Additional Measures to Support Employers for Increased Parental Maternity Leave Provisions

45 Ms Denise Phua Lay Peng asked the Minister for Manpower whether there are other measures besides salary support to jointly resolve with employers the manpower challenges that arise from the upcoming increase in parental maternity leave.

Dr Tan See Leng: In reviewing parental leave policies, the Government consults the Tripartite Partners and seeks to strike a balance between supporting parents’ needs and managing the impact on businesses.

In introducing the recently announced parental leave enhancements, the Government recognised that employers will need to make adjustments to their manpower planning. To help employers manage the cost impact, the Government will reimburse employers for the salaries of their employees who take up Government-Paid Paternity Leave or Shared Parental Leave (SPL), up to the prevailing reimbursement limit of $2,500 per week, or about $10,000 per month. This is not an insignificant sum and underscores the Government’s support for both employers and employees. Employers can use these wage savings to hire temporary workers or make operational adjustments.

The Government also incorporated employers’ feedback in the design of the SPL scheme. For example, to allow sufficient time for employers to plan for covering arrangements before an employee goes on parental leave, there will be a new minimum notice period requirement of at least four weeks, which employees must serve before taking leave. This will apply for the existing Government-paid maternity and paternity leave, as well as the new SPL. Additionally, parents will only be able to make changes to their SPL sharing arrangement within the first four weeks of the child’s birth. Any changes thereafter will require their employer’s agreement. This balances between the need for parents to have sufficient time to decide on caregiving arrangements and the need for employers to have certainty and plan for covering arrangements.

Beyond that, employers can tap on resources from the Institute for Human Resource Professionals, which provides playbooks on business and workforce transformation, to improve the capabilities of their human resource (HR) teams. With stronger HR capabilities, employers will be better able to design more flexible and sustainable manpower arrangements for covering their employees on parental leave and ensure business continuity. For example, employers can provide more workplace flexibility by allowing parents to effectively go on a part-time work arrangement by taking a few days of SPL each week rather than consuming the leave in a single block. Such flexible work arrangements can also enable employers to recruit and retain seniors and caregivers who are looking for such part-time work opportunities, effectively complementing and expanding their overall manpower pool.

Employers can also tap on workforce grants, such as Workforce Singapore’s Career Conversion Programmes, to reskill workers to improve overall productivity and address operational challenges. On top of workforce grants, the Government also has schemes to support business transformation. Business owners can visit the GoBusiness portal at gobusiness.gov.sg for more information on the Government schemes available.