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Conditions of Employment, 2012

Family-Friendly Practices On The Rise With More Employers Providing Leave Benefits and Work-Life Arrangements

Statistics and publications

20 December 2012

  1. Increasingly, employers are going beyond statutory requirements to provide various leave benefits to help their employees cope with family commitments. More employers are also offering work-life arrangements, such as part-time work, flexitime and tele-working (formal), though they are still not widely prevalent. These are the key findings from the 2012 Conditions of Employment Survey conducted by the Ministry of Manpower’s Research and Statistics Department1.

    Main Findings
  2. More employers were offering work-life arrangements. In 2012, four in ten (41%) establishments offered at least one form of work-life arrangement to their employees, up from 38% in 2011. Part-time working was the most common work-life arrangement offered by a third (33%) of establishments. At a distant second was flexitime (8.2%), followed by staggered hours (7.5%) and tele-working (formal) (4.0%).
  3. The share of full-time employees who were entitled to at least 15 days of paid annual leave edged up from 2010 by 0.4%-point to 41% in 2012. Management & executives (M&E) continued to have more favourable leave benefits, with 71% of them entitled to at least 15 days of paid annual leave, compared with rank-and-file (RAF) employees, where nearly 78% had less than 15 days.
  4. Increasingly, employers were going beyond statutory requirements to provide various leave benefits to help their employees cope with family commitments. A wide majority of establishments gave compassionate leave (89%) and marriage leave (73%). Slightly over half granted paternity leave (53%), while slightly over a third (36%) provided study/examination leave and one in six (16%) gave parental care/sick leave.
  5. The 5-day work-week continued to be the norm, with 44% of full-time employees in 2012 under such a work-week arrangement, where the standard working hours are compressed into five days a week, with employees working longer each day. Lagging significantly behind were shift work (17%), 6-day (18%) and 5½-day work-week (14%), each accounting for less than one fifth of the employees in 2012.
  6. Sickness absenteeism was broadly stable over the years. In 2011, 58% of employees took outpatient sick leave and 4.2% took hospitalisation leave. This was broadly comparable to 55% and 4.3% in 2009. Employees who had taken outpatient sick leave in 2011 on average consumed 4.7 days of sick leave, unchanged from 2009. The corresponding figure for those on hospitalisation leave was 16.0 days in 2011, compared with 14.9 days in 2009.

    For More Information
  7. The report is available online on MOM's Statistics and Publications webpage.

1 The survey effectively covered 3,500 establishments in the private sector each with at least 25 employees and the public sector, achieving a response rate of 91%.