Employers are buying AI tools. Their managers are being left behind

Thirty‑seven percent versus eleven percent. Those two figures hidden deep inside Jobstreet – SEEK’s Singapore Workplace Culture Study 2026 – may ultimately explain far more about the region’s productivity struggles than any headline about artificial intelligence or inflation.

The first statistic captures workers who try to control their own pace by silently insulating themselves from workplace pressures: muting group chats, blocking calendars, putting phones face down after dinner. The second tracks how many feel comfortable bringing that pressure directly to their supervisors.

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

In short, Singapore’s workforce is negotiating its available hours alone. The single stakeholder empowered to shift these terms appears absent from the conversation.

The study – which surveyed 600 employees and job seekers together with 200 hiring decision‑makers – delivers a finding already well documented: leaders profess a desire for initiative, while workers demonstrate priority through relentless availability.

Forty‑nine percent of employers list proactive problem‑solving among their top expectations, yet only thirty‑two percent of employees rank it a priority. By contrast, sixty‑three percent of staff rely on rapid reply times and fifty‑two percent count after‑hours responsiveness, behaviours that merely nineteen and thirty‑nine percent of employer leaders consider essential, respectively.

The deeper mystery is why this mismatch persists despite mutual recognition. Eight‑and‑five percent of employers admit their organisations expect staff to remain reachable, and eighty‑one percent of those acknowledge the long‑term hazards, primarily burnout. Across the dataset the problem clusters repeatedly at the same level of the organisational hierarchy: the line manager.

The Signal Nobody Sends

Hybrid work eliminated the most obvious performance proxy ever known – physical presence at the desk. Nothing replaced that metric. In the vacuum that followed, employees gravitated toward whatever was easily visible. A reply received at eleven p.m. is apparent. Three hours spent unraveling a broken process simply is not.

The report labels this phenomenon visibility bias, and leadership functions as key input variables. Among staff operating under perpetual urgency, thirty‑five percent blame explicit managerial or leadership pressure, mirroring forty‑one percent of employers who point to senior leadership in the same direction. And forty‑six percent of respondents on both sides describe constant availability as an unwritten cultural norm.

“Unwritten” frames the issue precisely because nobody ever formally instructs staff to answer at midnight – nor tells them to stop. In workplaces across Southeast Asia where hierarchical dynamics determine who contributes first in meetings, asking a supervisor whether a message truly requires attention tonight can border on insubordination. Consequently, people do not ask, and the figure drops to eleven percent.

The Youngest Are Paying the Most

The strain is not distributed uniformly. Thirty‑four percent of workers aged twenty‑five to thirty‑four encounter frequent always‑on pressure, and a substantial portion attributes much of it to self‑imposed tightness – thirty‑three percent of this cohort highlight self‑generated pressure, compared with twenty‑one percent of those aged thirty‑five to forty‑four and sixteen percent of the forty‑five to fifty‑four demographic. Career progression anxieties follow a parallel curve, with thirty‑five percent among early‑career staff versus twenty‑seven percent of the oldest surveyed responding.

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Older employees feel pressure similarly often – sixty‑two percent for ages thirty‑five to forty‑four, and sixty‑one percent for the forty‑five to fifty‑four bracket – though for distinct causes: structural workload and embedded culture rather than personal risk. Broadly, the trend reads as the junior team thriving while the middle ranks shoulder the burdens.

The troubling paradox is that heightened performance yields no advancement benefit. Sixty‑two percent of workers claim their constant‑availability habits have not advanced their careers, and just six percent view such behaviour as the primary route to success. Young staff continue the practice, revealing less irrationality than the absence of a clear alternative signal. For firms reconsidering early‑career recruitment for a remote era, this silence constitutes a design fault, not a personal limitation.

Support That Never Reaches the Desk

When organisations brag about tools they provide, the reality on the ground often diverges sharply. Half of employees report receiving no support to manage workplace pressure, whereas only twenty‑two percent of employers admit they offer none. Requests for workload discussion surface in forty percent of employer communications yet become familiar to just twenty‑two percent of staff. Protective boundary measures display a thirty‑six to nineteen percentage swing, and confidential feedback pathways split likewise at thirty‑three to thirteen percent.

A striking pattern emerges: nearly every programme of this nature hinges on a manager initiating dialogue, honoring boundaries, or acting on feedback. Yet manager development occupies near the base of employer budgets at twelve percent, alongside workload‑management improvements at thirteen percent. In stark contrast, AI and digital skill upskilling rise to thirty‑four percent and technology tools to twenty‑five percent, respectively.

AI Could Widen the Gap

This resource allocation order introduces genuine risk. Given that twenty‑four percent of employers are reshaping towards leaner teams and forty percent already recognise workloads cannot be completed within standard hours, layering faster AI‑driven workflows onto existing structures without equipping managers to rationalise capacity would likely produce more tasks rapidly delivered – not fewer late‑night messages.

One contributor observed that AI might transform what becomes manageable, yet it does not eliminate the need for management itself. Paradoxically, the technology may expose deficient leadership faster than any traditional engagement survey.

What a Useful Manager Would Do

The report offers sound guidance, albeit slightly consultancy‑heavy. Remove response‑speed and digital‑status indicators from performance appraisals. Explicitly record what truly qualifies as urgent. Conduct weekly capacity reviews where managers and teams co‑decide priorities, delays, and complete stoppages. The document also provides a phrasing guide enabling employees to articulate their priorities and pre‑agree offline hours.

The critical vulnerability lies in authority. A “stop” list functions solely when the assigned manager possesses actual power to halt initiatives. Numerous middle managers in lean regional startups simultaneously wrestle with founding‑team growth pursuits and team floods of status updates; the competencies demanded by rigorous monitoring environments seldom match their promotion foundation. Thus, prescribed actions remain impotent against entrenched organisational constraints.

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

Standard disclaimers apply: the investigation draws from a singular Singapore sample, relies on self‑reported employer responses, and originates from a talent marketplace where restlessness among workers strengthens the business case. Nevertheless, an impressive fifty‑five percent of employees and forty‑five percent of employers concur that both parties share responsibility for the always‑on culture, which at minimum furnishes a footholder.

For founders, neglecting this tension proves costly: thirty‑six percent of staff are already exploring new roles, and retaining talent has proven more challenging than acquiring it. The disparity between the seven‑percent and eleven‑percent figures collapses to a single conversation – one senior leader must initiate this dialogue.

The piece originally published under “Employers are buying AI tools. Their managers are being left behind.” subsequently carried on e27.

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