Essay Draft

Globalization can be defined as the increasing cross-border interaction and integration of various aspects of human activities. Due to this increase in interaction and integration, many activities do not exist in isolation. Activities in one part of the world have to keep in pace with activities in other parts of the world, moreover with the constantly improving technology, human activities are getting more efficient and effective. No country’s economy can escape this effect of globalization, including Singapore. Many of the services in Singapore have to provide round the clock service 7 days a week, businesses in Singapore are affected by of another time zone events in another country (MOM, 2005), all these are part of the many reasons why working Singaporeans are experiencing a loss of work-life balance. There are measures put in place by Singapore government to mitigate the loss of work-life balance in working Singaporeans. To improve the effectiveness of such measures, Singapore’s government should focus to meet the manpower needs of employers and clear communication between employers and employees is essential to ensure that measures for improving work-life balance are not abused.

The government has put in much effort to promote work-life balance in the workplace by setting up the tripartite committee of Ministry of Manpower (MOM), National Trade Union Congress (NTUC) and Singapore National Employers Federation (SNEF) in the year 2000. The tripartite is responsible for setting up the Work-Life Strategy. Under the Work-Life Strategy schemes such as Flexible Work Arrangements (FWA) and Family Care Leave to promote work-life balance. Although there were success cases of use of FWA to promote work-life balance such as Kleen-Pak Products Pte Ltd and Singapore General Hospital (MOM, 2013), but these cases are rare and few. In actual fact, many employers are unsupportive of flexible work arrangements, based on a news report on Channel 5 news in March 2013, 7 in 10 employers are unsupportive of flexible work arrangements. Many employers are thus just paying lip service to the FWA schemes.

The lack of support from employers towards the FWA consist of many reasons such as problems in scheduling meeting with workers due to different work timings, increase in cost to train more people for a particular job, there is also a need to employ more people for a particular position increasing operation cost (MOM, 2001). These are just some of the many problems experienced by employers when they consider adopting FWA for employees. The cost of practicing FWA in the workplace is not a main problem as Singapore’s government encourages the adoption of FWA through monetary benefits such as the Developmental Grant and FWA Incentive.

The underlying problems is that employers have difficulty trusting employees to maintain work competency if they spend lesser time in the office also some employers are afraid that employees may abuse the FWA system (Yeo, 2012). It is thus of paramount importance that employers and employees reach a common agreement before practicing FWA, such as setting the priority that a certain quota of work have to be met every week. Employers should also communicate clearly to the employees during the discussion process that regardless of whether employees are on FWA or not, they will still be judged fairly by employers upon their work performance. This is because some employers may have bias judgment of employees because they are on FWA (Yeo, 2012).

Another main problem is it is challenging for employers to hire 2 employees that have complementary work timings for the same job role (MOM, 2001). Perhaps the government can establish a committee to consolidate the people who require flexible working time and group them according to what kind of job they want and what is their working schedule. With this committee, there is a database or common ground for employers to search for people that fir or complement the working schedule of their current employee so as to allow them to adopt the FWA.

The effectiveness of existing measures to mitigate the loss of work-life balance among working Singaporeans is contingent upon the Singapore government to initiate solutions to meet the manpower demands of employers if they want to practice FWA in workplaces. However, it should be recognized that a long time may be needed to fully develop this solution by the government. Therefore, a more feasible and efficient way to improve the effectiveness of FWA may be to improve the communication between employers and employee.

References
Ministry Of Manpower. (2001). Flexible work arrangements Retrieved from http://mom.gov.sg/Documents/employment-practices/flexible-work-arrangements-mom-mcds.pdf

Ministry Of Manpower. (2005) Work-Life harmony report: Findings and recommendations for employers on how to use work-life strategies to optimize business performance. Retrieved from http://www.mom.gov.sg/Documents/employment-practices/WLSREPORTFINAL.pdf

Ministry Of Manpower (2013). The work-life grant: Better work-life harmony for all. Retrieved from http://www.mom.gov.sg/Documents/employment-practices/Work-Life%20Grant%20Booklet%20(online%20viewing)%20FINAL.pdf

Yeo, M. B. (2012). Tune up for success in work and life. Retrieved from https://bizalum.nus.edu/nbs/lifelongdetails.aspx?id=240