Rosari Chia

As of 2019, I have been working in JLL for 13 years, 7 of them as a mother. As a mother, it is important for me to have quality time with my child. On weekdays, I spent 12 hours for JLL (including commuting time) and max. 3 hours with my family. As many of you, our working hour takes the majority of our 24 hours capacity. In my case, my working time is 4 times more than my family time. Thus, the importance of my family quality time.

During my 7+ years tenure as a mother, most of the time I have been able to reach that precious family quality time that I want. If my child is sick, I could take parental leave and nurture her to health faster. Approaching Lebaran time where our support system take their leave for 2 weeks, I am able to take my child to JLL office, as we have child friendly week during that time.

Now I am on my second pregnancy and I see further support from JLL as mother of a newborn than what I experienced 7 years ago. We have the gradual return to work policy with 4 months of maternity leave. And when I do return to work as a nursing mother, JLL is also supporting us by having our own lactation room we proudly called Kartini, while 4 years ago us lactating moms are crammed up in the Executive Toilet and we have our JLL Diversity and Inclusion team to thank for that.

It is important for us, new mothers, to have that support system from our working environment. The period as a new mother is the ONLY make-or-break period in a working mother’s career that the fathers rarely, if not never, have to experience. Rarely do fathers have to choose between their career or raising their child, because they have the mothers to do that. In most cases, women resigned from their office during such period because of the lack of the support system either from their family or their working place. I am not diminishing the choice of being a stay-at-home mothers. I salute stay-at-home mothers. I only mean to say that the decision of mothers to be either a working-mother or a stay-at-home-mother should be the choice of the mother without any force or pressure from our family or our company or our community. And I am fortunate to be able to do that, and I will implement the message as best as I can by being involved in JLL Diversity and Inclusion team

Having that experience, I realized 2 things:

1) How important support system and environment is for mothers, and

2) That working environment and policies need to be designed also for us women and mothers.

I hope that JLL will continue to support female as working mothers, and implement design and flexibilities to support women in their workspace and policies.

For females everywhere - working or not, parent or not – let’s support each other and run the world!