Chief Human Resources Officer / Singapore / Southeast Asia
Three decisions that cost revenue, margin or earnings
- Revenue in 2025
- S$468m
- Parcel services in Singapore and Peninsular Malaysia
- Employees at June 2026
- 5,300
- Plus about 2,700 contracted riders each month
- Sortation hubs
- 11
- Four in Singapore, seven in Malaysia
Decisions & consequences
01Paying for platform protections directly instead of moving riders to agencies
When Singapore's platform-worker law took effect in January 2025, about 1,150 riders took work through our app each month, and we had to decide who would carry the new obligations. The law required platform operators to provide work-injury compensation, to make Central Provident Fund contributions that phase in over several years and are compulsory for younger workers, and to deal with associations formed to represent platform workers. Around 600 of our riders worked more than thirty hours a week.
In mid-2024 our Singapore general manager and chief financial officer proposed moving riders onto contracts with three fleet agencies, which would sell delivery capacity back to us at a fixed price per parcel. I opposed it. Our counsel's view was that the duties would most likely follow whoever allocated work through the app, so the change would add a layer without removing our responsibility. I was also concerned that we would lose direct contact with riders on safety, suspension appeals and pay disputes just as the law asked for more of it.
The chief executive accepted my recommendation on one condition: the per-parcel rate paid to riders could not be cut to fund it. We absorbed about S$2.4 million in 2025, and the figure rises as contributions phase in. To pay for part of it we cancelled a planned weekend incentive scheme, which riders noticed and resented.
We rewrote the rider contract, explained each deduction in English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil, and set up a claims desk with our insurer. Active riders fell by 7% in the first quarter, mostly those who worked occasional weekends, and recovered by September. We handled 46 injury claims in 2025 and settled 39 within ninety days. Quarterly meetings with the riders' association began that year.
The lasting change is that we hold hours, earnings and injury data for every rider, information an agency would have kept. I would do one thing differently: ask riders about the weekend scheme before cancelling it rather than explain it afterwards.
Withdrawing the two-hour product from the hottest hours
In April 2024 one of our van drivers collapsed with heat exhaustion while unloading at an industrial estate in western Singapore in the middle of the afternoon. He recovered after hospital treatment. Our review found that his route that day contained fourteen two-hour express drops for a marketplace customer, each carrying a lateness charge. Riders on the same product were paid per drop and lost S$0.40 for every delivery outside the window. Over the previous year, rider road injuries had risen from 2.6 to 3.3 per million drops.
Singapore's Ministry of Manpower already expected employers to manage heat stress through rest, shade, water and monitoring for outdoor work. Our policy met those expectations on paper but left untouched the product that set the pace.
I proposed withdrawing the two-hour product between 1pm and 4pm, offering a same-day window instead, and removing lateness deductions from rider pay altogether. Our commercial director disagreed strongly: the customer valued afternoon express slots and could buy them elsewhere. The chief operating officer supported the change on safety grounds but wanted evidence first. We ran a six-week trial at two hubs and made the full change in July 2024.
The customer moved part of its afternoon volume to another carrier, costing about S$1.3 million of annual revenue. We built shaded cooling points at four hubs, sent heat alerts through the app and let drivers pause a route for twenty minutes at high readings without the timer counting against them.
Reported heat illness among drivers and riders fell from nine cases in the hot months of 2024 to two in 2025. Rider road injuries fell to 2.4 per million drops, although routing also changed that year, so I do not credit the pay change with all of it. Commercial proposals now carry a pace review signed by operations and HR. Next time I would extend the heat review to the hubs at the outset; two Malaysian sortation floors proved hotter than some delivery routes.
Capping peak overtime at Shah Alam when the workers wanted the hours
In the November 2023 peak, the 610 sorters at our Shah Alam hub averaged 131 hours of overtime a month, above the 104-hour monthly limit in Malaysian employment regulations. The hub, our largest, sorts about 140,000 parcels a day. Of those sorters, 470 were foreign workers from Nepal, Bangladesh and Indonesia living in two company hostels. Fatigue-related near misses at the belts rose during the same weeks, and two electronics customers had begun auditing working hours in their logistics suppliers.
I recommended capping overtime at 96 hours a month, adding a shorter third night shift staffed partly by local part-timers and protecting one rest day each week. The hub manager argued that the extra shift would cost more and that inexperienced part-timers would slow the belts. The strongest objection came from the workers themselves. At three hostel meetings their representatives told us that overtime was the reason they had come. Many were repaying debts at home and supporting families; a cap would cut their income.
We did not pretend otherwise. We raised base pay for every sorter by RM180 a month, introduced a peak attendance allowance and funded 140 part-time places. The added cost in 2024 was about RM2.9 million, which the chief executive approved against the hub manager's objection.
In the November 2024 peak, average overtime was 96 hours. Near misses at the belts fell from 31 to 12 compared with the previous peak, and throughput dipped by about 4% in the first fortnight before recovering. Average monthly earnings for the foreign sorters still fell by roughly 6%. Eleven chose not to renew their contracts, and their exit interviews named earnings as the reason.
Peak planning at every hub now starts from a rest model rather than a volume forecast, and customer audits of our hours have passed since. What I would change is the process. We presented the allowance as a finished answer at the hostel meetings; the workers' representatives should have helped design it.