Employees’ needs fall on deaf ears

Research has revealed that employers in Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia continue to ignore the importance of work-life balance as employee preference for it rises to the highest level in years. The Randstad Employer Brand Research 2017 revealed that the importance of work-life balance has continued to rise to become one of the most important attractiveness factors in Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia. Despite this, employers in all three markets performed so poorly in the aspect of work-life balance that the factor ended close to the bottom of the ranking.

The ranking also showed that employers scored the highest in financial health and good reputation. While potential employees considered the financial health of the company to be fairly important, good reputation was not much of a priority, further highlighting the gap between employers and employees.

Pleasant work atmosphere was also found to have a gap in expectations between employees and employers. The attractiveness factor ranked fairly highly with employees, however, employers scored poorly in this area – just one position higher than work-life balance.

Michael Smith, Managing Director, Randstad Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia noted, “The results are far from being encouraging. It’s widely known that work-life balance has become highly important for employees of all demographics; our research just reaffirms and measures that attribute.” Whether organisations are resting their laurels on being financially healthy and having a strong reputation, or whether their current work-life balance initiatives are not strong enough, it is clear that employer branding efforts need to be very carefully re-examined.

Smith continued, “The stakes are high for these organisations. By not addressing the evolving wants and needs of employees, they risk losing the very talent that helped them build their strong reputations and financial health.”