Large companies across Asia are increasingly investing in human resources – attracting and keeping the best human capital as well as training them for business opportunities which they might face when the economy is more upbeat.

In a recent Hewitt Associates study of 912 companies and 180,000 employees in eight markets, including Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea, India, Hong Kong, China and Australia/New Zealand, the company found that the top 25 companies across Asia were investing heavily in their employees especially during the downturn.

“This is the time to build capacity for the future, so that we come out well-tempered rather than brittle after this period in the furnace,” Visty Banaji, head of corporate affairs for Mumbai-based Godrej, told the Wall Street Journal. Godrej boosted its budget for training and human resources by 8 percent for the year ending March 2010. 11 of Hewitt’s top 25 Asian companies were Indian.

In Asia where an employee is important and a majority of the work is still reliant on manual labor, employers are looking at cementing relationships with employees better during the crisis by not slicing jobs or salaries as radically as in the west. As a result, according to Hewitt, companies across Asia are also investing heavily in training employees for future expanded job roles. The best employers average around 132 hours of training per year and companies spend approximately 50 percent of their of their training budget on management training, the rest of the companies surveyed spend just 38 percent.