a safe environment for women to explore their leadership philosophies, Johansson explained. This space is essential for all women, she added, which is why MetaMind believes its Women in Leadership programmes offer empowerment for all women.

“In a world where it is difficult to find female role models, over the course of our programmes, women learn to unleash their voices and uncover the leaders within. A Women in Leadership programme will also be an essential part of an organisation’s inclusion strategy,” Johansson concluded. “Diversity is a complex issue and, if addressed well, will increase group intelligence. MetaMind Training also has a track record consulting and cocreating solutions to develop inclusive cultures for organisations.”

The Bronze Award for Best Corporate – Training Provider was awarded to ASK Training.

Best Corporate – Leadership Development Provider

The ability of effective leaders to drive workplace transformation is crucial in a business environment that is constantly changing. Besides creating a vision for the future and being focused on expectations in the new world of work, leaders must also be prepared to make tough decisions and take risks while also providing support and accessibility to their employees during the transition period.

For Scotwork Asia, the business management consultancy has been transforming the capability of local leaders and their teams for almost 30 years. Despite challenging times during the pandemic, the company has experienced its most successful two years to date in helping leaders across the ASEAN region develop their teams to be the best they can be, said Warren G. Langley, CEO of Scotwork Asia.

He explained, “Leaders need lasting change. Scotwork’s results are built on a deep-rooted understanding from 50 years of global experience coupled with the latest insights from our extensive research agenda, making all transformations in line with current trends and the need to futureproof.”

Scotwork specialises in negotiation training. Advancing Negotiation Skills (A.N.S.) is its flagship negotiation programme, which is also available as an online version called Virtual Advancing Negotiation Skills. The interactive sessions include a challenging mix of practical exercises, online tools, video analysis and bite-sized lectures from expert coaches.

Other programmes Scotwork has in its portfolio include Scotwork Negotiating Essentials as well as Negotiating Foundation Workshop

SILVER WINNER

Founded in 1973, the Marketing Institute of Singapore Academy (MISA) is part of the Marketing Institute of Singapore (MIS), the national body for sales and marketing. Over the years, MISA has nurtured more than 50,000 sales and marketing practitioners through its professional learning and development programmes, and provided networking opportunities for its members through its diverse series of events.

GOLD WINNER

Scotwork has coached hundreds of thousands of senior managers worldwide in 29 languages, and is one of the largest independent negotiation consultancies, operating in 120 countries with 46 offices. After more than 45 years and more than 25 years in Asia, Scotwork has empowered people with skills to transform their lives and support businesses to achieve greater success.

which are offered as introductory programmes, while the Masters and Coaching Negotiating Skills courses provide more focused expertise.

Due to the emerging virtual working environment experienced by businesses worldwide over the past two years, Scotwork Asia has been able to achieve equivalent satisfaction scores for both virtual and classroom programmes alike. These were the many reasons that earned the company the Gold Award under the Best Corporate –Leadership Development Provider category.

Langley concluded, “The sustainable change our programme delivers for business leaders continues to outperform the market, but often tends to be delivered behind the scenes so it is great to be recognised by HRM Asia Readers’ Choice Awards with the Gold Award as the Best Corporate – Leadership Development Provider.”

“We have some exciting developments launching over the next six months based on the insights from the largest ever research project into corporate capability, with inputs from 17,148 leaders from 532 companies across 31 sectors and we look forward to sharing these with the readers and our loyal alumni.”

Another company that has been offering executive development programmes is the Marketing Institute of Singapore Academy

(MISA), which was presented the Silver Award for Best Corporate –Leadership Development Provider.

With over four decades of experience, MISA has been providing training, learning, and development solutions to organisations and professionals in Singapore and across the globe. Through its professional development programmes, MISA continues to foster leaders as the training arm of the national body for Sales and Marketing, Marketing Institute of Singapore (MIS).

“We are deeply honoured and thankful to be the Silver Award recipient as the Best Corporate – Leadership Training Provider in this year’s HRM Asia Readers’ Choice Awards,” said Roger Wang, CEO of MISA, who also expressed gratitude to the judges and organising committee for recognising MISA as a top-tier provider.

