Inspiring HR Practices from Asia-Pacific’s Top Employers

Are you ready to unlock a world of innovative HR practices and transformative ideas? Look no further! We are thrilled to present our ebook, “Inspiring HR Practices from Asia-Pacific’s Top Employers,”

In this comprehensive resource, we have curated insights and best practice examples from a select group of our esteemed Top Employers in APAC.

These organisations have not only raised the global standard of HR excellence but also set the benchmark for others to follow.

Download the ebook now to uncover valuable insights. Here are some highlights from the ebook:

• Diversity, equity, and inclusion – Discover how Avanade partnered with the Autism Resource Centre (ARC) Singapore to train adults on the autism spectrum with digital skills and provide them with full-time technical roles. Learn how this initiative contributes to large-scale digital transformation projects at organisations in Singapore.
• People strategy – Explore Boehringer Ingelheim’s cultural framework called FOCUS, which defines their purpose and serves as a guide for their day-to-day work. Gain insights into how this framework supports their business objectives and is interwoven throughout the entire organisation.
• Strategic Employer branding – Learn about PUMA’s commitment to creating a premier workplace by developing a set of Employer Values that align with the actual employee experience. Discover how these values contribute to PUMA’s mission of becoming the fastest sports brand in the world.
• Purpose & values – Dive into DHL Express’ annual Employee Opinion Survey (EOS), which allows employees to voice their opinions, share feedback and insights, and help shape the DHL culture. Understand how this survey helps create an inclusive and comfortable working environment while also identifying areas for improvement.
• Talent acquisition – Explore MCC Singapore’s strategic talent acquisition approach, which focuses on attracting and developing competent leaders, executives, and specialists in alignment with their organisation’s sustainability goals. Discover how this approach ensures a strong leadership and talent pipeline.
• Onboarding – Learn about Saint-Gobain Sekurit’s New Hire Orientation programme, designed to help new employees adapt to their roles effectively. Discover the three-phase programme that ensures new hires are ready for the company, its culture, and their specific job requirements.
• Organisation & change – Explore Sampoerna’s adoption of a Leadership Model and the Three Hands philosophy, which empower individuals’ growth and support internal transformation. Learn how these approaches create an inclusive working environment and drive high performance.
• Learning & Development – Delve into the TCS’s innovative continuous learning culture, designed to empower employees to drive their own career development. Explore the diverse ecosystem featuring various learning formats, democratizing skills and talent, which ensures individuals are not just ready for roles, but are future-ready for evolving careers.
• Rewards & Recognition – Discover SAP’s internal Compensation Assistant Tool launched in April 2022, allowing employees in India to view their pay-range. This initiative has significantly boosted employee engagement and trust, clarified compensation paths, dispelled misperceptions about rewards, and reinforced the fairness and equity of decision-making processes within SAP

These are just a few examples of the invaluable insights you will find in the ebook. Download your copy today to unlock a world of innovative HR practices and transformative ideas that will help you excel in the dynamic field of human resources.

Reintegration Programmes for Women After a Career Break

Emerging Practices in Top Organisations 

According to data from the Spanish National Institute of Statistics, the chance of unemployment among women increases with the number of children they have. In fact, women with three or more children have an unemployment rate of up to 26% higher than their childless counterparts. There is a clear relationship between childbearing and the decline in the employment rate. However, the opposite is true for men as research shows that their unemployment rate decreases with each child.

“The role of childminding is usually assumed by women. This leads to a widening wage gap. Returning to work after a long absence is often a complicated journey. The longer you stay out, the harder it can be to get back in,” explains Massimo Begelle, Regional Manager of Top Employers Institute in Spain and Italy.

Some of the main problems encountered by women who have put their careers on hold to have a family, or for other reasons, are related to feelings of obsolescence around the current technologies and skills required to reintegrate into the workplace. “They are going to discover a different world than the one they knew,” Begelle points out, “and they may suffer from insecurities after years away from the world of work.

