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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.
The work can be divided by function, geography, time or workload, and the arrangement requires an adequate transfer of tasks.
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 under job-sharing schemes are adjusted based on their new employment agreements.
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 “data-driven and project-specific squads” 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.
DBS Chief Piyush Gupta said: “As the way we live, banks and work continue to change dramatically, we must address the scale of disruptions before us. We are poised to radically transform the way we we work by introducing a wide range of measures to include (these initiatives) “.
Similarly, United Overseas Bank announced last Friday that it will give the majority of its workforce the option to work remotely two days a week once the Covid-19 restrictions are lifted. The bank, which operates in 19 markets, has a workforce of more than 26,000 employees across the group.
In a six-month review of work arrangements and tools, the bank found that about 65 percent of its functions, all of which are not customer-oriented, were suitable for remote work.
UOB group head of human resources Dean Tong said: “We believe the future of the workplace is a hybrid in which employees choose how to manage their work commitments based on where and where they can be more. Working from home during Covid-19 has been instructive because of the speed and intensity of change, but we must look beyond the present and define a more sustainable future of work. “
For example, once safe distancing restrictions are eased, people will want to meet at the workplace for close collaboration and in-person discussions, but prefer to connect online for routine tasks that can be accomplished from anywhere, he said.
Meanwhile, Jason Ho, head of group human resources at OCBC Bank, said: “Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have been agile in the way we introduced new initiatives, practices and measures to adapt and transform the way we work. “.
He added that the bank will continue to do so as the situation progresses, taking into account factors such as the preferences and well-being of employees.
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