MISA has a team of experienced, accredited trainers who possess a combination of management experience, practitioner knowledge and industry know-how. In today’s business landscape, working professionals need to constantly master new skills and improve on their current ones to gain a competitive advantage.

Beyond standard course offerings, MISA also offers tailored inhouse courses to cater to different industries and companies. The institute will continue to work closely with senior management to better understand current trends to ensure quality courses that best suit today’s market needs.

Deep Impact, a provider of leadership training programmes and solutions, was awarded the Bronze Award for Best Corporate –Leadership Training Provider.

BRONZE WINNER

Deep Impact provides leadership training programmes and solutions to help organisations build high-performance teams across 40 countries. Established in 2007, Deep Impact aims to help its clients imagine the possibilities of how their leaders should be and develop competencies for it, and supports them in achieving their goals through consulting, training, and executive coaching in both online and offline deliveries.

The Marketing Institute of Singapore Academy (MISA) plays a leading role in providing training and development solutions to professionals and corporations in Southeast Asia.

We are committed to nurturing and developing leaders of the future through our extensive range of leadership courses.

For course enquiries, call us at (+65) 6327 7580 or e-mail to seminars@misa.com.sg. For more info, visit www.misa.com.sg/courses.

© 2022 Marketing Institute of Singapore Academy. All rights reserved.

229 Mountbatten Rd, #03-02 Mountbatten Square, Singapore 398007.

Best Recruitment Firm – Outsourcing Solution

Technology, globalisation, and the changing nature of the workforce are just a few of the many factors that are influencing the way that people work. Employers are increasingly experiencing recruiting challenges as the workforce shifts from the traditional office to a more mobile and flexible work-at-home model.

In the category of Best Recruitment Firm – Outsourcing Solution, Resource Solutions received the Gold Award for their efforts to help businesses prepare for tomorrow’s challenges by building, connecting, and optimising their workforce.

Charlie O’Farrell, Operations Director at Resource Solutions, said, “The team at Resource Solutions are thrilled to have been awarded Gold in the Best Recruitment Firm – Outsourcing Solution category at the HRM Asia Readers’ Choice Awards, for the fourth year running.”

Achieving this win is a testament to the critical and complex work the Resource Solutions team performs day in and day out to support its growing list of client partners, he added. Furthermore, he credited the company’s dedicated recruitment and operational teams with this achievement, as 2022 has been another year of business expansion for Resource Solutions with focused, responsible growth for its Asia Pacific operations.

He continued, “I would also like to take this opportunity to thank all our client partners in Asia Pacific, who have been incredibly supportive as we’ve evolved, realigned, and innovated our breadth and scope of services, and improved operational and service delivery excellence to support them in their quest for the talent that will drive

GOLD WINNER

A leading global provider of outsourced recruitment and consultancy solutions, Resource Solutions supports organisations to build, connect and optimise their workforce to face the challenges of tomorrow.

As part of the Robert Walters Group, Resource Solutions offers a suite of tailored, premium, end-to-end recruitment solutions and a global footprint across 31 countries. Using its expertise, intelligence and innovation, Resource Solutions strives to redefine work so that every individual has an opportunity to achieve their full potential.

their business forward.”

“With 2023 in our sights, I am confident in our ability to deliver more of what makes us a market-leading provider of outsourced recruitment and consultancy solutions.”

Resource Solutions is a leading global provider of OUTSOURCED RECRUITMENT AND CONSULTANCY SOLUTIONS.

We support organisations to build, connect and optimise their workforce to face the challenges of tomorrow.

As part of the Robert Walters Group, we offer a suite of tailored, premium, end-to-end recruitment solutions and a global footprint across 31 countries.

We strive to make a positive social impact through solutions that champion untapped and underrepresented talent. As powerful talent partners, we put expertise, intelligence and innovation at the forefront to redefine work so everyone has a lifetime of opportunity.

Our outsourced permanent and contingent talent solutions are underpinned by 24/5 Global Service and powered by our Centre of Expertise (CoE), enabling our partners to scale and rapidly advance their business agendas.RSConsultancy provides expert guidance in Assessment, ESG and Brand & Experience, while our award-winning Diverse Hiring Practitioners can help organisations to audit and re-engineer their recruitment processes. RSIntelligence, our on-demand, cloud-based, talent intelligence solution, empowers leaders to make data-led decisions that deliver impact.

