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Bend Over Backwards for Flextime
It was a hot issue a few years ago but now flextime seems to have been
dropped from press coverage. Does that mean it was tried and didn’t
work?
Momentum to introduce flextime grew through the 1990s and peaked along
with the economy. However, since the dotcom crash and a general slowing
of economic activity it faded from the list of prominent concerns as
employees became focused on simply staying in their jobs.
With news of a skills shortage
and forecasts of a more difficult outlook for employers seeking staff,
flextime is making its way back into the news and should once again be
given consideration by organizations that haven’t yet introduced it.
Flexibility is Valued by Professionals
Minnesota-based Work & Family Connections Inc., a training organization
for employers, recently conducted a survey that found there was little
doubt about which benefits work-life professionals saw as having the
most positive impact on their organization. More than half of
respondents to an online survey chose either flextime (27%) or informal
flexibility (24%).
A 2004 ‘Women in Technology’ poll of its 25,000 members found that 61%
said that flexibility was the most valuable benefit for working mothers,
and a recent UK study by software maker Corel found that employers who
want creativity and increased productivity in their staff should not
only offer more flexible working hours, but should take the time and
trouble to find out when individuals work best.
Offering flextime enables smaller businesses to compete with larger
firms for top talent. It’s also been shows to increase employees’
loyalty and can even be good for business.
When First Tennessee Bank allowed some of its branches to adopt
flextime, it found that customer-retention rates were seven percent
higher in those offices, and employee-retention rates were twice those
without flextime.
Increase Your Appeal to Prospective Employees
With flextime, or ‘flexible work scheduling’ to use one of its more
definitive names, employees put in the hours of a normal working week
but choose their own times to start and finish work. One employee might
start work at 7am and leave the office at 4pm while another might start
at 10am and leave at 7pm.
This has real ‘market appeal’ for employees with so many having to
balance a varying list of domestic responsibilities including childcare
with earning a living. A parent can put in eight hours a day and still
manage to attend to the demands of raising children. This means a
happier employee with less stress in their life outside the office.
There are managerial issues connected to introducing flextime, not least
being the needs of supervising employees and keeping track of who is
working when.
But these haven’t proved to be major challenges to organizations with
non-controlling and efficient management.
There are also some types of enterprises where flextime is simply not an
option. Where an assembly-line type of process is involved, or where all
members of a team have to be together at the same time, flextime is
inappropriate. Management has to consider such issues and decide if it
can be introduced for the benefit of the organization before going ahead
with it.
If the choice is to introduce flextime there are other decisions that
need to be made about the terms and conditions under which the system
will operate. Most businesses with flextime have ‘core hours’ within
which all employees must work – say from 10am to 2pm. Other
considerations revolve around details such as can different hours be
worked on different days and can ‘extra’ hours be worked one week and
credited to the following week? Flexibility is the essence of successful
flextime.
Increase Team Members’ Job Satisfaction
A survey conducted by OfficeTeam, an administrative staffing service
based in Menlo Park, California, found that one-third of 613 workers
polled said greater schedule flexibility would result in increased job
satisfaction.
Liz Hughes, vice president of OfficeTeam had this to say about the
survey findings. “More work often means longer hours, which can lead to
burnout. A flexible schedule can alleviate some of the burden and allow
for greater work-life balance for staff.”
Hughes also noted, “The best managers focus on retaining top performers
in any economy. Turnover is costly, and employees who feel appreciated
are less likely to leave when business conditions improve.”
A business needs to focus on results and not just on what’s called ‘face
time’. The best workers you have might be capable of even more if they
were allowed to work hours that are their most productive. If workers
were able to create a better balance between their responsibilities
inside and outside the workplace they could perform better in both
environments.
Back in 1990 when it all started to happen, K. Cramer and J. Pearce said
in their Management Review article ‘Work and Family Policies Become
Productivity Tools’:
“Corporate strategists know that a good employee is far too precious a
resource to waste and that they will find themselves hard-pressed in the
1990s to attract and retain skilled workers and professionals-that is,
unless they offer the type of employment programs that employees want
and need.”
Kramer and Pearce may have been ahead of their time, but now the time
might be right for all employers to consider the possible benefits of
flexible working hours.
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