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Cutting women'€™s work hours: Profit or loss?

Vice President Jusuf Kalla has suggested cutting work hours for women, to enable working mothers to allot more quality time to their children

Cyti Daniela Aruan (The Jakarta Post)
Canberra
Thu, December 4, 2014

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Cutting women'€™s work hours: Profit or loss?

V

ice 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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The writer is 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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