For more information, please visit resourcesolutions.com

Best Serviced Apartment – By Property

With its central location in the heart of Singapore’s prime shopping district and nearby attractions, Pan Pacific Serviced Suites Orchard offers guests convenient access to the city’s bustling life. The property refurbished its interior during the pandemic slowdown, adding relaxing earthy tones and rattan and bamboo elements to convey a sense of nature and tranquillity.

Furniture and home appliances have also been upgraded to minimise the property’s carbon footprint and incorporate a biophilic design. This was one of the many reasons that made Pan Pacific Serviced Suites Orchard the Gold Award winner of the Best Serviced Apartment – By Property category.

Damian Tan, General Manager for Pan Pacific Serviced Suites Orchard, said, “The serviced apartment sector in Singapore is thriving and Pan Pacific Serviced Suites Orchard is proud to be at the centre of this success. This vote of confidence by readers of HRM Magazine Asia serves as a strong and timely affirmation and motivation for our team who provide round-the-clock personalised service, making an ideal home away from home for our residents.”

Pan Pacific Serviced Suites Orchard offers 126 one- and twobedroom serviced suites and penthouses. Upon entering each unit, guests will find a separate living room and dining area with premium furnishings and facilities like a home theatre system, a fully equipped kitchenette, and a washer-dryer.

“Demand for housing is high and many business travellers require greater flexibility in lease terms, we try our best to accommodate them,” Tan elaborated. “The interiors of our apartments and the Living Room residents’ lounge underwent a renovation to refresh our product offering, this was completed in April last year. With

SILVER WINNER

Oasia Residence offers a tranquil respite from the hectic city life while being conveniently close to a variety of modern amenities, dining, and retail options. Ideal for the astute business traveller, the residence is situated within minutes from Singapore’s bustling science and technology cluster in West Coast. Guests can refuel on energy and recharge anytime with wellness offerings and recreational enclaves right at their doorstep, such as a fitness centre, tennis court and swimming pool.

GOLD WINNER

Enjoy the lively atmosphere of Singapore’s shopping district from the comfort of a luxury apartment at Pan Pacific Serviced Suites Orchard. The property offers 126 refurbished one- and two-bedroom serviced suites and penthouses. Each suite is now refreshed in relaxing earthy tones and included bespoke rattan and bamboo elements to evoke nature and calm. Furniture and appliances were also upgraded to reduce carbon footprint and incorporate biophilic design.

safe distancing measures lifted, we have restarted resident events for more engagement after living in isolation for the last couple of years.”

The Living Room is an exclusive space for residents comprising a TV lounge with console games, a boardroom-style meeting room, a pool table, two OSIM massage chairs, and facilities for coffee and tea. In addition to buffet breakfast and housekeeping services, residents may enjoy access to an array of health and wellness facilities, including four outdoor sky gardens, a 24-hour fitness centre, a hydro-therapeutic spa, and ionised-water swimming pool with children’s area and jacuzzi.

“Pan Pacific Serviced Suites Orchard exists to provide extended stay travellers with an ideal home away from home,” Tan concluded. “Our service elements place emphasis on recognising our residents, anticipating their needs, being flexible with individual needs and going the extra mile. For at Pan Pacific Serviced Suites Orchard, guests have less to worry about because here, they can depend on us.”

Oasia Residence won the Silver Award this year, making the third consecutive year the company has been nominated in the Best Serviced Apartment – By Property category. The property offers 140 studios, one- and two-bedroom apartments, ideal for guests seeking

wellness in the heart of the city.

Eunice Woo, Residence Manager for Oasia Residence, Singapore, said, “I would like to thank the readers of HRM Magazine Asia who had voted for us throughout the years. We are humbled to receive the Silver Award for Best Serviced Apartment – By Property. As one of the winners for the third consecutive year, it means a lot to us to be recognised at the HRM Asia Readers’ Choice Awards 2022. To win such a prestigious award is a testimony to our wonderful service and incredible effort from the team.”

Providing comfort and convenience, the apartments are fully furnished with a living area and kitchenette. As guests arrive at the Residents’ Lounge, they will be able to enjoy tranquillity and peace to Refresh their minds and Refuel with a light continental breakfast. Additionally, guests can look forward to Recharge with a suite of wellness services along with a variety of dining, retail and lifestyle establishments located within walking distance.

