Employee experience key to Vietnam’s HR growth
- Josephine Tan

“HR in Vietnam can anchor on local culture and societal values such as community value, family-focused and respect to tailorise Western good practices.” – Associate Professor Elaine Chew, Acting Associate Head for Research, Department of Management, The Business School, RMIT University Vietnam
In part one of this series, we explored the evolving role of HR in Vietnam, where digital innovation and changing workforce demographics are driving a significant shift. Associate Professor Elaine Chew, Acting Associate Head for Research, Department of Management, The Business School, RMIT University Vietnam, shared her insights on how HR moves beyond traditional administrative roles to become a strategic force in shaping organisational culture, employee engagement, and competitive advantage.
In part two, Chew shares more with HRM Asia on the importance of blending Vietnam’s deep-rooted cultural values—such as family focus and community spirit—with modern HR practices to create thriving, people-centric workplaces. From promoting work-life balance to fostering career growth and leveraging flexible work arrangements, organisations in Vietnam are redefining the employee experience to align with evolving workforce expectations.
How are organisations in Vietnam addressing the challenges of motivating employees while ensuring productivity and workplace happiness, what role does employee experience play in shaping the future of HR in the country to create environments where employees can truly thrive?
Elaine Chew: Indeed, employee experience at the workplace is very important to develop strong employee engagement. When employees are intellectually and emotionally attached to the organisations, the underlying reasons to stay or quit will be less determined by salary. Vietnam’s work culture combines traditional and contemporary practices with a delicate balance that maintains tradition while leveraging modern practices.
HR in Vietnam can anchor on local culture and societal values such as community value, family-focused and respect to tailorise Western good practices. There are a few areas that HR in Vietnam can explore to motivate employees to ensure productivity and workplace happiness. The areas are work-life, career, benefits and human connection, with a central theme of family orientation.
Besides fair pay, the emerging theme that has been repeated across recent years in different surveys is work-life balance. A survey by Grove HR in 2022 found that work-life balance (73%) and employee benefits (72.9%) are among the top two criteria for accepting job offers for the 25-34 age group.
The survey participants anticipated higher efficiency, productivity, lower absenteeism and sick leave. This employee benefit is highly appreciated against the backdrop of a deeply entrenched work culture of long work hours and physical presence in Vietnam. The International Labour Organisation noted that employees in Vietnam work an average of 41.6 hours per week, which is within the permitted 48 hours. However, 25% of employees worked more than 49 hours per week in 2023.
Nevertheless, work-life balance, which started as a foreign concept, can be localised to respect cultural norms and leverage societal values to truly reap the extended benefits. Nearly 70% of respondents in a 2021 HR Asia survey interpreted work-life balance that includes flexible work time as a form of employee trust. Therefore, work-life balance can be effective for employee motivation. Flexible work time supports female employees in juggling between family and career. It can be as simple as early release from work to fetch children from kindergarten or school.
Vietnamese are known for strong work ethics, loyalty, and a ‘get-it-done’ attitude. The Salary and the Labour Market 2024 report notes that while salary (70.1%) is the top determining factor for quitting jobs, career advancement is nearly half as important (35.5%). To keep employees in Vietnam motivated, genuine dialogues on career plans and advancement can help map the career trajectory at both interpersonal and professional levels. Such organisational effort also signals the desire for employees to adopt a growth mindset to align and share the journey.
Building into such dialogues, HR can work with managers to set goals and create meaningful work that promotes a sense of purpose. Genuine conversations of this kind are rare, and performance reviews are generally just a mere exercise if supervisors practice a rigid hierarchy that expects obedience. Therefore, it is motivating for employees to work with supervisors in developing career plans and meaningful work opportunities.
The 2021 HR Asia survey shows that nearly 82% of employees in Vietnam are willing to take up extra work beyond their job responsibilities to assist in business. Nearly three-quarters of the respondents wished for inclusiveness in corporate decision-making against rigid hierarchy. Many respondents (81%) constantly seek opportunities to improve their role and contribute to their organisation. The industrious nature of employees in Vietnam parallels the survey result that salary is the top determining factor for quitting a job.