In leading organisations, initiatives to assist women who have taken career breaks to re-enter the labour market are an emerging best practice, with programmes that include ideas such as offering them new work experience (permanent or temporary, to serve as a platform for them to carry out another role), training in new skills, or coaching support.  

“The focus of these programmes,” continues Begelle, “is not only to comply with the CSR or diversity and inclusion policies of organisations but as a way to acquire valuable, experienced talent with a wealth of life experience who, aware of these new professional opportunities, participate with a high degree of commitment.

In top organisations, these programmes are complemented by others designed to ensure that women do not have to quit their job when they have children. 74% of Top Employers in Spain already have good flexibility practices in place to adjust working hours in order to accommodate childcare. Moreover, 58% offer special leave to care for children.

Schindler and Banco Santander are two examples of companies with programmes designed for the reintegration of women who have taken career breaks.

Women Back to Business, Schindler’s Talent Recruitment Programme

In 2021, Schindler launched the Women Back to Business programme, aimed at incorporating into its organisation women who had taken a career break of several years for personal reasons, and who, despite being ready to return to the labour market, were facing a number of obstacles to re-integrate. More than a corporate social responsibility project, it was a talent recruitment programme and was approached as such.

After an intense communication campaign lasting several weeks, they set up a web page for the programme and received more than 600 applications from different profiles. They hired nine women from different areas to take on commercial and supervisory positions as middle managers.

Santander Reencuentra, a successful programme

Banco Santander’s Reencuentra (“Reunite”) programme is aimed towards women who left their professional careers for family reasons and is designed to help them re-enter the labour market with a company in their area.

This programme offers participants a professional experience in Santander in an office close to them, formative retraining that includes the completion of an Online MBA and training in digital skills, coaching for employment, and outplacement firm services, all with the aim of finding them a stable job.

In its first edition, the programme had 100 participants, with an average age range of between 38 and 46 years, returning from a professional break of between 5 and 10 years. 84% of these participants managed to find employment during the course of this initiative. Santander plans to launch the next edition of this programme in 2023.

Case Study: Deutsche Post DHL



Certified Top Employer, Deutsche Post DHL Group (DPDHL), is the world’s leading logistics company employing nearly 600,000 colleagues and operating in over 220 countries and territories worldwide.To increase collaboration and interaction between their large number of employees within the company, DPDHL has implemented Smart Workplace, a mobile application designed to improve the daily employee experience. Developing the Smart Workplace was a challenge not only because it was a huge undertaking in scale, but it was also a challenge given the diversity of employees, roles, languages and places of work.

Download the case study to learn how: 

• The organisation customised this intranet as a mobile application using tools such as the Office 365 suite.
• The Covid-19 pandemic impacted the launch and need of the Smart Workplace platform for DPDHL.
• Smart Workplace has become one of the leading internal information sources within DPDHL, engaging more than 300,000 employees worldwide just 6 months after its launch.

Using HR Analytics to Make Your Corporate Culture—and your Workforce—Healthier

HR sits on a wealth of data today. Yet, when it comes to organisational culture, it’s often a struggle to analyse meaningful data for CEOs, boards, and senior business leaders and what data to present.

In this webinar, Kevin Oakes, i4cp CEO and author of Culture Renovation®, and David Plink, CEO of Top Employers Institute, explored how HR can most effectively leverage existing human capital analytics to measure and monitor cultural health.

Brandon Schassberger joined them, SVP Business Transformation, People & Capability at Mastercard and Richard Lobo, Executive Vice President & Head HR, Infosys, who shared how they use HR analytics at their respective companies.

The session started with a poll: 

The number one answer was “Our culture somewhat healthy” (62%), followed by “our culture is very healthy” at 23%, making that a very good cumulative score of 85% of respondents saying somewhat or very healthy. i4CP, across various webinars and events, has asked this question, and the results are very similar.

i4Cp recently launched a survey to understand how companies deal with toxicity, even pockets of toxicity in their culture. And on the positive side, look at the elements of a healthy culture and what companies are doing to sustain that.

