Cutting
women’s work hours : Profit or loss?
Cyti Daniela Aruan ; Researching strategic human resources
management in the Indonesian public service for her doctorate thesis in
business administration
at the University of Canberra, Australia
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JAKATA
POST, 04 Desember 2014
Vice
President Jusuf Kalla has suggested cutting work hours for women, to enable
working mothers to allot more quality time to their children.
This is
like an oasis in the desert for working women. This should not just be seen
as simply reducing working hours, which probably impacts on organizations’
profits — but as a strategy to increase women’s productivity.
It seems
a contradiction but cutting women’s work hours certainly can be seen as a way
to reduce conflicts for women as they can balance their work and personal
lives. Harmonization between work and personal life can potentially increase
life and job satisfaction and this can by all means increase work
productivity.
In
strategic human resources management theory, this policy is similar to the work-life
balance (WLB) policy widely adopted in developed countries such as the US,
UK, Australia and New Zealand.
In these
countries, WLB aims to increase employees’ productivity and to reduce staff
turnover. WLB is based on the reality that an employee always has multiple
roles including work, family and other major responsibilities.
While
roles can drain resources (e.g. time), role balance can provide additional
benefits (e.g. self-esteem) through the ability to balance multiple roles and
commitments. WLB view’s that the more employees can balance their lives, the
more companies can benefit from them. WLB assumes that having multiple roles
is not really an issue but what matters is how those multiple roles can be
balanced in harmony.
For
countries adopting this policy, WLB has been capable of boosting working
productivity. A study in New Zealand involving 609 parents and 708
non-parents found that employees reporting greater WLB had higher
satisfaction and lower levels of psychological issues compared to those with
lower WLB. The study, published in The International Journal of Human
Resource Management in 2013, indicated that both organizations and employees
benefited from the policy.
Besides
cutting work hours, flexitime policies could also be another alternative to
help working women balance their roles as mothers and as employees. Flexitime
aims to provide work flexibility without cutting work hours. For example, a
working mother is permitted to arrive at work at 10 a.m. and go home late in
accordance with work-time regulations.
Or,
working mothers could choose when to spend quality time with their families,
especially with their children. Such a policy is already familiar to some
workplaces including government agencies in Indonesia.
If work
hours are cut or flexitime is put in place, there are issues that need to be
taken into consideration. For example, variations in employment status need
to be considered, such as full-time or part-time positions. These employment
classifications are important to ensure fairness among employees.
As in
developed countries, WLB or flexitime is only given to full-time and
part-time positions and is not applicable to casual positions. Hopefully,
this would refresh the working environment and the employment system in
Indonesia, especially in the public sector, which has been labeled as slow,
unresponsive and ineffective.
As
communication technology develops more, many tasks can be resolved outside
the physical workplace. In the long run, discretion surrounding working hours
should not only be aimed at women but also applied to all employees, as
balance in work and personal lives is needed by all individuals.
In the end, what organizations need is certainly not how much time an
employee physically stays in the office, but for them to be productive in
their job. ●
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