This article first appeared in Digital Edge, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on January 10, 2022 - January 16, 2022

The pandemic and its attendant restrictions seem to have brought out the shadow side of some employers in Malaysia. And Victor Phang, founder and CEO of Worksmartly Digital Sdn Bhd, a firm dealing in human resources technology, has had to field a plethora of HR requests that are unsavoury and sometimes bordering on illegal.

These range from being asked to have an override into the employee’s login (so the company could go in and apply for leave on their behalf without their knowledge, thus shortening or even wiping out the leave owing to them) to using its system to put surveillance on the employee so the company would know every single website they click on that is not work-related during working hours.

While many expressed shock at the revelations of how some glovemakers were treating their employees, the thinking behind these actions and the practice of regarding employees as robots or mere units of production seems to be endemic.

Phang tells Digital Edge that he has been forced to part company with some of his more overbearing clients because his company could not fulfil their demands and still keep its various certifications related to things like information security and data privacy. Also, he objected on principle.

“There are a few key challenges here. The first is a trust issue. We see many companies claiming to treat their employees like partners and assets of the company, but the moment everyone was forced to work from home, they asked their employees to share their screens throughout their working hours.

“They even asked us if we could provide them with a tool that allows their manager to have multiple screens like with a CCTV so they could monitor each of the people who share their screens to know what they are doing,” he says.

Phang was thrown for a loop. This was a European company that had always come across as caring for its employees, providing them good benefits and being really flexible about working conditions. “But when it came to the pandemic, there was a lack of trust.”

He could have told the company that implementing such a system wouldn’t work; instead, Phang let them find out for themselves. “When the manager implemented it, productivity actually went down. So he stopped it, and they are fine now.”

But trust remains an issue. This is why so many employers are already asking their employees to return to the office. “I’m not sure why they think that working from home cannot be continued.”

Phang admits that working from home may impact the level of interaction between employees, which is a crucial factor in retaining staff. In fact, when Worksmartly announced that it would allow staff to continue to work from home, one of its employees quit. “When I asked him why, he said he wanted to go back to the office because bonding is important.”

The company had already come up with a product, Gather, a virtual simulation of the office that would allow employees to interact with each other. While the product came with all the bells and whistles, allowing staff to have their own offices within the virtual space that they could decorate as they saw fit, have one-on-one meetings with anyone who walked into their offices, or congregate in the meeting rooms, it was obviously not enough for the staff member who decided to leave.

That was when Phang realised that physical interaction is important, and the company introduced a “relationship benefit” where a minimum group of four could go out for a meal (the company would sponsor up to RM200 a month, per person).

“Of course, we follow the SOPs [standard operating procedures] but we can’t continue to isolate our employees. The engagement cannot just be between the company and the employees. It has to be between peers as well. That is what we call sustainable engagement.”

He sees the role of the employer as having evolved beyond just supporting employees financially to supporting their physical and mental well-being as well. However, for companies that do not have the budget to do this, Phang points out that simply treating employees like human beings rather than robots, would be a start. 

“You can see that some companies simply want their employees to get back to work, no matter what the risk. And they come up with all these strange policies as a way to cut their employees’ salaries, and want us to use our system to customise these features for them,” he says.

This, naturally, would create negative employer branding but does that matter? Phang admits that companies with bad employer branding can still recruit staff. “But are they the right staff? If someone, knowing that this company has a reputation for not treating its employees properly, joins the company anyway, you need to have a question mark on this person.”

Phang has some personal experiences of employers who wanted to customise onerous features to monitor their staff.

“Every time they asked us to customise these features — for instance, they want to know exactly when the employee clocks in, when they search any website — I asked them, ‘do you have permission from your employees? Because this is a privacy issue.’ And they say, ‘why do I need to bother?’” 

Phang insisted on the employer getting employee permissions before Worksmartly would customise these features. “We have the ISO 27000, which is information security compliance, and we need to ensure data privacy to keep this certification. 

After about three months of increasingly contentious communication, Phang decided to terminate the relationship with this particular client. “In the end I said, why not we just stop this. Please go and find another company that would be more amenable to your requests.”

After witnessing what he considered unfair treatment in the workplace, Phang decided to introduce a series of videos linked to its products, called “HR talk to you” (they are also available on YouTube). 

“For example, you cannot simply terminate a person within 24 hours or any short period of time. You need to follow a process. We educate them on this process.”

Phang started this series because he realised that most employees in Malaysia are not aware of their rights. “I felt this was unfair so, we started to produce a series of videos on YouTube and employed real HR gurus to talk about this stuff.”

Some clients objected. “They got very angry and asked me why I have this kind of programme. But they couldn’t stop me because I was not doing anything wrong. Whatever content we have on these programmes is accurate. We talk, for instance, about the right way of going about a retrenchment and how to handle disciplinary issues.”

Following the pandemic, more companies wanted to digitalise their HR functions, particularly in certain industries, which actually saw a surge in business following the lockdowns. 

“Most of those who came to us were companies who had the budget and were doing well during the pandemic. They were mostly in the supermarket and healthcare industries,” he says.

There were three new services companies requested — a way to have instant access to an employee’s vaccination records to see if they were fully or only partially vaccinated, a mission whiteboard to remind employees of the company’s values and their own KPIs and a way to do digital onboarding during the various lockdowns.

Were there any requests for products that would support their employees’ mental health? “No. The sad thing is that many companies still don’t care about mental health. There was no demand for this application.”

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