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SINGAPORE – South East Asia’s largest bank, DBS, will introduce a formal work-sharing scheme to support employees in need of more flexible work arrangements, among other initiatives aimed at transforming the way its staff work in a post-pandemic world.
Two employees will share the responsibilities of a full-time position under the scheme, which is based on the bank’s ability to operate successfully in divided teams over the past few months, DBS said on Tuesday (November 17).
Staff under the plan will retain all existing medical benefits in full and will continue to be covered under the bank’s insurance plans.
At the same time, the bank will also introduce more part-time work arrangements.
The Straits Times understands that the shared work plan is voluntary and is not the result of cost reduction measures.
Job sharing is a flexible working arrangement in which two or more people share the responsibilities of a full-time job, according to an implementation guide on the scheme from the Ministry of Manpower and the National Federation of Employers of Singapore.
[[nid:507949]]The work can be divided by function, geography, time or workload, and the arrangement requires an adequate transfer of functions.
Job sharing differs from part-time jobs, which are self-employment with less than 35 hours of work per week.
Only 1.3 percent of Singaporean companies offered job-sharing opportunities in June last year.
The salaries of employees participating in shared work plans are adjusted based on their new work arrangements.
Employees’ wages under job-sharing schemes are adjusted based on their new work arrangements.
Singapore Human Resources Institute President Low Peck Kem said that job sharing is not very common among Singaporean companies as it requires companies to manage multiple employees for a full time job and not many companies have reaped cost savings as a result.
However, he added that the scheme can help companies retain talent and improve productivity, if used correctly.
“Employee benefits are clearly the option of having flexible work arrangements suited to different stages of an employee’s life. Employees can contribute significantly to the economy and balance other interests in life, ”he said.
In addition to the scheme, DBS Bank will give all employees the flexibility to work remotely for up to 40 percent of their time at work. The bank will also create more “squads based on project-specific data,” compared to the usual functional departments. These squads will be made up of members from various functions and areas of expertise.
DBS has a workforce of 12,000 people in Singapore.
More than 7,200 employees across the bank, 4,300 of whom are in Singapore, will also receive upgrade or retraining in emerging areas such as design thinking, data and analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning.
To facilitate further collaboration, it will launch a 5,000-square-foot Living Lab workspace that aims to combine physical and virtual work setups.
