Are flexible working arrangements really a disaster for employers?

A female preschool teacher – a position for which there is a worldwide shortage – loves her job, but has young children who need her to be around more during critical schooling years. She would prefer working three days a week, but her employer does not provide that option.

Another woman is a single, high-flying executive. Her father has been diagnosed with cancer and needs her to accompany him for doctors’ visits and treatment.

Must these women, whose stories epitomise thousands of others, choose between job and family?

Putting careers on hold or giving them up altogether is a reality for some caregivers – predominantly women – who are unable to balance the demands made of them professionally and personally.

An estimated 261,700 women in Singapore aged between 25 and 64 are unemployed, and the 2023 Labour Force Report revealed that the top reasons are housework and caring for children.

This should matter to us all. Gender equality issues aside, there is an economic cost. A 2015 McKinsey study estimated that if women participated in the economy identically to men, this would add US$28 trillion to global gross domestic product by 2025.

In Singapore, the latest National Business Survey identified both the availability and retention of manpower as top challenges for businesses.

Are Singapore’s upcoming tripartite guidelines on flexible work arrangements the answer?

The ability to flex

Employees want flexibility. The Pew Research Centre found that not having enough flexibility was one of the top reasons for the Great Resignation – a trend of quitting observed during the pandemic.

A 2023 survey by jobs portal Indeed found that 85 per cent of workers in Singapore desired flexibility at work.

The pandemic forced the world to work from home. Some employers, including bulge bracket banks such as JPMorgan, have since required staff to return to on-site work.

The battle is not between work-from-home militant workers and control-freak employers, though.

Flexibility is much more than that. It encompasses nuanced adjustments in working times, location or workload, and could take the form of telecommuting, part-time work, job-sharing or staggered work hours, or any combination of these.

Ultimately, flexibility allows work arrangements to be tailored for both businesses and employees. Flexible work arrangements may therefore be the key to opening up job possibilities previously inaccessible to some employees.

For women who bear the burden of housework and childcare, flexible work arrangements would let them return to the workforce at a pace, time and location that suits their schedules.

This is not a pro-employee pitch. In Singapore, 83 per cent of companies reported talent shortages and difficulties in hiring.

Employers complain that business costs are growing faster than profits, which is especially painful in the current higher-interest-rate environment.

If we cannot hire and retain locally, Singapore will need to look abroad for manpower. This brings a slew of other socioeconomic challenges, with Singapore trying to balance its core identity while continuing to be an open and global city.

The question is not whether we should have flexible work arrangements, but how.

Flexibility can make employers nervous. Ensuring workforce productivity, fostering collaboration and learning, and building work culture are just some headline concerns.

They also pose a risk for employees, who worry about being overlooked for promotions and not receiving appropriate training and guidance.

The tripartite guidelines to be released later this year will require employers to fairly and reasonably consider requests for flexible working arrangements.

While lacking strong legislative teeth, they are a clear signal that such arrangements are going to be a permanent feature in the Singapore business landscape.

Apart from the possible sanctions that might be imposed for flouting the guidelines, businesses that want to stay competitive – and being able to attract talent must surely be integral to this – would do well to implement them, or risk losing out to competitors.

Making flexible work arrangements work

If Singapore businesses are going to make flexible working arrangements work, a few things must happen.

Each company will first need to decide and communicate what arrangements they can accommodate.

Big organisations have the advantage of a large headcount and could allow part-time work requests and job sharing among employees. Smaller businesses may need to sign up for a programme where employers deploy from a pool of shared workers with the relevant capabilities but who want to work at different times.

Managers who could previously supervise employees on site will need to develop new models for assessing productivity. This would allow them to evaluate whether the flexible working arrangements they implemented make economic sense, and provide clear indicators of how performance is assessed and promotions decided.

These new structures should be communicated to employees, and regular performance reviews should include a discussion on what is working and what is not.

Implemented correctly, flexible working arrangements have the potential to help businesses reach a wider talent pool by creating roles that are more varied in scope and time.

Such arrangements also help with talent retention, as flexibility at work has been consistently deemed important by millennials and Gen Z-ers in surveys.

Companies, which may not have considered the hidden costs of having to source and train a revolving door of new hires, would save money by having a more stable workforce. Happier workers have also been shown to lead to better overall productivity.

More broadly, normalising flexible working arrangements could reduce the gender gap at work.

Women who bear the brunt of home responsibilities would be able to rejoin or stay in the workforce. Men could use the flexibility to take on more caregiving duties. Together, this would allow families to split their caregiving roles in ways that work for them.

The implementation of flexible working arrangements will not be simple. Employers will be looking at difficult conversations, some impractical requests and organisation-wide mindset shifts before they find a working equilibrium.

Employees will have to recalibrate their expectations on promotions and pay. Even where flexibility requests are readily acceded to, they will have to make more of an effort to have their contributions seen and valued.

Flexibility at work may therefore bring more pain in the short term. As a country with no natural resources beyond human capital, however, this is a problem Singapore businesses cannot afford not to address.

Stefanie Yuen Thio is joint managing director at TSMP Law Corp, and Elizabeth Tan is associate director

Source: Business Times © SPH Media Limited. Permission required for reproduction.

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