Many leading brands, like Google, Grab and Facebook, have been featured for their successes in injecting a start-up culture to make work a fun and enjoyable place for employees. Others have since tried to emulate their successes by re-designing work spaces and offering benefits like free food, office games, paid outings and chilling areas. In fact, a recent study by Sage revealed that 40% of business owners believe that such benefits are important to employees.

With almost half of the local population thinking about leaving their current jobs within the next year, it is time for us to evaluate how effective we have been in engaging our own employees. After all, if people are spending 50% of their waking time at work, then a department dedicated to ensuring people are happy and productive at work should be taking a prominent place in the organization. The next question would then be: how can your HR team be genuinely human-centric and focus on taking care of real people needs. Or has some become ‘transaction’ processing machines? How can HR get out of this quandary?