Japan eases overtime guidance amid labour shortages, sparking work-life balance concerns
Japan’s latest workplace reform is placing economic growth against employee wellbeing in a renewed debate over working hours.
Can making tea be a career? CHAGEE and ITE build the ladder
A new CHAGEE-ITE qualification folds tea-beverage skills into a national vocational course and the chain’s own shop-floor training – a bid to turn a high-churn frontline job into a certified profession, and one whose skills, CHAGEE says, a worker keeps wherever they go next.
Three days, two workshops, one question: Who runs the next phase of Vietnam’s growth
CHRO Series Vietnam runs 9-11 September at Rex Hotel Saigon, with sessions on blue-collar retention, executive localisation, skills-first hiring and the green talent shortage – plus a data protection law that has been live since January.
“You cannot sue an AI”: Why adoption comes down to people, not platforms
Deploying AI is the part most organisations have mastered. Jun Tay, who works for a major bank in Asia, explains what happens after, and why the human shift, not the technology, decides whether adoption sticks.
Indonesia targets October completion for new Manpower Law
Deputy Minister of Manpower Afriansyah Noor says the bill will address outsourcing, wage structure and the scope of labour protection, and that unions will have space to contribute before the deadline.
Remote working is reshaping presenteeism, study finds
New research argues that remote work and always-on digital tools have outgrown the standard definition of presenteeism and proposes eight distinct forms of it.
The workforce risk that doesn’t show up in your engagement survey
Recent data show a shift in the dominant workforce health risk and a more complicated picture of disengagement than the numbers suggest.
Tourism offers jobs, not careers. Mandai Wildlife Group is trying to prove otherwise
Mandai Wildlife Group has put competency-based pay and structured pathways behind frontline roles. Two long-serving employees describe what that has looked like in practice.
Employer groups warn RM3,100 minimum wage could put MSMEs under pressure
The call for a RM3,100 minimum wage has met resistance from employer groups, who warn the move could prove unsustainable for many MSMEs.
Singapore ties childcare leave to the number of children
Childcare Leave and Extended Childcare Leave will be merged into a single scheme scaled to the number of children, with employers reimbursed for the full duration of all child-related leave up to the existing cap.
Should people grow the organisation, or should the organisation grow its people?
Two Hong Kong practitioners took opposite starting positions on the same budget line – and both conceded that where an organisation sits in its cycle shapes the answer.
Poor sleep could cut nearly nine months from working life after 50
As employers look to retain older employees for longer, new research suggests sleep health could play a role, with severe sleep disturbances linked to a shorter working life after 50.
Employees are navigating AI disruption in the dark
While organisations are diving in full on to adopt AI, employees are a bit slower in taking up the cause, and the result will be telling.
What workplace support for marrow donation looks like in practice
Nearly half of Singaporeans say workplace support shapes whether they would register as a marrow donor. What that support looks like in practice is still being worked out.
Malaysia reviews RM1,700 minimum wage as cost-of-living mount
Malaysia’s review of the RM1,700 minimum wage comes amid calls for wage policy to better reflect the rising cost of living and ensure employees can maintain a decent standard of living.
Ten years of poor health, and the workplace in the middle of it
Between a health span ending at 70 and a life expectancy of 80 sits a decade in poor health. At the inaugural AIA Healthcare Summit, the argument was that employers hold more of that decade than they think, and that fragmentation – not funding – is the constraint.
AI adoption isn’t one-size-fits-all. Five strategies to make it work
A recent study suggests that rather than asking how to get people to use AI, employers should ask how groups experience AI differently and tailor their approaches.
The technology is the easy part. Transformation stalls on the people.
Singapore’s S$400 million Enterprise Workforce Transformation Package is a bet that the workforce, not the tooling, is the missing piece of the AI.
Taiwan’s AI boom is showing up in the overtime data
Electronic components employees averaged 28.7 hours of overtime in June – more than three times the national average – as AI-driven orders reshape where Taiwan’s manufacturing hours are going.
Oracle puts 13 AI agents to work across the talent lifecycle
Thirteen agents built into Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM span role design, learning content, manager coaching, and workforce planning.
Zuckerberg’s AI vision: More jobs, fewer workers and ‘personal superintelligence’
Mark Zuckerberg’s new AI manifesto argues that automation would not outpace human capability and outlines what that means for HR leaders.
The dull work built your senior people. Now AI does it first.
If AI absorbs the routine tasks juniors once cut their teeth on, where does the next generation of judgement come from? Dr Gary Ang, co-author of a new Asia Tech Alliance paper, on the pipeline problem HR is not yet planning for.
When disruption is the operating environment, ‘bouncing back’ isn’t the whole job
Organisations have long treated resilience as the ability to recover from a discrete shock. Dr Athenais Sivaloganthan of International SOS argues that the definition no longer fits the conditions employees are actually working under, and that the psychological side of the equation has been the slowest to catch up.
AI didn’t invent hiring fraud. It made it harder to see.
Candidates are using AI to prepare more effectively, and recruiters are struggling to tell preparation from inflation. At an HRM Asia webinar with Veremark, panellists argued the question has moved from whether a CV matches a role to whether the experience behind it is real.
First the layoffs, then the rehiring: AI’s expensive round trip
From Ford’s assembly line to Klarna’s call centres, organisations that bet on AI over experience are quietly buying it back, often for more than they saved.
Employees in Hong Kong are among the world’s heaviest users of AI. Most have never been trained to use it.
Weekly AI use in Hong Kong runs at more than double the global average, but nearly 60% of employees have never received any AI training, an HKUST study of 3,722 professionals finds.
AI less likely to replace jobs in developing economies, but gains aren’t guaranteed – World Bank
The World Bank’s latest report finds that generative AI threatens far fewer jobs in developing economies than in wealthy ones, but warns that the productivity upside will go uncaptured without investment in skills and infrastructure.
Malaysia urged to review wage structure beyond minimum pay to support income growth
The National Wages Consultative Council says employees earning just above the minimum wage are being left out of pay rises and that fresh graduates are starting on less than they did two decades ago.
Finishing the training isn’t the same as changing how you work
As Samsung reskills its workforce from the top down, Samsung Indonesia’s Christine Josephine shares why leadership makes change believable and what it takes to make it stick.
The tool users and the outcome-getters: Hiring’s new diving line
A wage premium for AI skills is already measurable across the region. Kazunori Fukuda, who runs Sansan in Singapore and Thailand, argues most hiring processes still cannot tell who has earned it.