“This award from HRM Magazine Asia serves as a recognition to our colleagues who worked tirelessly with dedication to ensure that guests Journey Well in comfort during their stay,” she added. “I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to our voters for their unwavering support. In our continuous effort to strive for service excellence, this recognition will motivate us to give our utmost effort and go the extra mile to exceed guests’ expectations, ensuring that their needs are well taken care of.”

The Bronze Award for Best Serviced Apartment – By Property was picked up by Adina Serviced Apartment Singapore Orchard.

BRONZE WINNER

Located between Somerset and Dhoby Ghaut, Adina Serviced Apartments Singapore Orchard offers warm residential living and accessibility to a plethora of retail and dining options, as well as prominent parks and museums. With comfortable studio, two- to three-bedroom apartments available, Adina Serviced Apartments Singapore Orchard caters to every modern traveller visiting for work or leisure.

Best Employer of Record (EOR) Service Provider

As firms expand internationally, they can diversify their revenue streams, enhance their brand recognition, and develop new talent pools. Entering new markets, however, can be challenging, which is why G-P simplifies the process to allow employers to expand worldwide, earning the company the Gold Award for Best Employer of Record (EOR) Service Provider.

Graham Lim, Senior Partner Manager, APAC Team, G-P, said, “On behalf of G-P, I am honoured to accept, for the third consecutive year, the Gold Winner for Best EOR Service Provider by HRM Magazine Asia. A big shout out to our team, customers, investors, partners, and all the industry followers and supporters; thank you for your trust and commitment that have propelled us to where we are today, the leading EOR service provider.”

Formerly known as Globalization Partners, the newly rebranded G-P reflects the company’s commitment to breaking down barriers to global business and enabling employment opportunities for everyone, everywhere. And as G-P embarks on its next phase of growth, the company intends to continue pushing the envelope, innovating, and creating access opportunities via the digital economy to achieve human potential to the fullest.

He said, “No doubt we live in uncertain times, and we will all face challenges in the future. At G-P, we recognise that work is no longer a place we go and in challenging times, work can be done anywhere. Technology has enabled an interconnected workforce, one in which cross-cultural communication and collaboration will unlock the future. As we work across locations, time zones, and borders, our access to diverse talent has never been greater.”

Besides the growth G-P has had in Asia Pacific, Lim shared that the company invested in hiring the best talent in its executive leadership team, enhanced the platform that its customers rely on, and adopted a borderless approach to succeeding faster in business.

He emphasised the goal of G-P is to help companies navigate the current talent landscape and guide them in the right direction, and added, “We never forget that behind every hire is a human being and part of journeying together is understanding that people desire to work for companies that uphold the same values, offer flexibility, and fulfil a promise of uncompromised growth no matter where they choose to work.”

“We are excited about the tremendous opportunities in the Asia Pacific region. We look forward to continuing to innovate and help our customers build their global remote teams and unlocking for them the possibilities of the everywhere workforce.”

The Silver Award for the Best EOR Service Provider category was jointly presented to CXC, which has been helping its clients better manage their workforce by providing access to quality talent and supporting candidates in navigating the legalities of the employment market.

With its ability to provide access to quality talent and help candidates navigate the employment market, CXC emerged as the winner of the Silver Award for the Best EOR Service Provider for the second consecutive year.

Receiving this award for the team was Richard Farmer, Managing Director, Asia, CXC, who said, “Winning the Silver

GOLD WINNER

Founded in 2012, G-P is the originator of the EOR industry and has been named the Industry Leader in NelsonHall’s 2022 Global Employer of Record Research. With its Global Employment Platform, companies can find, hire, onboard, pay, and manage their teams, regardless of geography, quickly, simply, and compliantly. The platform is fully compliant with employment, tax, and licensing laws in over 180 countries, and by combining its in-country expertise with the platform, G-P provides businesses worldwide with the ability to create global remote teams without the need for subsidiaries.

Award for the Best EOR Service Provider category is a testament to our continuous commitment to providing the highest quality solutions. On behalf of CXC, I want to thank our valued clients, candidates, and partners for this award; it is truly an honour to receive it two years in a row.”