The risks of not using data

A notable trend is that many companies now have a lot of data – but many are not necessarily using it. There comes naturally with his associated risks. Kevin Oakes book “Culture Renovation: 18 Leadership Actions to Build an Unshakeable Company” emanated from a study done on corporate culture and the elements of a healthy culture overall.

And specifically, if companies want to change culture, how do they do it – a question many CEOs and senior executives posed. While the inherent importance of culture and the urgency to change it was understood, very little literature existed on ‘ how to do it. The book outlines 18 action steps that the organisation can take to renovate its culture.

Companies like Microsoft and Mastercard feature heavily in the book, as they have changed their culture over the last few years. They didn’t completely transform those cultures. Instead, they carefully renovated those cultures to keep what made them good, to begin with, to keep the unique elements of that organisation.

Kevin noted, “One of the very first steps, though, before you start changing our culture, is to understand the cultural elements today. And I tell executive teams this all the time. If you lock yourself in a conference room and decide amongst yourselves what the  Culture is, you’re going to get it wrong.”

It’s important to understand the employee sentiment, probably even more so today where we got remote, flexible or hybrid work. Understand where employees feel the problem is before you set out to change it.

Engagement surveys are good for this, but they are at one point in time, and you don’t get a lot of great information in just one annual engagement survey. More companies are using newer technologies to listen on devices using natural language processing and a little AI to understand what’s happening in the workforce.

How Top Employer Infosys uses HR analytics to improve their corporate culture 

Richard Lobo explained that Infosys has always used data for its clients. And unfortunately, not enough of the good work done by companies in the consumer space translates into the people space. The pandemic presented a great opportunity to accelerate the use of HR analytics.

Infosys, an organisation with close to 300,00 employees, provides lots of data. Data that allows you to predict, like an automated guidance system to your car or aeroplane.

In the pre-pandemic stages, many of us used to have water cooler conversations and would run into each other in corridors, and most of these moments have now moved into a virtual  / tech space. As a consequence, the data produced by systems got that much richer.

Infosys uses HR analytics in various ways. 

• The first is through a program labelled Hale (Health assessment and lifestyle enrichment. Through this, both mental and physical well-being data is collected. Based on the various application uses and programs, they can link them to absenteeism metrics. Furthermore, it provides input into how teams are doing and how many hours they can work without having a negative impact.
• The second program they use is called Lex – Learning Experience & Careers Adaptive Learning and Digital Career paths, based on employee insights on interests & skills. The online system can extract data to understand which skills are more in demand.

Conversely, Infosys also uses analytics to improve the employee experience and make work more ‘human’.

• On average, an employee goes through 200 touch points (for example, when they want approval, mark attendance, access employee data, etc.) through one mobile app. Improvements are made along the way by understanding how employees use the app through the data collected.
• Finally, through a program called MCode – Manager effectiveness, Infosys can collect data to develop managers and provide people insights on the go through interactive dashboards and nudges.

Richard also noted how the Top Employers Programme assisted Infosys “Because the whole certification experience, the interaction with the Top Employers team, has helped us advance the impact of people practices through shared learning.

Because we’ve learned so much from other companies because no company can get everything right. Being able to drive change because the whole certification process, the process regulation helps you use your data better, and they might apply some of these things on an on a real-time experience.”

How Mastercard used a Cultural Health Index to measure cultural trends

Brandon explains that Mastercard started their culture journey maybe 3-4 years ago, as they looked at things such as ISO categories and looked at metrics and the industry standards – which didn’t resonate with their cultures.

It’s great to have these metrics externally, but it didn’t provide any understanding or a way of measuring things that were important to them.

At the same time as undergoing this exercise, there was a lot of unrest in the USA. There was a strong push from stakeholders and asset managers to be much more transparent.

Through collaboration with i4CP, Mastercard had a breakthrough moment in conversation with Kevin Martin (Chief Research Officer at i4cp). Mastercard noted the modelling for reporting and the use of indices. So, instead of using 30 different KPIs, they could arrange them into indices: Innovation, Inclusion, and Employer Brand.

When these indices are aggregated and incorporate the retention statistics of Mastercard’s succession plans, they provide an objective, outcome-based view into the cultural trends that impact their organisation.