Extended health insurance coverage for employees’ nuclear families can enhance employee engagement. Vietnamese are family-focused and community-driven. The workplace in Vietnamese organisations often carries the familial sense of community spirit and ownership in sharing work and success. Extending healthcare benefits to family members is a form of organisational care and support. In Vietnamese culture, such care is connoted by family. It resonates with familial values manifested in government policies on providing monthly allowances for elderly parents who cannot earn a living. Therefore, the Vietnamese appreciate an extension of healthcare services and insurance for family members.
Childcare fees can be expensive, given that childcare centres operate long hours to accommodate the long work hours of custodians. However, this is a low-hanging fruit that can reinforce a family-oriented workplace.
READ MORE: Vietnam HR: Driving change, fostering engagement, and building a competitive edge
Vietnamese organisations typically create a family-like workplace. Human connection is appreciated and central to one’s existence and trust-building at the workplace, where physical presence is preferred. The notion of a family-like workplace differs from the Western term of collegiality in that the former signifies strong communal bonding and emotional attachment to the people and the workplace.
Influenced by Confucian teaching, Vietnamese strictly observe societal norms such as respect, harmony, community, and loyalty. To recognise good work, HR can emphasise social events to celebrate success together, boosting employee morale. HR can execute the reward session in a typical afternoon break by giving out food and beverage vouchers or sponsoring milk tea for the team to socialise and chill out. The Lunar New Year (or “Tet”) bonus is another form of seasonal benefit not to be missed. It is also typical for organisations to organise Tet parties with lavish dinners.
Looking ahead, how do you envision the role of HR evolving in the next five to 10 years with the rise of technology and changing workforce experience, and what do you think is the key to creating a successful, future-ready HR model that balances employee wellbeing and organisational performance?
Chew: To have a future-ready HR model, HR needs to maintain human-centric principles and work with external experts to prepare organisations to unlock digital excellence of operating as an AI-driven enterprise beyond the immediate urgency of cost optimisation and efficiency.
Besides upscaling employee performance, HR can go the extra mile in the future to create meaningful work and valuable experiences for employees by enabling them to create or re-engineer work processes and experiences. HR can work closely with employees to redefine work and create new metrics and performance criteria.
Given the multi-generational workforce, tailored benefits and personalised solutions may help to enhance employee wellbeing and engagement in stressful times of continuous improvement.
Regardless of the transforming scale of business processes, clear and transparent communication is crucial at the early stage of the change management exercise. Strategic communication in change management and dialogues enable employees to imagine how their jobs may change, be co-created, or be augmented to redefine skills and capabilities-oriented roles. Accessibility to key information helps employees to imagine how HR will prepare them as AI-enabled talents to work in a value-driven workplace. Not only can these address the perceived threat and disruption to traditional jobs, but the extra mile that HR undertakes can enhance employee wellbeing.
In the next five to 10 years, HR in dynamic organisations will be wearing multiple hats in driving adoption and adaptation of AI. HR shall be a key partner in digital transformation to ensure alignment of value with the business-led digital roadmap. HR has to develop a talent roadmap to ensure timely availability of skilled talents. Digital talent is an organisational delivery capability for rewiring operations and technology to build proprietary digital solutions and digital excellence. In short, HR is a change agent to manage change processes, risk and value maximisation.
For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), there is a tendency to try not to lag too far behind for business survival. Procuring off-the-shelf software is common. In Vietnam, SMEs tend to purchase existing software to digitise and digitalise accounting and customer data for work efficiency and enhancement of customer journey. HR is such organisations may develop a talent roadmap and play the change agent role on a relatively smaller scale.
Stay ahead of the curve and gain valuable insights into the future of HR in Vietnam by attending CHRO Vietnam 2025. Taking place from 19-20 March 2025 at Caravelle Saigon Hotel, CHRO Vietnam will explore innovative strategies, from AI-powered talent management to data-driven recruitment, helping HR leaders to thrive in Vietnam’s rapidly evolving business landscape. Register here to secure your spot and be part of the HR transformation in Vietnam!