Changing patterns: People during lunch hour in Singpore’s central business district. More young workers in the country take remote work as natural. — AFP
SINGAPORE: Insurance boss Andrew Tay believes that working in the office is more conducive and less distracting, while also increasing interactions with others and reducing stress.
He also reckons that the act of leaving the house enhances mobility and well-being.
Since 2022, Tay, who is managing director at Goshen Financial, has been asking his two employees to return to the office five days a week, following the end of the Covid-19 lockdowns.
Global bosses are pushing the message as well, with more insistent orders for workers to return as job markets soften.
Amazon said in September that it will reverse its three-day policy to a five-day in-office mandate from January 2025, joining others such as Manchester United Football Club, and banks such as Citigroup, HSBC and Barclays.
There are payoffs in company culture, collaboration and creativity, these bosses have told staff, despite not backing this up with data.
A report in 2024 by consultancy KPMG noted that 83% of bosses globally expect a full return to the office in three years, up from 64% in 2023.
Workers in Singapore are trudging back to workplaces for 3.7 days in 2024, half a day more than in 2023, noted workplace strategy and design firm Unispace.
Employees are even warming up to it.
About 37% of Singaporean staff in 2024 support spending four to five days a week at their desks, up from 7% in 2022, said a poll by Paperspace Asia, another workplace strategy and design firm.
Workers aged above 56 are most keen for a full-time return, with 29% of them saying so, it noted.
However, while more bosses and workers have settled into a rhythm of hybrid work in the past three years, Singapore bosses still come up last among their peers in 12 other markets when it comes to meeting what their employees want, according to Unispace.
In particular, employers are struggling to entice young workers back and please them, said Qiu Jianhan, the firm’s principal for strategy for Asia.
Workers aged 18 to 34 are more than doubly likely to say they lack spaces to recharge and rest compared with their colleagues over 55, he added.
This younger cohort also spends a day less than their older colleagues at their workplaces.
“Sometimes we struggle with this,” Qiu said. “Younger workers spend less time in the office, but have more demands and more expectations of the workplace.”
Fixed floor plates in many older office buildings and rigid head office’s guidelines sometimes hinder the redesign of spaces to suit what these young workers want.
For instance, some head offices prioritise large pantries without considering Singapore’s lunch culture, which can reduce available space for meeting rooms and dedicated work areas.
Younger employees – some joining the workforce during or after the lockdowns – take remote work as natural and expect additional perks to make their commute worthwhile.
Still, Singapore firms are not calling staff back to the office as much as their counterparts in the United States, Britain, Hong Kong and Tokyo, said Sher-li Torrey, founder of social enterprise Mums@Work.
She added that in some markets, some employees are relocating across states to meet their office mandates.
“The common thing we hear is ‘how lucky you all are in Singapore’,” she said.
It turns out that the government is the check on bosses, especially for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which might have been tempted to return to pre-lockdown routines, she added.
The civil service has kept its hybrid work arrangements, which were started during the pandemic.
“I think most working mothers can see that the nationwide policies are pushing employers back,” said Torrey.
Even so, some mothers are going a step further, seeking fully remote jobs to handle care-giving duties.
She said: “Increasingly, we have new women who join us and tell us that they currently have hybrid work arrangements but it’s not enough – they want full-time work-from-home.”
Dr Issac Lim, an organisational sociologist and founder of consultancy Anthro Insights, is worried about bosses and managers’ misplaced assumptions that hours in office mean higher productivity, and constant availability means efficiency.
“I am particularly concerned about the perceptions held by some employers that employees who prefer flexible work arrangements are lazy, less productive or less committed, or that only younger workers seek flexibility,” he added.
“The reality is that everyone values flexibility.”
Like Dr Lim, labour economist Walter Theseira cautioned against over-interpreting studies linking productivity and flexible work arrangements (FWA).
“I don’t think you would find any consistent evidence on this. If there are successful examples, there is likely a huge amount of selection (bias),” said the associate professor at the Singapore University of Social Sciences.
Time would be better spent studying how to leverage technology and FWA to get more out of local workers for jobs that have the broad consensus on being retained in Singapore, he said.
Prof Theseira added that workers should be thoughtful about the benefits of remote work or FWA.
“If you actually have some kind of perfect communications and management technology that allow you to collaborate and work with people anywhere, then it would be actually obvious that for a great number of job roles, there would be no need to hire somebody who is in Singapore.”
That remote worker, moreover, would likely cost less than the Singaporean, he added.
Singapore’s tripartite guidelines on FWA requests come into play on Dec 1, and employers are encouraged to have proper processes to deal with staff requests for flexible work.
The Singapore National Employers Federation or SNEF launched in September a step-by-step guide for employers, with tips on how to deal with FWA requests.
It tells employers, among other things, to answer their employees’ formal requests within two months, and not to dismiss them on grounds such as “management does not believe in FWAs”. — The Straits Times/ANN