CXC was established in 1992 to provide contractor vetting, compliance, and payroll services. Since then, the company has grown internationally with services delivered in over 50 countries. 30 years and on, CXC is committed to remaining curious, creative, and eager to explore the future of work.

“Our motto is simple, we want our clients to build on us, and our candidates to rely on us. We strive to help clients better manage their workforce by giving them access to quality talent and supporting contractors in navigating the complex legalities of the employment market,” Farmer added.

Also receiving the Silver Award for Best EOR Service Provider

SILVER WINNER

SILVER WINNER

CXC is a global provider of a contingent platform for the extended workforce. The company was established in 1992 to provide contractor vetting, compliance, and payroll services; and has over 250 employees serving customers in more than 50 countries. CXC aims to help its clients hire anyone, anywhere, compliantly, with speed and efficiency. In addition to improving quality and risk management for contingent workforces, its solutions also enable companies to reduce costs.

BRONZE WINNER

AYP is committed to growing together with its clients and advancing the future of work. Headquartered in Singapore, the company is positioned with a regional presence that continues to grow across Asia Pacific. Equipped with a team of in-country HR advisors and real-world marketplace insights and knowledge, AYP aims to help its partners develop their business expansion goals via its all-in-one HR platform, AYP Global Pay, which provides EOR outsourcing partner solutions, payroll management, and freelancer management.

Multiplier was founded in 2020 to simplify how companies hire, pay, and manage employees in countries without a local legal entity. With over 150 entities and partnerships established worldwide, Multiplier’s platform simplifies the employment process by taking charge of the complexities involved in expanding and employing in new markets. By addressing the issues of global employment, Multiplier is helping eliminate borders to redistribute the supply and demand of global talent by providing opportunities for people and scaling companies across the world.

was Multiplier, whose SaaS-based platform allows employers to manage their staff from one single dashboard. Employers may also leverage the platform’s capabilities to recruit foreign talent without the need to establish local subsidiaries in each country.

Amritpal Singh, Commercial Director of Multiplier, said, “Amid the global talent crunch, EOR service providers play an integral role in enabling businesses to scale worldwide. Thanks to Multiplier’s user-centric technology, businesses can now hire the best talent anytime, anywhere, just within a few clicks.”

The EOR solution is Multiplier’s flagship product, and allows the company to partner with its clients, acting as their legal employer and managing their risk and compliance. Other features of the solution include multilingual contracts, compliance and payroll on autopilot, benefits administration, and expense and leave management.

Amritpal continued, “We truly believe that what we have to offer is like no other solution out there. We pride ourselves on being able to provide innovative solutions to payroll, benefits, insurance, contracts, and an expertise on-ground, all in one bundled-up, easy-to-use SaaS solution.”

“We believe that our EOR solution stands out because of our customer-first mindset. Since day one, the customer has been the focal point of all decisions related to delivering products, services, and experiences. Thank you to everyone who voted for Multiplier in this year’s Best EOR Service Provider category.”

The Bronze Award was presented to AYP Group.

Best Professional Employer Organisation (PEO) Service Provider

As businesses become more globalised, they often need to manage teams of employees from a more diverse range of backgrounds. This might pose a challenge as businesses need to ensure that their employees are able to work together effectively and have the necessary support. Besides, labour regulations vary from country to country.

The true meaning of globalisation has changed over the years, Sagar Khatri, Co-Founder and CEO of Multiplier, declared.

He explained, “A decade ago, globalisation was mainly driven by cross-border trade in goods and services. Today, globalisation is defined by the flow of human capital from country to country, and how collaboration takes place across borders. To build a truly distributed workforce, companies need employment solutions providers like Multiplier to scale quickly, efficiently, and compliantly.”

Multiplier brands itself as an all-in-one HR partner to employ, pay and manage global teams. It provides Professional Employer Organisation (PEO) services to employers with existing entities who need support with onboarding and managing payroll, benefits, expenses, and other HR services. For excellence demonstrated in delivering these services, Multiplier was awarded the Gold Award for Best PEO Service Provider.

Specifically, employers can utilise the platform to manage international payroll for their global workforce in more than 120 currencies and bring them all down to a single monthly invoice. They may also offer competitive benefits and insurance, which the Multiplier team is constantly updating to comply with local laws and norms; and manage their workforce better by centralising documentation around employment, offer letters, payslips, insurance, expense receipts, time offs, and more.

