中文标题待翻译

Thirty-seven per cent. Eleven per cent. Those two numbers, tucked deep inside Jobstreet by SEEK’s Singapore Workplace Culture Study 2026, may say more about the region’s productivity problem than any headline about AI or inflation.

The first is the share of employees who try to manage workplace pressure by quietly drawing their own boundaries: muting the group chat, blocking the calendar, putting the phone face down after dinner. The second is the share who feel comfortable raising that pressure with their manager.

Also Read: SEA’s CEOs want innovation, but employees feel stuck in execution mode

In other words, Singapore’s workers are negotiating their working hours with themselves. The one person who could actually change the terms is rarely part of the conversation.

The study, which polled 600 employees and jobseekers and 200 hiring decision-makers, has a headline finding that is already well documented: bosses say they want initiative, workers try to prove themselves through availability.

Some 49 per cent of employers rank proactive problem-solving as their top expectation, yet only 32 per cent of employees prioritise it. Meanwhile, 63 per cent of employees lean on rapid replies and 52 per cent on after-hours availability, behaviours just 39 per cent and 18 per cent of employers respectively expect.

The harder question is why the mismatch survives when both sides can see it. Some 85 per cent of employers concede their organisations expect staff to stay reachable, and 81 per cent of those acknowledge the long-term risks, chiefly burnout. Read across the data, the answer keeps landing on the same layer of the org chart: the line manager.

The signal nobody sends

Hybrid work removed the oldest, crudest performance metric of all: being seen at your desk. Nothing replaced it. In that vacuum, employees reach for what is legible. A reply at 11pm is visible. Three hours spent untangling a broken process is not.

The report calls this visibility bias, and leadership is part of the feedback loop. Among employees under always-on pressure, 35 per cent blame explicit manager or leadership expectations, a view echoed by 41 per cent of employers who point at senior leadership. And 46 per cent on both sides describe constant availability as an unwritten cultural baseline.

“Unwritten” is the operative word. Nobody instructs staff to answer at midnight. Nobody tells them not to, either. In workplaces across Southeast Asia, where hierarchy still shapes who speaks first in a meeting, asking a boss whether a message really needs an answer tonight can feel uncomfortably close to insubordination. So people don’t ask, and the 11 per cent figure starts to make sense.

The youngest are paying the most

The burden is not evenly spread. Some 64 per cent of workers aged 25 to 34 face frequent always-on pressure, and much of it is self-generated: 33 per cent of this cohort cite self-imposed pressure, compared with 21 per cent of those aged 35 to 44 and 16 per cent of those aged 45 to 54. Career-progression anxiety follows the same curve, at 35 per cent for early-career workers against 27 per cent for the oldest group surveyed.

Also Read: Gen Z isn’t hard to manage, you just need to rethink how you lead

Older employees feel the pressure almost as often (62 per cent for ages 35 to 44, 61 per cent for 45 to 54) but for different reasons: structural workload and embedded culture rather than fear. Put crudely, the young are performing, while the middle-aged are carrying.

The cruel part is that the performance does not pay. Some 62 per cent of employees say always-on behaviour has had no impact on their career progression, and only 6 per cent believe it is how people actually get ahead. Young workers keep doing it anyway, which is less a sign of irrationality than of the absence of any clearer signal. For companies still rethinking early-career hiring for a remote world, that silence is a design flaw, not a personality trait.

Support that never reaches the desk

Employers will argue they have tools in place. The data suggests those tools rarely survive the journey from the HR handbook to the individual worker. Half of employees say they receive no support to manage workplace pressure, while only 22 per cent of employers believe they offer none. Workload conversations are offered by 40 per cent of employers but experienced by 22 per cent of employees. Boundary protections show a 36 per cent to 19 per cent split, and confidential feedback channels a 33 per cent to 13 per cent split.

Notice what those programmes have in common. Almost every one of them depends on a manager to start the conversation, honour the boundary or act on the feedback. Yet manager development sits near the bottom of employers’ investment plans at 12 per cent, alongside workload-management improvements at 13 per cent. AI and digital skills (34 per cent) and technology tools (25 per cent) lead the list.

AI could widen the gap

That ordering carries a real risk. Some 24 per cent of employers are restructuring towards leaner teams, and 40 per cent already admit workloads cannot be finished within standard hours. Layer faster AI-driven workflows on top, without teaching managers to ration capacity, and the likely result is more tasks arriving more quickly, not fewer late-night messages.

As one contributor recently argued, AI will change what work has to be managed; it does not remove the need to manage it. If anything, it may expose weak leadership faster than any engagement survey.

What a useful manager would do

The report’s prescriptions are sensible, if a little consultancy-tidy. Strip response speed and digital status indicators out of appraisals. Write down what genuinely counts as urgent. Run weekly capacity reviews in which managers and teams agree what to prioritise, what to delay and what to stop altogether. It even supplies a script for employees to propose their priorities and agree offline hours in advance.

The weak spot is authority. A “stop” list only works if the manager drawing it up is allowed to stop anything. Many middle managers in lean regional startups are themselves squeezed between founders chasing growth and teams drowning in status updates, and the skills a monitored workplace demands are rarely the ones they were promoted for.

Also Read: AI can increase productivity. It can’t increase human capacity

The usual caveats apply. This is a Singapore-only sample, employer responses are self-reported, and a jobs platform benefits when workers feel restless. Still, 55 per cent of employees and 45 per cent of employers agree that both sides share responsibility for always-on culture, which at least gives them a starting point.

For founders, the cost of ignoring it is measurable: 36 per cent of employees are already exploring other jobs, and across the region keeping good people is proving harder than hiring them. The gap between 37 per cent and 11 per cent is, in the end, just one conversation. Someone senior needs to be the one who starts it.

The post Employers are buying AI tools. Their managers are being left behind appeared first on e27.