Malaysia’s digital economy ambitions continue to accelerate as it positions itself as a regional hub for artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, and hyperscale digital infrastructure. At the same time, workplace is undergoing a major transformation. While Malaysia has introduced one of Southeast Asia’s clearest legislative frameworks for flexible work under the Employment Act amendments of 2022, implementation across organisations remains uneven.
Hybrid work adoption remains relatively limited across industries amidst concerns about employee well-being, trust, and workplace communication. This disconnect has become increasingly significant especially in Malaysia’s technology sector, where talent shortages remain acute and employee expectations are evolving rapidly. The challenge is no longer about whether flexible work is legally permitted, but whether organisations are culturally and operationally prepared to support it effectively.
Tsubasa Nakazawa, Managing Director of Kintone Southeast Asia, shares his perspectives with BizTech Times (BT) on Malaysia’s evolving workplace culture, the realities behind return-to-office mandates, psychological safety at work, and leadership behaviours that may quietly undermine organisational trust and flexibility.
BT : As Malaysia positions itself as Southeast Asia’s AI hub and rapidly attracts hyperscale investments, how do you see the country’s leadership and workplace culture evolving to ensure that talent not only builds, but also remains within this growing digital infrastructure?
Malaysia’s digital ambitions are at an important inflection point. The country has made strong progress in attracting investment, building infrastructure, and positioning itself as a serious regional player in AI and cloud technology. But the next stage of competitiveness will not be determined by infrastructure alone. It will depend on whether organisations can build workplace cultures where people are trusted to innovate, not just trained to operate new systems.
This is where leadership needs to evolve. In many organisations, digital transformation is still treated as a technology project led from the top. But the real value often emerges from the people closest to the work such as the operations teams, sales teams, HR teams, factory supervisors, and service staff who understand where processes are slow, fragmented, or overly manual.
We believe Malaysia’s digital future must be more participatory. If transformation only sits with IT teams or senior management, progress will always be limited by bottlenecks. But when employees are given autonomy, visibility, and accessible tools, they become active contributors to innovation.
For example, a staff member who handles customer requests every day may be the best person to identify where response times are delayed. A logistics coordinator may know exactly where tracking breaks down. A HR executive may understand why approvals take too long. The leadership challenge is to create an environment where these people can act on those insights.
To retain digital talent, Malaysian organisations need to offer more than salaries or prestige. They need to offer ownership, purpose, and room to build. Talent stays when people feel their ideas can influence how the business works.
BT : Malaysia has one of the clearest legislative frameworks for flexible work – Employment Act amendments of 2022. What are some of the key features of the legislative amendments that empower flexible work arrangements? Why do you think Malaysian workers are hesitant to use them?
The Employment Act amendments gave employees a clearer legal route to request flexible working arrangements, including changes to working hours, working days, or place of work. This is an important foundation because it formally recognises that work does not have to follow a single fixed model.
However, legislation alone does not create psychological safety. A worker may have the right to request flexibility, but still hesitate if they believe the request could affect how their commitment is perceived. This is especially important in cultures where hierarchy, visibility, and face-time still influence workplace norms. Employees may ask themselves: Will my manager think I am less serious? Will I be passed over for promotion? Will my colleagues think I am getting special treatment?
That gap between legal permission and cultural confidence is where leaders need to focus. Flexible work only becomes real when employees feel safe using it.
From our perspective, the problem is not just whether flexibility is allowed. The deeper question is whether the organisation has built enough trust, transparency, and workflow clarity for flexibility to function fairly. When work is visible through shared systems and outcomes are clearly defined, flexibility becomes less dependent on manager perception.
BT : What are some of the major drawbacks of mandating RTO?
Return-to-office (RTO) mandates often reflect a deeper challenge: the difficulty of managing work without relying on physical presence. While offices continue to play an important role, mandating attendance without redefining purpose can create several unintended consequences.
One of the most immediate drawbacks is the reintroduction of presenteeism. Employees may prioritise being seen in the office over producing meaningful outcomes. This can lead to longer hours, more meetings, and less focused work, all of which reduce overall productivity.
There is also a mismatch between how work is structured today and how offices are being used. In many organisations, employees return to the office only to spend most of their time on virtual calls with colleagues in different locations. In such cases, the office adds little value while increasing fatigue.
Another concern is retention. Employees who have experienced flexibility and demonstrated that they can perform effectively, may view rigid mandates as a step backward. This is particularly relevant for knowledge workers and younger professionals who place a high value on autonomy and work-life integration.
From Kintone’s standpoint, the question is not whether offices should exist, but how they should be used. Offices are most valuable when they are designed for collaboration, mentoring, onboarding, and relationship-building. They are less effective as default workspaces for tasks that require deep focus or independent execution.
The risk with blanket mandates is that they prioritise uniformity over effectiveness. A more nuanced approach recognises that different types of work require different environments.
BT : What does a workplace where flexibility actually functions look like — and what should leaders (in Malaysia) do differently?
