Holding up half the sky
Chairman Mao Ze Dong uttered the famous words, ‘Women hold up half the sky’. But as female employees here juggle with work and childcare responsibilities, the question remains: Who supports the women? Lisa Cheong finds out.
Two months ago, I told a HR practitioner that I was writing about recruiting and retaining women in the workforce, to which he bluntly said, “Isn’t that topic done and dusted with?”
Yes and no.
On one hand, we have business leaders such as Karen Koa, head of HR for AXA Life Insurance Singapore, who states matter-of-factly that she is a product of the meritocratic education system of Singapore’s government. That is true. The meritocratic education system here churned out well-skilled and smart working citizens – regardless of gender.
However, the statistics paint a very different and disproportionate picture. The country’s female labour force participation rate is only 56%, lower than the 76% found in Scandinavian countries. And even though Singapore also ranks third on the 2009-2010 World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report, its lower female labour force participation rate is dismal – coming in at 84 out of 133 countries.
With a small talent pool such as Singapore’s, the need to lure more women back into the workforce is becoming more urgent, said Halimah Yacob, deputy secretary-general for the NTUC Women’s Development Secretariat at a recent event. “Increasing the female labour force participation rate is becoming more urgent now as we realise that Singapore cannot have a limitless pool of foreign workers without imposing tremendous strains on our society.”
The hidden veil
It is no secret that women in Singapore today still face a level of discrimination at the workplace. Latest figures by the Ministry of Manpower show that for the first nine months of 2009, 119 women have lodged “pregnancy-related” complaints with the ministry. And the numbers are increasing, up from only 95 such cases last year and 72 in 2007.
Among the complaints are those from women who say their bosses sacked them under the pretense of poor performance or other work-related issues to avoid meeting maternity payment obligations. Other cases also involved being underpaid or denied maternity benefits, and 75% of these companies stem from the small and medium enterprise sector.
Adrienne Wong, HR manager for Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Cambodia at Chevron International does not mince words when she says that there are companies in Singapore who do practice discriminating policies against certain population demographics such as older workers and women.
Pointing to the recent push by the government on educating employers about fair employment practices, Wong says women in Singapore tend to shoulder more of the childcare responsibilities and at times, these issues may spill over to the workplace. “Some businesses may see this as non-productive hours, when you are asking for time off to go to school with the children or visit the teacher because your kid has got some issues. They see this as you not contributing as much [to work] as male colleagues who have fewer such problems.”
However, Wong says these errant companies are merely looking at the value that female employees bring to the business in a very narrow and siloed manner.
They see only that snapshot of when a woman is unproductive, she says. “But they don’t see that if a woman continues to be motivated, she will be a lot more loyal [to the company].” In 2008, Chevron achieved a turnover rate that was 50% lower than its other oil and chemical competitors in Singapore. Part of its retention success is attributed to the company’s ability to retain and engage with its female staff, says Wong.
That’s not to say that there aren’t companies who recognise the need to be a family-friendly and women-friendly workplace.
For companies such as Chevron and UPS, this is stemmed from the company’s deeply entrenched values of employee diversity.
For instance, in Chevron, their core value of diversity is embedded into HR processes such as recruitment, where steps are taken to eliminate discrimination against age, gender, race or value systems.
To prevent discrimination against female candidates, Chevron’s job application forms do not require candidates to state their gender. In addition, managers and key decision makers are briefed before recruitment interviews on what they should look for in candidates – such as skill sets and knowledge.
Even the panel of interviewers is diverse as well to help support the recruitment decision-making, adds Wong. As such, the company would encourage interviewers to be of both genders or from other functions to participate in the selection. “So if I am hiring for a HR person, I would not just be a HR interviewing the person. I would invite a line manager who has a lot more opportunity to interact with the HR areas to be part of the panel. And there will be at least two, if not three interviewers.”
With kids in tow
Because women often have shoulder more of the childcare responsibilities, Koa says females with young children typically look for employers with family-friendly policies. “They typically ask about childcare leave, how supportive the company is if they need to take more leave than what is necessary because their children is young, or if they have old parents to support.”
But what is preventing companies from doing supporting women and their responsibilities in the workplace? Halimah says the real challenge in most cases is not merely employers’ lack of will power to introduce flexi-work or family friendly practices, but because of the lack of knowledge and skills to do so (perceived or real), as it often takes very little to introduce such schemes.
At Chevron, employees are allowed to work on a “9/80” schedule, where employees work 80 hours over a period of nine days, and would subsequently get the tenth day off. Wong says this helps employees who often take Mondays or Fridays off, as they can spend long weekends with their family.
AXA also provides employees with the option of telecommuting and part-time work as well, as the company and its managers want to support employees and their families however it is operationally possible, says Koa. Some options of flexi-work includes working fewer days a week or fewer hours in a day.
AXA employees who want to raise the feasibility of adopting alternative work arrangements will first have a dialogue session with the employee and business manager, facilitated by HR. During this session, some of the talking points between the three parties include:
- What is the situation that requires alternative work arrangements?
- Does it concern the children or family?
- What level of flexibility does the employee require?
- What is the job function of the employee? Is it a service-orientated role where service counters need to be manned?
- What is the composition of the employee’s team?
- Can the work be picked up by the rest of the team? Or can certain aspects be farmed out?
Through this, employees and line managers would be able to work around the situation and come to a solution that both parties can agree on. This helps with retaining employees who may have initially thought that the only solution would be to resign. In addition, the ability for flexi-work and telecommuting is also extended to male workers who have family matters to attend to as well, says Koa.
“If you’re concerned about your family situation, you can’t be effective in the office anyhow,” says Koa.