“At Multiplier, we take care of these complexities so that our customers can focus solely on growing their business,” Khatri said.

SILVER WINNER

Headquartered in Singapore, AYP is a HR technology solutions provider that is committed to growing together with clients as well as supporting them in advancing the future of work. The company has regional offices across Asia Pacific and believes in making digital workplaces happier and smarter through technology, helping companies to build a scalable and engaged hybrid workforce.

GOLD WINNER

Multiplier was founded in 2020 to simplify how companies hire, pay, and manage employees in countries without a local legal entity. With over 150 entities and partnerships established worldwide, Multiplier’s platform simplifies the employment process by taking charge of the complexities involved in expanding and employing in new markets. By addressing the issues of global employment, Multiplier is helping eliminate borders to redistribute the supply and demand of global talent by providing opportunities for people and scaling companies across the world.

“It is a privilege to be presented with the highest honour of Best PEO Service Provider. This is a huge win for our dedicated team of professionals at Multiplier. We will continue to provide the best-inclass service and help global teams expand into new markets with full compliance, speed, and agility.”

The Silver Award for Best PEO Service Provider went to AYP, which offers AYP Global Pay, an all-in-one platform that uses advanced data analytics to ensure faster hiring, better decisionmaking, and easier management.

Jolin Nguyen, Managing Director of AYP Group, elaborated, “AYP’s transition into the HR solutions business marks a golden age of opportunity for the company. We will evolve from strength to strength as AYP continues to promote its agenda of the future of work in the Asia Pacific region. We believe in making digital workplaces happier and smarter through technology, helping companies to build a scalable and engaged hybrid workforce.”

Data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) are used by AYP Global Pay to track trends, plot progress, and help HR managers plan accordingly. HR managers can also leverage the platform to quickly access rules, regulations, and information from different countries to better manage their global workforce.

Commenting on winning this recognition, Nguyen said, “AYP Group humbly accepts the award for Best PEO Service Provider from HRM Asia Readers’ Choice Awards. We’re pleased to learn of the support we have from HRM Magazine Asia’s reader community and our clients who have voted for us.”

Best Corporate Healthcare/Wellness Solution Provider

Having a corporate wellness strategy programme is arguably one of the best ways to improve employee productivity, and even on a wider level, reduce healthcare costs. Healthy employees potentially take fewer sick days and can also cope with stress and reduce their risk of chronic disease.

Hiraash Thawfeek, CTO of Multiplier, said, “When wellness in companies was first introduced, it was about providing a wellequipped pantry, or complimentary gym passes. Today, wellness has extended beyond physical health. Just as important if not more, companies must start to focus more on employees’ psychological and mental wellbeing, which have proven to bolster higher employee engagement, higher retention rates and higher confidence in a company’s leadership.”

Multiplier offers healthcare and wellness packages at a localised level, enabling its customers to provide tailored employment contracts and benefits for their employees. Through partnerships with leading providers globally, the company has been able to provide local employees with diverse health and wellness solutions, which they recognise and trust.

According to Hiraash, Multiplier was the first company in the world to launch localised and customisable yet homogeneous benefits across Asia Pacific, which was one of the reasons that saw the company win the Gold Award for Best Corporate Healthcare/ Wellness Solution Provider.

“Receiving the Gold Award in Best Corporate Healthcare/Wellness

GOLD WINNER

Multiplier was founded in 2020 to simplify how companies hire, pay, and manage employees in countries without a local legal entity. With over 150 entities and partnerships established worldwide, Multiplier’s platform simplifies the employment process by taking charge of the complexities involved in expanding and employing in new markets.

By addressing the issues of global employment, Multiplier is helping eliminate borders to redistribute the supply and demand of global talent by providing opportunities for people and scaling companies across the world.

Solution Provider is something we are extremely proud of,” he said. “With everything going on around the world, geopolitical factors and a shrinking talent pool, it is a privilege for us to be held in high trust by all our customers and their employees, that we deliver more than just employment solutions, but beyond that as well.”