A workplace where flexibility functions well is typically characterised by clarity, consistency, and transparency.
Flexibility is often misunderstood as a reduction in structure. In reality, it requires stronger systems and clearer expectations than traditional models. In high-functioning flexible environments, work is organised around outcomes rather than activity. Employees understand what they are responsible for, how their work contributes to broader goals, and how progress is tracked.
Another defining feature is information accessibility. When data, decisions, and processes are centralised, employees can work independently without being blocked by missing information. This is particularly important in Malaysian SMEs, where reliance on spreadsheets, emails, and personal drives can create silos.
Flexibility also depends on communication discipline. Teams need to agree on how and when they communicate whether through structured updates, asynchronous channels, or scheduled check-ins, rather than defaulting to constant availability.
Indeed, leaders play a critical role in setting these norms. Instead of monitoring activity, they need to design systems that make work visible and manageable. This includes reducing unnecessary approvals, clarifying decision rights, and ensuring that tools support collaboration rather than complicate it. We believe that organisations that succeed with flexibility are those that treat it as a design challenge. They actively rethink workflows, not just policies.
BT : Are there any statistics to suggest there may be confidence issues for managers on flexible work arrangements, especially in Malaysia?
While there may not be one definitive Malaysia-specific figure that directly measures manager confidence in flexible work, recent data gives us a useful read on where leaders may still feel uncertain.
Aon’s 2025 Malaysia findings show that 81% of employers and 77% of employees agree flexible work improves work-life balance, yet 73% of employers remain concerned about collaboration among teams. That contrast is important. It suggests that many leaders are not rejecting flexibility itself; they are still working through how to sustain teamwork, visibility and culture when work is less tied to a physical office.
It is also reported that more than 5,340 organisations in Malaysia have implemented flexible work arrangements since 2021, benefiting over 1.6 million employees. This shows flexibility is becoming mainstream in Malaysia, but adoption alone does not mean organisations have fully adapted their management practices.
From our perspective, this points to a leadership capability gap rather than a simple trust issue. Many managers were trained in environments where visibility was physical: they could see who was at their desk, who stayed late, and who seemed responsive. In flexible work settings, those signals become less reliable. Without better systems, managers may fall back on frequent check-ins, instant-reply expectations, or a preference for office presence.
The more sustainable answer is to make work visible without making employees feel watched. That means clearer performance metrics, shared workflows, transparent project ownership and communication systems that help managers understand progress without constant oversight.
BT : Explain how organisations identify and address the leadership behaviours that could be quietly undermining their own teams?
The most damaging leadership behaviours are often not obvious acts of poor management. They are usually everyday habits that were once seen as responsible: asking for constant updates, requiring multiple approvals, stepping into every decision, or rewarding the people who are most visible rather than most effective.
Over time, these habits create a quiet drag on the organisation. Employees stop taking initiative because decisions always move upward. Managers become bottlenecks because teams wait for permission. Work becomes slower, not because people lack capability, but because the system teaches them not to act independently.
The first step is to look at workflow friction, not just employee sentiment. If decisions take too long, if teams duplicate updates across emails and chats, if employees rely on informal workarounds, or if people stop raising ideas, those are signs that leadership behaviour may be suppressing ownership.
This is where many organisations misunderstand productivity. The issue is not always whether employees are working hard; it is whether the organisation has created a system where good work can move quickly.
To address this, leaders need to redesign how authority and information flow. That means clarifying which decisions teams can make independently, reducing unnecessary approval layers, and making work visible enough that managers can support without micromanaging.
At the end of the day, the best leaders are not the ones closest to every task. They are the ones who build systems where teams can move with clarity, confidence, and accountability.
BT : What key strategies does Kintone Southeast Asia advocate to address the above problem and empower flexibility in workplace in Malaysia?
Our view is that flexibility should not begin with the question, “Where should people work?” It should begin with, “How well does work move?”
A company can allow hybrid work and still be inflexible if approvals are slow, information is scattered, and employees have little authority to improve processes. Likewise, an office-based company can still be flexible if teams have autonomy, clarity, and the ability to solve problems quickly.
For Malaysian organisations, especially SMEs and traditional businesses, the priority should be to build flexibility into operations, not just HR policy. That means starting with the everyday pain points: approval delays, manual reporting, duplicated data entry, unclear handovers, and information stuck in individual inboxes or spreadsheets. These are the hidden barriers that make flexible work difficult.
We advocate a practical, people-centred approach: make workflows visible, give teams ownership over improvements, and use digital tools to reduce friction rather than add complexity. The larger shift is from digital adoption to digital participation. Employees should not only be users of technology; they should be contributors to how work is improved. When frontline teams can identify problems and help shape solutions, flexibility becomes more than a benefit. It becomes part of how the organisation learns and adapts.
For Malaysia as a whole, this matters because the country’s digital ambitions will require workplaces that are not only modern in infrastructure, but also modern in culture. The organisations that succeed will be those that trust people closest to the work to help redesign it.