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Govt to give ‘outstanding’ civil servants Fridays off
Lily Fajriah, a 28-year-old civil servant, rarely sees her 2-year-old son during work days
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Lily Fajriah, a 28-year-old civil servant, rarely sees her 2-year-old son during work days.
Lily, an analyst at the Office of the Coordinating Economic Minister, is supposed to go home at 4 p.m. However, she always dedicates extra time to finish her piles of work and leaves the office after 7 p.m.
After she arrives home at around 8 p.m., Lily still has to do chores around the house and always finds that her son has already fallen asleep. Before she heads to the office the next morning, her son has yet to wake.
“I feel so bad for always coming home late, as I can’t spend time with my husband and my son,” Lily told The Jakarta Post on Friday.
Therefore, she was delighted to learn that the government plans to allow high-performing civil servants to have Fridays off.
“I heard from my colleague that we could have an additional day off during the week. I think it’s a good idea so that I can dedicate the additional day off to taking care of my family,” Lily added.
The Administrative and Bureaucratic Reform Ministry is studying the possibility of granting civil servants four-day work weeks, as well as allowing them to work remotely.
Waluyo Martowiyoto, the ministry’s civil servant management head, said the flexible work arrangement would be aimed at improving the working conditions of civil servants.
“It’s still just a plan. We want to follow similar policies private companies have for their employees,” he said, adding that the government had not set an implementation date for the plan.
Civil servants would be granted the option to work a four-day work week only if they have met their weekly working hour target before Friday.
According to the 2003 Manpower Law, civil servants are required to complete 40 hours of work every week. This means they have to work eight hours a day under the five-day scheme.
The regulation paves the way for civil servants to have Fridays off if they work at least 10 hours from Monday to Thursday.
“This benefit will not be enjoyed by all civil servants, only the most outstanding will be eligible,” Waluyo said.
He stressed that the four-day work week would only be offered to those whose annual assessment score was above 90 — which is classified as “exceeding the government’s expectation” according to the Government Regulation No. 30/2019.
The ministry plans to grant the four-day work week benefit to only the top 20 percent of high-performing civil servants in each institution.
Waluyo added that the benefits could only be enjoyed by civil servants who performed administrative and analytics tasks such as researchers and analysts.
Under the plan, civil servants in public service divisions would not be eligible.
Indonesian Civil Servant Corps (Korpri) head Zudan Arif Fakhrulloh welcomed the plan, saying that it was a progressive idea that would help provide a better working environment for civil servants.
However, he underlined that good plans needed to be supported by equally good systems.
The government, he suggested, should set up a digital platform that allowed civil servants to report attendance and to upload work documents. Such a platform would help the government oversee the activity of civil servants, Zudan said.
Trubus Rahadiansyah, a public policy expert at Trisakti University also expressed support for the plan, suggesting that flexibility at work could improve civil servants’ performance.
He suggested that before enjoying the benefits, civil servants should sign an integrity pact stating that they would maintain an excellent level of performance.
If civil servants failed to do so, the government could impose administrative sanctions, such as reducing their wages or demoting them, Trubus added.
Ela Nurlaela, a 43-year-old mother from Bogor, West Java, said she had no issues with the plan so long as it did not affect the operating hours of public offices, such as civil registration, religious affairs and taxation offices. (glh)
