Pros
ASEF has a nice garden, a few kind colleagues can be found, and the HR department although limited genuinely tries to support staff and be helpful wherever they can.
Cons
Avoid working in the Digital Transformation, Finance, and Communication Departments unless you are comfortable with a highly stressful, inefficient work culture and hollow “standards” masking incompetence. Communication dept in particular it’s a joke: working here means learning that commas, dots, and endless nitpicking matter more than strategy, expertise, or results. The leadership of this department mistakes micromanagement for “high standards,” creating constant stress and wasting the team’s time with pointless demands. Everything is exaggerated into drama and wrapped in an inflated sense of importance. Staff are treated more like personal assistants than working professionals — expected to drop everything for managerial whims, take on menial tasks, and tolerate late-night scolding messages or arbitrary denial of even short leave requests. Expertise is routinely dismissed, as the department’s management — despite clear incompetence — always believes it knows “better.” Her so-called 'expertise' seems limited to endlessly rewriting paragraphs by hand, while basic tools like copy-paste, ChatGPT, or simple office software appear to be beyond her knowledge. Tasks that should take a few hours often drag on for weeks. Likewise, routine meetings that could be wrapped up in 30–45 minutes regularly stretch into 2-3 hours. Even small mistakes can provoke sarcasm, public scolding, or other forms of disrespectful behaviour. Salaries are already low for Singapore, yet team members are requested to follow a strict on-site schedules (9 a.m.–6 p.m.) with lunch often shortened due to constant made-up work pressure and unnecessary overtime. Unlike in most workplaces where team lunches are common, people here often prefer to eat alone trying to recover from the constant stress. Many also quit within a year. The general office atmosphere is equally unpleasant: most people seem to dislike their work, stay only due to visa constraints or lack of alternatives, and genuine friendships are rare. As other reviews have mentioned, ASEF suffers from a lack of effective leadership and strategic vision — a recurring issue across departments.