Butch Clas of Dow Chemical is part of the HRD Asia Hot List 2018
HR director, SEA and ANZ
DOW CHEMICAL
Dow Chemical won the Gold award in the ‘500-plus employees’ category in HRD’s own Employer of Choice Awards in 2017. Butch Clas, who has been working in Singapore for over 10 years, told HRD the award was the culmination of lots of HR work by the HR team at Dow Chemical.
Dow has high-market-growth expectations of Singapore and Southeast Asia, and it will be up to the HR team to support that growth and drive expansion. At the tail end of 2017, Dow Chemical merged with DuPont, and Clas tells HRD about the changes this will entail: some of the business will spin off (agriculture and electronic materials) into new companies, while several new businesses will move across from DuPont. “We’re going to have to manage all of these changes over the next few years while not losing track of our objectives,” Clas says.
Clas is also excited about shifting his HR team away from administration and further into strategy with the launch of a self-service HR tech portal, including mobile phone apps to enable 24/7 transactions, called HR Next Generation. “It means new digital technology that we’re all going to have to embrace, and it’ll change the way we work,” Clas says. “Going digital will help our employees and leaders access information 24/7 via cloud-based computing.”
