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Conditions of Employment, 2014

More Firms Adopt Family-Friendly Practices

Statistics and publications
9 December 2014

  1. More employers in Singapore are offering work-life arrangements. Increasingly, establishments are going beyond statutory requirements to provide various leave benefits to help their employees with family commitments. These are the key findings from the 2014 Conditions of Employment Survey conducted by the Ministry of Manpower’s Research and Statistics Department1.

    Main Findings

    Steady increase in firms providing flexible work arrangements
  2. Amid the tight labour market and ongoing initiatives which support work-life harmony, the proportion of establishments which provided at least one formal flexible work arrangement (FWA)2 improved steadily from 38% in 20113 to 47% in 2014.
  3. Among the various formal FWAs, part-time work remained the most prevalent, offered by 36% of all establishments. This was followed by flexi-time (12%), staggered hours (11%) and formal tele-working (5.8%).

    Employers were generous in offering leave benefits
  4. Although not a statutory requirement, many employers were generous in providing compassionate leave (89%) and marriage leave (71%). Four in 10 (42%) establishments provided unpaid leave of more than one month (e.g. to pursue personal interests, sabbatical, to attend to family matters), followed by study/examination leave (37%), parental care/ sick leave (17%) and childcare sick leave (16%).
  5. The share of full-time employees who were entitled to at least 15 days of paid annual leave edged up from 2012 by 1.3%-points to 42% in 2014.

    Five day work-week still the common practice
  6. The five-day work-week continued to be the common practice, with 46% of full-time employees under such an arrangement in 2014, up 1.7%-points from 2012. The remaining full-time employees were mostly having a work-week of six days (19%) or five-and-a-half days (14%), or on shift work (14%).

    Stable outpatient sick leave rate
  7. Absenteeism due to illness was stable over the years. The proportion of employees who took outpatient sick leave (58%) and the average duration taken by them (4.7 days) remained the same as 2011. The share of employees who took hospitalisation leave edged up 1.0%-point to 5.2% in 2013.

    For More Information
  8. The report is available on the MOM's Statistics and Publications webpage.
1 The survey effectively covered 3,800 establishments in the private sector each with at least 25 employees and the public sector, achieving a response rate of 91.6%.
2 Excluding unplanned time-off and informal/ad-hoc tele-working.
3 The year of reference differs for each indicator as it depends on when the data was last collected. Please refer to page 11 of the report for reference dates.