Breaking down one of those indices (Employer brand) – Mastercard recognised that they are one of the most valuable brands in the world – but this was not necessarily seen in their employer brand. Instead of only looking at their Glassdoor rating, for example, other perspectives were now being looked at  – such as early career hires to customer voice of customer feedback to the engagement level of active people, Net promoter score, exits etc.

And thus, creating the indices helps you figure out what levers you have to pull and how they influence others.

Why Developing an Effective (Remote) Offboarding Process is Important

Remotely onboarding and offboarding employees are becoming the norm across organisations globally. These practices are revealing new challenges and opportunities in these new and established practices. While we explored some of these opportunities in our past article about onboarding, this article is focused on current practices around remote offboarding. The article will explore how people practices around offboarding are being adapted to meet the virtual digital landscape many employees are currently navigating.

What is Offboarding and Why is it Important?

Offboarding, which is the process when an employee parts ways with the organisation they have worked for, is often overlooked as much of the focus usually falls on onboarding processes. But offboarding should not be forgotten.

Offboarding is likely neglected because many often see offboarding as a necessary process for returning company equipment and deactivating company access to various systems. They forget the way the process of offboarding affects the transferring of responsibilities and knowledge, feedback from employees and the last impression they have of the company.

Let’s take a moment to look at some of the reasons why having a good offboarding process is important and should be on the HR agenda

• Past employees can become future employees – The reason that employees leave companies is not always because they do not enjoy working at the company. There is a multitude of reasons why employees leave. They might leave for personal family reasons, because they are relocating, or because they feel that they may be challenged more at another organisation. In the future, it could become advantageous for both parties to work together. When employees leave on a sour note this possibility is diminished.
• Past employees strategically impact a company’s employer branding – The impressions of an organisation that an employee leaves with are built over the length of their employee journey. And the final days of their employment can cement their feelings about the organisation. While they may not work for the organisation anymore, if asked, they will likely report positive feelings. And as employer branding moves higher on the agenda, this good feeling can funnel into social posts and other word of mouth stories that help the business attract new employees.
• Past employees can aid in assisting new employees – One of the more pertinent reasons for properly offboarding staff is the need for a smooth handover process between them and the new employee. When there is a well organised and empathetic offboarding process former employees are more likely to be willing to smooth the transition of knowledge and expertise to the next person.

How Offboarding has Gone Remote

While the larger shift to remote offboarding, like remote onboarding, was increased due to the global pandemic and with many jobs continuing to operate remotely it is sure to be a practice that not only stays but innovates to better suit the needs of the organisation and its workforce.

To create seamless and effective remote offboarding processes HR departments need to work closely with their Digital and IT departments to develop the right digital employee experience that helps to create an empathetic work environment, so as to make employees feel empowered and engaged in making their steps out of the organisation.

The support of digital systems can lead to the creation of a well-thought-out dashboard or portal that can make the transitionary process seamless.

The portal could include a guide to how employees can return their equipment to the employer, best practices for virtually handing off responsibilities and other tasks that aid the offboarding process. The HR department leads in the knowledge and experience around what is needed in the process and the IT department aid in making this process a digital reality. Working together to tackle the challenges of offboarding remotely is eased when these two departments work together.

One of the best ways to make the offboarding process an easier procedure is to have it operate in an environment that is already adaptable and empathetic to its workforce. While how a business can do this work cannot be covered, even briefly in this article, we have many other articles on our insights page that can lead you in understanding how that environment.

Companies and leaders that are more keen to listen to employee insights and HR analytics, and are open to it empathetically will be able to make sure that as their former employees leave on happier notes.

Concluding Thoughts on Offboarding

The need to have a successful offboarding process is supported by HR and IT departments. As remote work becomes the standard, or at least an option, in many organisations creating processes that support these workers is integral.

Are you curious of Offboarding best practise? By joining Top Employers Institute Program you will have access to an immense library of best practise that will help your company grow.

Get in touch today for free to become an employer of choice!