The experiment that changed Safeguard Global’s mind
Safeguard Global employs people in dozens of countries, and it has long described itself as remote-first. In 2023, it piloted a four-day week with a group of engineers spread across 26 countries, with every Friday off.
What replaced it was a culture Reynolds describes as “freedom and choice”, in which employees choose the hours and days that suit the work they need to deliver. Four days if the role can be done in four. Five, or four and two half days, if that works better.
The governing idea: define the outcome for every role
Safeguard Global replaced hours with what Reynolds calls “outcome-based measurements”. Each role is measured against 3 outcomes that fit what the role is for. For a customer service representative, HR Brew reported, those might be account growth, customer satisfaction, and points of failure.
Reynolds has also been clear that this asks more of leaders, not less. In his Fortune piece on the experiment, he argued that giving people freedom does not make a leader less demanding, because someone has to define what success looks like for every role. An hours-based culture lets managers avoid that work. An outcome-based one does not.
Why the idea matters more across borders
For a manager in Singapore leading a team in one office, outcome-based management is a good idea. For a manager leading people across 4 countries and 2 time zones, it is close to a necessity.
Outcomes travel across time zones. A support representative’s customer satisfaction score means the same thing in Manila as in Singapore. A sales manager’s pipeline is equally visible from either side of the border.
The part hours-based managers forget: the law still counts hours
There is an important complication, and it is one that a company employing people in several countries meets every day. Measuring outcomes does not change the fact that employment law in most of the region still regulates hours, and in some places it regulates them closely.
Singapore has its own rules. Employees covered by Part IV of the Employment Act have limits on working hours and are entitled to overtime at one and a half times their hourly rate. And since December 2024, the Tripartite Guidelines on Flexible Work Arrangement Requests have required employers to consider employees’ requests for flexible arrangements properly and in good faith.
How to put this into practice
4 steps turn the idea into something a Singaporean company can run.
Take a backend engineer in Ho Chi Minh City. Three outcomes might be the share of sprint commitments delivered on time, the number of defects that reach customers from their code, and how quickly they review colleagues’ work so others are not blocked. None of those says when the engineer should be online. All of them tell the manager in Singapore, within a fortnight, whether the arrangement is working, and each points to a different conversation if it is not.
Check the hours rules in every country where you employ people. Decide who records working time where the law requires it and how overtime is approved and paid. A flexible culture should never mean an unpaid one.
Where an employer of record fits
For Singaporean companies employing people across the region through an employer of record, the division of labour is straightforward. You define the outcomes, manage the work, and build the culture. The employer of record makes sure the employment itself complies with local rules, including working time, overtime, and leave. When an outcome review turns into a harder conversation about performance, the same specialists know how that conversation has to be documented in each country, so the flexibility you offer never becomes a weakness in a later dispute.
The lesson from Safeguard Global’s own experiment is that flexibility and accountability are not opposites. Define the outcome, give people room to deliver it, and make sure the legal floor underneath is solid in every country where your team works.
