Work It Podcast: Normalise family-friendly practices in the workplace or risk losing talent, says Indranee Rajah
The worldwide trend shows younger employees prioritise flexibility and companies simply have to get on board to retain talent, says the minister on the Work It podcast.
With more shared parental leave and mandatory paternity leave on the horizon, employers need to re-design the way they operate. Otherwise they risk losing good staff, says Minister Indranee Rajah.
She tells Tiffany Ang and Gerald Tan why the government is committed to helping everyone reach a win-win situation.
Here's an excerpt from the conversation:Â
Tiffany Ang:
With the new shared parental leave, will this, in a way, also make employers change the way that they hire? Because, for example, I'm just wondering right, if you have many would be or potential young parents in your team, and then a headcount comes up, I'm guessing that some companies, will go "I would like more diversity. I don't want too many parents on my team, because then that would mean that at some point everybody's just going to be gone and away, and then I would have to pick up the slack."
Would that also create some form of invisible discrimination against people who are planning for a family, because now that we know that there are more benefits that are coming for them.
Minister Indranee Rajah:
If an employer did do that and really did discriminate against such employees, then they might bump up against the new workplace fairness legislation that we are bringing into parliament and into force.
So I will be very careful if employers did that.
But if I'm an employer, also have to approach it from this way. The underlying assumption of that question is that these married couples who are going to have children who will be needing that leave. So maybe I'll focus on employing singles.
But what's to say that your single is not going to get married in the next year and then have a kid in the other year. You have no idea, right? That that may happen.
And don't forget when I talked about younger people enjoying that or wanting that flexibility, your other employee, who may not be married, may not have a young kid, but then their dog needs to go to the vet, or their cat needs to be taken for some kind of treatment, they're going to want to have leave for that too, maybe not 10 weeks, but they still are going to need that.
Then what about those who have aging parents or grandparents? The global norm now is that move, that desire for flexibility, so any employer who's not able to design the workplace to deal with this is going to have a problem, because sooner or later, employees are going to say, I want flexibility, and I'm not getting it, so maybe I should go somewhere else.
Tiffany:
Find someone else who will give me that, right? Â
Minister Indranee:Â
Exactly. So the message is actually, if you want your company to be productive, you want your employees to be happy and want to continue working for you, this is an issue that you must grapple with.
The shared parental leave is only part of it, but there's a much bigger phenomenon, which is that need for flexibility and the ability to design work in a way that it can be picked up by somebody else, or it can be done off site, and all of that.Â
Gerald Tan:Â
I think the point about flexibility and how employers need to implement it. For many of the employers I've spoken to, a lot of them step up, right?
But at the same time, some of them are thinking, "You know what? Maybe I need to move out because I can't meet the expectations here."
And I know that's not the intent of the policy for the companies to shift out because we want them to stay here. But at the same time, how can businesses remain competitive, productive, even when implementing flexible work? Â
Minister Indranee:
Yeah, I think a very important part of that is having conversations with your employees. It's to say to employees, "Hey look guys, this is what the company is facing. These are our constraints. I really want to be able to make sure that you can take your leave, but at the same time, I have to be sure that this works can be covered. Let's sit down and talk about this and see how we can work it."
And also, I appreciate that companies do need to have people in the workplace, in order to build a corporate culture, in order to do training, in order for mentorship and so on. So it really comes back to that, how do you design your workplace to allow this to happen? And it's really critical to have that conversation with employees, so that the employees also feel invested in this and want to make it work with you. Â
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