BrazilErnst & Young named on Great Place to Work list as a top employer in Asia
Workplace research and consultancy Great Place to Work has named professional services firm Ernst & Young as one of the top 25 employers in Asia.
While perhaps of little comfort to the millions of people in the region being stood down from work at present and facing the threat of ongoing unemployment, HR research consultancy Great Place to Work has named its Best Workplaces in Asia for 2020 – with professional services firm Ernst & Young making the list. Still, things are also looking a little brighter for workers in Singapore at least, following significant support in the government’s recent Resilience Budget.
Placing at 20th on the latest rankings, EY is a consistent performer as to workforce culture both regionally and elsewhere in the world, despite some notable hiccups. In similar recent rankings, the firm led other consultancies on Universum’s most attractive employers list released toward the end of last year, finishing second overall behind Google, with Chinese, South Korean and Japanese among the 245,000 business and engineering/IT students surveyed around the world.
Published in February, Fortune’s best places to work list for the US market (where many of Asia’s business graduates hope to land a lucrative job) also had EY out ahead of its fellow consulting firms in 25th place overall, although the firm failed to make the most recent compilation from consumer platform Glassdoor. Meanwhile, no consulting firms featured in the top ten of Glassoor’s inaugural Singapore edition, which was also topped by Google.
The latest list of 25 companies compiled by Great Place to Work, which requires prior certification, saw DHL Express atop of the multinational category for Asia, followed by Hilton and enterprise resource planning giant SAP. Information technology firms mostly dominated the list, with Salesforce, Cisco, Adobe, Kronos, SAS and HP also among those making an appearance. Ernst & Young was the only professional services classified firm on the list.
Like other enterprises however, the firm has had to take swift action to protect its talent base in the face of the global coronavirus outbreak and measures initiated in countries around the world to contain the spread of the pandemic, with one early analysis suggesting $30 billion could by wiped off the books of the global consulting industry in 2020, or nearly 20 percent. For those employed in Singapore, that effort has been aided by the government’s recent response packages.
As part of the supplementary Solidarity Budget announced this week, which followed the previous S$48 billion support and stimulus package (widely praised by EY leaders in Asia), the government co-funded Jobs Support Scheme was raised to 75 percent of the first $4,600 of gross monthly wages per local employees for businesses in a number of the hardest hit sectors, with payments brought forward to April and flow through the employers to aid with cash-flow.
“The Solidarity Budget is a swift, decisive and thoughtful response to the escalation of the COVID-19 outbreak and the institution of a workplace closure circuit breaker,” said Max Loh, EY Managing Partner for Singapore and Brunei. “It not only supports businesses, workers and individuals in addressing their financial challenges but also their socio-emotional wellbeing, which is vital to building our collective resilience and unity as a community and country."
