Balancing act

Antoine Gaetan Angoh

Managing Director, Schering-Plough

Personally I believe strongly in creating a family environment at work for all colleagues. This creates a sense of belonging and ownership. In return, the company gets employee retention and engagement. We have introduced a number of initiatives that promote work life balance in the organisation.

Full-time employees are free to choose their start and end times. Some departments also operate on a compressed work week schedule. An option to work remotely allows staff to work up to several days a week at sites other than their primary location – usually their home or satellite office.

Employees with green fingers are also encouraged to grow flowers, fruits and vegetables at the MSD Garden. The site won the Gold Award from National Parks Singapore in July.

We also engage families of our employees through Sports Recreation Committee events and activities such as Family Day, trekking, “Duck Tours” and Kelong fishing expeditions; and also on-site visits to the plant so that they can see the work environment of their loved ones.

Julien Arnaud

CEO, Edgilis

Entering its fifth year, Edgilis’ culture can be summed up by one phrase: It’s OK to work hard and to live well too!

Indeed, our employees are passionate about their work, and passionate about life. As in any consultancy, the backbone of our company is our consultants’ quest for knowledge and drive for results. Naturally, we wouldn’t ever think of curbing this enthusiasm and we never hear colleagues telling each other “not to work too hard”.

This said, every time a project ends, we encourage our employees to take a long break and to expand their minds outside the office.

We have set up work/life balance arrangements called Flexi-Place and Flexi-Time, allowing employees to work from home and to vary their daily start and end times to suit their personal lives. We have also offered the option of buying extra holidays and of taking a career break.

Finally, we’ve upgraded our childcare support and increased the new infant leaves to support family life.

Stephen Wong

Director, KPK Quantity Surveyors Singapore

The measure of a balanced work and home lifestyle is different from individual to individual. At KPK Quantity Surveyors, we respect individual staff’s choice of working style. Whether it’s spinning like tops on a regular basis or a more gradual incremental approach to their career, the individual staff member must take charge of things themself.

Instead of prescribing what staff must do to keep a balanced work and home lifestyle, we always try and identify the right project for the right staff member with a support system and work processes.

These should ideally constantly challenge them and help them acquire the skill sets needed for the projects they manage.

As leaders, we must always be there, willing to listen and be flexible with our policies and sincerely willing to help staff to take charge of and realise their individual work-life balance model.

Individual staff must also take the responsibility to make that choice and rank their own priorities at varying stages of their career development so as to achieve fair work and life balance targets.