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Strategies for work-life harmony

A work-life friendly workplace is a win-win situation for both employers and employees. You can get resources such as toolkits and funding to put in place work-life strategies at your workplace to gain competitive advantage with greater productivity.

What are work-life strategies

Work-life strategies are measures you can put in place to help your employees manage work responsibilities alongside personal needs. They help raise employee productivity at work and make your organisation more competitive.

Work-life strategies can be divided into 3 broad categories:

  • Flexible work arrangements
  • Leave schemes
  • Employee support schemes

Why implement work-life strategies

Work-life strategies are a good investment for organisations. The Singapore National Employers Federation (SNEF) conducted a study on 11 Singapore-based organisations in 2003 and found that for every $1 spent on family-friendly programmes, the organisation reaped a return of $1.68.

Work-life strategies have also been found to benefit organisations in the following ways:

  • Higher productivity and shareholder value
  • Improved employee engagement and satisfaction
  • Improved attraction and retention of talent
  • Reduced health-related costs (e.g. absenteeism, medical leave)
  • Improved customer experience

Get started

Use these resources to help you get started on adopting work-life strategies.

Work-Life Works! portal
Provides useful information on implementing effective and sustainable work-life strategies. Visit the Tools & Resources section for more information.

Work-Life Harmony Report
Gives general and sector-based tips on how to implement work-life strategies. The report also covers examples of best practices from the banking, chemical, healthcare and infocomm technology industries, as well as small and medium enterprises.

Tripartite Advisory on Flexible Work Arrangements (FWA)
Provides guidance on how to implement FWAs effectively. This tripartite advisory also provides useful info for:

  • Employees on how to broach the subject of FWAS.
  • Supervisors on how to assess and manage FWA requests.

Get funding

You can get funding from the enhanced Work-Life Grant under the WorkPro programme to implement work-life strategies.

The grant has 2 components:

  • FWA Incentive – encourage companies to sustain implementation of FWAs for their local employees.
  • Job Sharing Incentive – encourage companies to implement job sharing for employees at PMET-level with gross monthly salary of at least $3,600, before job sharing arrangement.