Employees with flex time opportunities remain longer in their position and exhibit increased motivation and willingness to do their jobs, because the flexible arrangements show their employer values them.
Flex time, to me, is actually a reward for employees—or an attempt by the employer not to be so rigid in their thinking regarding the hours of operation and when employees should be working. If there’s room for flexibility, why not let your employees benefit from it?
Offering Flex Time Opportunities
When offering flex time opportunities to employees, employers often make a couple mistakes, such as:
- Not putting enough parameters around the arrangements;
- Trying to administer it by piecemeal instead of sitting down, thinking about their business, their employees, and what makes sense for them and then coming up with a written flex time policy.
In order to offer flex time opportunities to employees, employers should:
- Do an analysis of their workplace—what they do, their core business, the different departments they have—and really give some thought to if flex time would work in their line of business and for their employees. Not all businesses are adaptable to flex time, but there are plenty that are.
- Write a policy surrounding what the flex time opportunities will be, and give employees some guidelines on what will and will not be allowed.
- Roll out communication to the management team, and then to employees, when these opportunities are available.
There can be several variations for flex time; again, it’s really all about what works for the company.
Here are some examples of flex time opportunities companies can offer:
- An alternative work schedule where employees work four 9-hour days and one 8-hour day, and then the next week they get an additional day off. Or they might work four 10-hour days and have one additional day off each week.
- Employees could be allowed to come into work anywhere between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m., as long as they work 8 hours once they get in.
- Employees could be allowed to telecommute, which means they work from home sometimes. Telecommuting depends on a company’s line of work, but it is a great option for most office environments. There still have to be parameters, though, such as the hours telecommuters should be working or productivity goals they have to meet each week.
Not going into the office everyday is a plus for a lot of people. With the economy on a downturn, employees would often like to stay at home and save some money—not to mention the wear-and-tear on their cars. And if you can do your job in the comfort of your own home/home office, why shouldn’t you?
But there’s still a lot to take into consideration, because when you have a situation where maybe not every department can work from home, you might have some rivalry, jealousy or things of that nature. So before you make the decision to offer telecommuting as an option to your employees, you have to figure out which positions can work at home and, once again, have clear guidelines in place.
You may even need some type of legal agreement about the equipment, the hours, what is going to happen if the arrangement doesn’t work and how many times a week the telecommuters must come into the office. These types of issues should be well-documented in an agreement and/or policy.
Flex Time Means Different Things to Different Companies
If, for example, a customer service department has to be on the phones from 8 a.m., then maybe their flex time would be different than another department where they don’t have outside contact with the public, so it isn’t important for them to be at their desks at a certain time.
For another example, a primarily IT company I once worked with wanted to offer flex time opportunities to its employees. This company didn’t really have day-to-day deadlines. Their work had longer deadlines. So as long as employees were working on their projects and completed them in a timely manner, it didn’t matter if the employees were at the office at a certain hour in the morning or left at a certain hour in the evening.
The company decided to have an “8-hour rule.” This meant that as long as the employees worked 8 hours a day and let their manager know their schedule ahead of time, the company didn’t care what time employees came in or what time they left.
As a result, the employees were a lot happier, the company had fewer turnovers and there was less dissatisfaction than there had been in the past.
So flex time opportunities need to be tailored to the majority of employees at a company, as possible.