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Eugene Loh, CHRO Singapore, tells Sarah Gideon about ENGIE’s approach to rewards across diverse APAC markets – balancing consistency and localisation, strengthening governance and transparency, and more.
Behind every salary, benefit, or allowance lies a complex internal framework that rewards leaders must design and defend — and at the core of that framework is job architecture.
What is job architecture and why is it crucial in an organisation?
Job architecture is the blueprint of an organisation’s workforce. It provides a structured way to organise roles into job families, levels, and functions, and underpins how work is valued and rewarded. A robust job architecture typically includes:
- Clear job families and levels to support consistent evaluation and pay decisions.
- Workforce planning to identify the jobs, skills, and capabilities required now and in the future.
- Flexible role design so jobs can evolve as business needs, technologies, and markets change.
Employees usually only see the end result — a title, a band, or an increase. What they don’t see is the tradeoff thinking behind the scenes:
- How many levels are enough to recognise growth without creating title inflation?
- How do we keep pace with the external market without creating internal inequity?
- How do we design something robust today that will still make sense in three years?
When pay transparency is added to the mix, job architecture becomes even more critical. It becomes a framework that explains and justifies pay outcomes, helping employees understand how compensation decisions are made — not just what they receive.
All of this plays out against a backdrop of accelerating change:
- Rising transparency requirements mean ranges, levels, and pay philosophies are increasingly visible—and must stand up to scrutiny.
- A shift toward skills‑based pay is pushing organisations to reward capabilities and continuous learning, not just static jobs.
- AI‑enabled market data is turning compensation from an annual exercise into an ongoing, data‑driven calibration.
- A multigenerational workforce is raising expectations around flexibility, wellbeing, career growth, and personalised benefits.
These pressures create a constant mental load for rewards leaders: always optimising, defending, and future proofing decisions that can be challenged from multiple directions at once.
In the following case study, we step inside that decision making process at ENGIE, a French multinational electric utility company. While the work in APAC is not labelled as a “job architecture project”, many of the choices around governance, consistency versus localisation, and how roles are rewarded across markets are exactly the kinds of decisions a modern job architecture must support.
Case study: How ENGIE is taking a pragmatic approach in prioritising the rewards that matter
With a workforce spread across the region, ENGIE in APAC faced the challenge of designing rewards programmes that balance consistency across markets with local relevance.
When he joined the company about 18 months ago, Eugene Loh (pictured above), CHRO Singapore, APAC Platform Lead, ENGIE, focused first on understanding how employees experience rewards today. Expectations had moved beyond pay alone, to include security, flexibility, wellbeing, and career progression.
He also needed to address the fact that many employees did not have a clear view of the full value of their total rewards, particularly where benefits are seen as largely statutory.
"Our approach has therefore been deliberate and phased. Rather than rushing into wholesale changes, we are focusing on establishing clear regional principles, strengthening governance, and improving communication, while gradually identifying where local adaptation can add the most value," Loh shares.
The biggest challenge? Navigating complexity while building alignment. ENGIE operates across very different labour markets, cost structures, inflation pressures, and regulatory environments, and supports a wide spectrum of businesses in the region — each with different operating models, talent profiles, skill scarcity, and market dynamics. What is competitive and meaningful for project based or technical roles may not resonate for employees in commercial, operational, or energy trading environments.
At the same time, Loh affirms, there needs to be a balance between maintaining internal equity, regional coherence, and governance.
Uncovering legacy practices and achieving stakeholder alignment also required time. Before moving into redesign, ENGIE focused on building a shared understanding of what "good" looks like. The real challenge was not the reward design itself, but navigating the tradeoffs between competitiveness, affordability, and long-term sustainability.
Securing leadership buy-in
To gain commitment from senior leadership, ENGIE framed rewards not as an HR cost, but as a strategic lever for talent attraction, retention, and business continuity.
Buy-in was therefore secured through:
- Grounding discussions in data
- Market insights
- Realistic framing
- Framing the conversation on rewards around talent risk, critical capabilities, and business continuity.
This pragmatic approach enabled leaders to have a shared understanding of where investment is needed now, and where it can come later.
Of course, with every rollout, comes its challenges. Loh highlights two major ones:
- Perceived fairness across markets – Employees naturally compared benefits, allowances, and pay practices, even when differences are driven by specific business/industry or market norms.
- Cost constraints in low-margin businesses where cost management takes centre stage – Some business units needed to be prioritised as cost management took centre stage.
ENGIE addressed these through transparent communication, stronger governance, and equipping managers with clear, simple messages so they could confidently explain decisions and value propositions to employees.
Measuring ROI
When it came to ROI, and recognising the diversity of APAC markets, Loh shares that ENGIE first focused on strengthening foundational elements such as governance, data quality, consistent metrics, and clearer reward principles, rather than launching large scale, high investment programmes.
“In a diverse APAC environment, jumping straight into hard ROI claims without this groundwork would be misleading.”
Instead, the organisation tracks early indicators of impact, including:
- Employee engagement levels
- Performance culture trends
- Retention of the right talent
- Stability in critical roles
- Employee utilisation of existing rewards and benefits
Reflecting on rewards initiatives that delivered a bigger impact than expected, Loh candidly shares two that exceeded expectations.
The implementation of ENGIE Care, a global initiative, provided employees with a more consistent and meaningful baseline of protection, particularly around healthcare coverage and parental support regardless of local market maturity.
In several markets, this addressed fundamental concerns around security and wellbeing, which in turn strengthened employees’ sense of belonging and confidence in the organisation’s commitment to care.
The other is flexible work arrangements. Beyond supporting work-life balance, flexibility helped reinforce trust between managers and employees, especially in a region where personal and family responsibilities vary significantly by culture and life stage.
As ENGIE looks ahead into the next phase of its rewards strategy, Loh is focused on sharpening priorities, i.e., strengthening pay governance, improving transparency, and continuing to localise within a consistent regional framework.
Alongside his team, he is also exploring how to better utilise data and digital platforms to help employees better understand and engage with their total rewards.
As he highlights, the aim is not to chase trends, but “to ensure our rewards strategy matures in step with ENGIE’s transformation and the needs of a diverse APAC workforce.”
When asked to come up with one bold or unconventional benefit – one with no budget constraints, Loh offers an alternative lens: “I don’t think budget will be the driving factor even if there are no constraints. The focus should be on purpose and impact on business and employees.”
He would like to explore using AI to create rewards as a living system that can be dynamically reconfigured based on employee’s life stage, market volatility, and business transformation phases.
“These should somehow be transparent to employees so that they are empowered to make changes to their rewards within boundaries, of course, and also know what and why their rewards structure is changing.”
ENGIE’s journey shows that reinventing rewards in a region as diverse as APAC requires a balance between consistency and localisation, competitiveness and sustainability, and innovation and pragmatism.
By grounding decisions in employee experience, building strong foundations, and aligning stakeholders, ENGIE is progressively shaping a rewards strategy that is not only relevant today, but adaptable for the future – and aligned with the principles of a modern, resilient job architecture.
READ MORE: Case study: Inside Kerry’s playbook for a real‑life, globally consistent employee experience
Lead image / Provided
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