Flex Time: 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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Copyright 2005, RAN ONE Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission from www.ranone.com.