Difficult conversations at home and workplaces unavoidable for FWAs to take off

The recently announced

Flexible Work Arrangement (FWA) guidelines

aim to facilitate conversations between employers and employees. However, these discussions must begin within families. 

With dual-earners making up

more than half of all married couples in Singapore

and people having rising expectations around work and life aspirations, tensions between working mums and dads in navigating family commitments and demanding careers can be intense. 

This challenge may be exceptionally tough for power couples with grand career aspirations who see their jobs as part of their identities. It is not unusual for each to prioritise their work commitments, as the stakes may be too high to do otherwise. But such pursuits often come with longer hours and new challenges. 

Globally, managing a full-time job and a household has already exacerbated burnout for this group, according to a 2022 McKinsey study. Frustration and resentment can stew as both engage in the process of confronting expectations and limitations that may lead to roles being redefined, where one person is left with the shorter end of the stick. 

Constructive discussions begin with sharing an aligned vision of treasured family time and dynamics. Family forms the foundation of society, yet we frequently compromise time in nourishing our primary relationships because of life’s pressing demands. 

A consistent collective effort will be required by the couple to find a dynamic that helps the family live out their best ideals and thrive. There may be a need to decide on a primary caregiver or alternatives where a tactical give-and-take may be feasible. 

Listing practical duties of day-to-day family life can clarify and support discussions in how work commitments and home responsibilities ought to be jointly, even dynamically, handled. One parent may arrange for a later work time in order to drop the children off at school, while the partner opts for a compressed work schedule with longer but fewer in-office workdays to manage household tasks and errands on work-from-home days.

Playing to individual strengths can help couples divide household tasks more efficiently. For example, the one skilled in logistics can handle runs for groceries and enrichment classes, while the other focuses on analytical tasks such as budgets and child development.  

The key lies in approaching this as a collective stake to share, instead of a bean-counting activity on who is giving or doing more. It is paramount that couples position themselves on the same side of the conversation table, where they listen with an open heart, to understand each other’s unique needs, challenges and aspirations and build a thriving family together.  

Building family together: An ongoing process of choice 

For couples who see one of their careers as the “primary” and the other as “secondary”, where both do not aspire to climb the corporate ladder simultaneously, a daily balance might be easier to strike. The partner with more job flexibility and fewer time-consuming responsibilities outside of office hours may choose to assume the heavy responsibilities of running a home and raising kids, to allow the high achiever to concentrate on their demanding job. 

The more difficult balance to achieve is the one across life. Marriage is for life, and the ideal work-life combination can vary over time as preferences change. Life ambitions rarely remain in some neatly defined box confined to career goals.

A higher-earning partner keen to switch gears and step back may decide to reduce work commitments and spend time with the children, allowing his or her partner to now focus on developing their career. The primary caregiver might want a shot at spending time on their ambitions and pursuits outside of family. These choices are decisions to be made and remade. 

The FWA guidelines can be a double-edged sword, providing sustainable, significant support to parents struggling to cope with raising families in an inflexible work system and culture, yet also potentially unearth fundamental differences in attitudes towards work and family. 

This can be unnerving for couples who have to confront the roles each plays in their lives together, along with societal expectations of what an ideal family looks like.

Stereotypical beliefs, such as the partner with a lower income or a less senior position should automatically take on more household responsibilities or that the dad should be the breadwinner and mum the primary caregiver, can create detrimental power dynamics and harmful expectations. These can be a substantial hindrance to couples who need all the support they can get from each other to build a family and thrive together.  

Flourishing businesses and families 

For FWAs and the resulting asynchronous nature of work to succeed, clear guidelines, timelines and key performance indices can set expectations and upkeep productivity. They require employers to understand, for example, that an employee who needs to shuttle children to after-school activities can make up for lost time by working later in the evening when the children are in bed.  

Here, supervisors can afford to be clear-eyed about the must-haves for a team to function, perhaps even set core hours when all team members need to be available for meetings and collaboration, while giving them the autonomy to organise the rest of their workday in ways that suit them best. 

For front-line or essential workers who cannot choose their work locations, the spirit of FWAs can be adhered to if supervisors respect family commitments and adjust through actions such as providing shift timings weeks in advance or allowing team members to trade shifts with one another. 

A key challenge at the workplace is the stigma fathers may encounter in requesting FWAs because of outdated social norms. The challenge may be in persuading themselves, less so their employers. Many fear the repercussions of suggesting that families are more important than work. Yet, research demonstrates that a father’s active involvement contributes positively to the well-being of the children, couple and family.    

When dads face pushback to their FWA requests or when people around them imply that home matters are best left to their wives, they may avoid asking, and in the longer term, struggle to move beyond traditional roles as primary breadwinners. 

Aspirationally, FWAs should bring about a more equitable distribution of caregiving and household duties where mums and dads can find a sweet spot that aligns with their preferences and strengths, instead of the lion’s share falling on the shoulders of women by default and disrespecting the other demands on her time.

A shared sense of accountability should be the goal because achieving complete equality in parenting and household tasks may not be realistic or even desirable. 

On the macro level, Singapore is grappling with population challenges from ageing and delayed marriages – a trend leading to later parenthood and smaller family sizes compared with when younger grandparents were enlisted as caregiving backstop. FWAs are no silver bullet but can help with rebalancing work and life commitments. 

Here, employers will do well to remember that the future of work is one of intense competition for scarce skilled manpower, and FWAs may be a core strategy to hire and retain talent. FWAs are a crucial tool for talent management, with the new FWA guidelines potentially creating momentum for firms to progress alongside growing family needs, so both businesses and families can flourish together in a Singapore that is made for families.