But the option of flexible work cannot be successful without strong support from the business line and managers as well.
In order to cultivate employees who value and facilitate Chevron’s core value of employee diversity, all newly promoted managers are put through a two-and-a-half day managerial workshop called Supervisor’s Essentials. In this, participants come together to discuss Chevron culture and values and practice skills related to coaching, communication, performance feedback, and motivation, says Wong.
New managers are also taught on the business case for diversity and how they can use that to capitalise on the subordinate’s true potential. The workshop will also discuss case studies revolving typical supervisory issues that managers face.
But there will be detractors.
“Of course there will still be some older, more traditional managers who say, ‘If you are female, you get married and have children, and that’s four months maternity leave and it could be a strain to the team,’” says Koa. It then falls on the HR team at AXA to talk and educate these managers on how they can work around employees’ maternity or childcare needs and support the business operations at the same time.
Other family-friendly policies companies such as AXA has includes inviting employees’ children to join company activities, such as cycling, bowling, trekking and kayaking. As for the company’s flexi-benefit scheme, AXA employees are also able to use their flexi-dollar benefits to cover their spousal and childen’s medical care and medical insurance as well, with Koa adding that she has used her flex-dollars to put in claims for her own childrens’ visits to the doctors when they fell ill before.
Up, up and away
In a regionalised business environment such as Asia, it is quickly becoming a necessity for any potential leader to be sent on international assignments so that he or she may be exposed to different business environments, ways of working and grow in their career as well.
But some companies think twice about sending female employees with childcare responsibilities out on long-term assignments – to the detriment of the employee’s career. That is not to say that there are absolutely no women assignees with young children in tow.
In fact, Gillian Sim, managing director for UPS Singapore has managed to convince her current sales director based in Singapore to relocate among various Asian countries before. What helps, Sim says, is the support system which UPS provides all assignees on the move – from ensuring that the kids are settled in the right schools and even spousal allowance of a few months to make up for any loss in spousal income.
And this will pay off for companies, who will benefit from a stronger succession pipeline, as seen in the meteoric success of UPS’s director of sales who started out as a center manager for the UPS Penang branch six years ago.
Back then, Sim, who identified the employee’s potential, persuaded her to relocate to the Kuala Lumpur office for a business development role. “I had the hardest time convincing her to move from Penang, where she was so comfortable, to come to Kuala Lumpur. This is just within the country and it was already a tough sell!”
However, Sim told the center manager about her potential for growth. “I said, ‘This is the potential. You go from a small business development job for a small country and develop yourself to grow into a bigger country.’”
In addition to that, Sim also spent some time persuading the sales director’s spouse to relocate as well, as he would bear some risk of unemployment in a different location. Speaking with him personally, Sim shared her views on his wife’s potential, UPS’s policies of looking after the assignee’s spouse and family as well as the opportunities for a better education for their children. “You focus on kid’s education, and that sells it.”
Once the family had decided to move to KL, the company managed to enroll the children into Chinese schools. The employee’s husband also managed to get a reassignment within his employer as well.
“Then she worked well for two years, and then we gave her an incredible assignment to go to Hong Kong, to go from managing a group of 30-man sales force to 100-man sales force. And now she has to bring her kids, and her husband may not get a job!”
As they say, the rest is history. After her Hong Kong stint, she was recently offered the sales director position in Singapore to oversee 40 countries. Her rise from center manager to sales director of 40 countries is evidence that it pays to develop good talent – regardless of whether they have childcare responsibilities or not.
Golden girls
Children would not stay young forever and when they do grow up and are more independent, are women refocusing their energies on their careers then?
Definitely so, says Sim. She cites a case of UPS’s ocean freight manager who had left the company for a four years to look after her young children. After several years, the ex-employee had reapplied for the same position again.
“Her main reason for coming back was to redevelop herself. She felt that she still had the expertise and the experience. She wanted to help the company to grow further in a couple of industries that we were looking at.”
“Her kids are all grown up and she felt that there’s nothing to do at home for her,” says Sim.
Kee Swee Huang, Dy director of human resource management for Housing & Development Board (HDB) agrees, adding that even for the mature workforce, they would look for an employer who would can provide learning opportunities at work. This is the reason why HDB recently introduced a new initiative titled Self-Directed Learning (SDL) in 2006.
In this initiative, employees aged 50 years and above are given a S$500 credit to take up any L&D course of their interest. The courses, which may not necessarily pertain to their work functions, is aimed at broadening employees’ learning to prepare them in developing new areas of interests during their retirement years. HDB also hopes that through this SDL initiative, employees would take greater ownership in their own learning and development as well as have a mindset for lifelong learning.
According to Kee, some employees have taken up Traditional Chinese Medicine classes and even aromatherapy massage classes. Other courses such as financial planning, new language skills and hobby crafts are popular as well.
“So these are some opportunities [for those] who do not have young children. There are different types of benefits to meet the diverse needs of the various age groups,” Kee says.
But not everybody would want to put themselves back into climbing the workforce again, says Koa. She cites an example in one of AXA’s current employees, who used to be her former ex-boss many years ago. While the employee is “not quite golden”, Koa says she is only working two days a week on a contract basis to keep herself current and contribute to the company, without having to worry about climbing the corporate ladder.
“She is experienced enough to be the head of Life Operations. The reason why she doesn’t want to climb the corporate ladder is because she has other things she wants to do, such as volunteering,” says Koa.
But no matter what the situation of the life cycle of the employee, in the end, the question of how companies can best manage their employees requires the input of both the company and the employer as well. “After all,” Koa says, “it is a partnership, isn’t it? It’s really how we can best support each other and not just one way.”