Best Workplace Innovation Solution

Work-from-anywhere is becoming increasingly popular in the global marketplace, and JustCo has been working closely with its customers to develop innovative solutions that meet the evolving needs of today’s hybrid employees. In the category of Best Workplace Innovation Solution, JustCo won the Gold Award for its innovative workspace solutions and seamless digital experiences.

Ho Seng Chee, Chief Corporate Officer for JustCo, said, “The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has undeniably upended the way of life and work across the globe. As countries gear up for the transition into the post-pandemic future, many firms have started to rethink what form of hybrid work arrangement achieves the optimal outcome for the business.”

“Although most firms had first implemented hybrid working arrangements as a pandemic response measure, many have since adopted this arrangement as a permanent practice owing to the positive outcomes delivered.”

He cited an article, published by Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, on the benefits of hybrid work. According to the article, research had suggested businesses allowing their employees to decide where and when to do their jobs, whether in another city or the middle of the night, would result in higher employee productivity, a reduction in turnover, and lower organisation costs.

At JustCo, its pan-Asia co-working centres, as well as the Switch marketplace for on-demand work booths and spaces, provide its

GOLD WINNER

JustCo is Asia Pacific’s leading provider of flexible workspace for businesses of all sizes seeking flexible solutions to nimbly scale their operations. JustCo’s value proposition lies in its focus on highquality fit-outs, attractive locations and a seamless experience via technology to work from any of its centres.

customers with flexibility in workspace options. Building on this success, JustCo launched REIO, a one-stop workplace management software platform that allows companies to manage workspaces and engage employees. Features of REIO include desk-booking, meeting room reservations, team collaboration scheduling, and more.

He concluded, “At the core of JustCo’s business lies the strong emphasis to innovate, collaborate, and take full advantage of technological advancements to enhance the future co-working space and property management experience. JustCo believes that hybrid arrangements will define the future of work. It is our aspiration to provide the best combination of physical spaces and technology to power that future.”

WHAT ARE THE TYPES OF EMPLOYERS CAN IMPLEMENT?

Telecommuting

What is it?

• A flexi-place arrangement where employees can perform their jobs at a location other than the workplace

• Uses information and communication technologies to enable employees to connect with clients remotely

Benefits

• Reduces commute time which can be spent more effectively at work

• Helps business reduce operating costs

If you are an employer who seeks to implement Flexible Work Arrangements (FWAs) for business sustainability, you have to consider the types of FWAs that best meet your business and employees' needs. Though there are many FWAs available, you may begin by considering these few:

Part-Time Work

What is it?

• An arrangement that allows employees to work reduced hours on a regular basis

• Employees work less than 35 hours in a week, including those who work less than a full day all week or only some days per week

Staggered Time Job-Sharing

What is it?

• An arrangement that allows two or more part-time employees to share the responsibilities of a single workload

• Employees usually work at different times during the day or week, or on alternate weeks

Benefits

• Helps companies attract and retain employees who need reduced work hours

• Enables exchange of skills and knowledge between job sharers

What is it?

• An arrangement that allows employees to vary their daily start and end times to suit their personal commitments

• Flexible time bands are created to let employees choose their preferred start and end times

Benefits

• Allows employers to provide coverage of duties during peak periods or when work needs to be done only at particular times

• Access to wider talent pool such as: back-to-work individuals

8:00 AM 5:30 PM

Benefits

9:00 AM 6:30 PM

• Helps employees avoid peak-hour travelling

• Helps the business extend operating hours at no extra labour costs

LEADING FROM THE FRONT: PUTTING HR STRATEGY INTO ACTION WITH IMPACT

CHRO INDONESIA 20 Oct 2022 Shangri-La Jakarta

CHRO SINGAPORE 1 Dec 2022 Shangri-La Singapore

CHRO MALAYSIA 7 Dec 2022 Sheraton Imperial Kuala Lumpur

HRM Asia’s exclusive, by-invitation CHRO Series returns in-person this year to bring together HR leaders from across the region (Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore) to navigate shared business challenges and provide solutions to critical priorities facing their role today.

Dive into the latest topics close to the hearts of HR leaders:

• Latest hybrid work models for an agile workforce and innovative culture • Navigating through talent supply chain disruption • Industry-critical trends and predictions for HR leaders in Asia

• Driving continued success as the board’s leader in human capital management