Question

You are a supervisor in a government office. Your workers are upset because their work hours have recently been changed to 8:00am-4:30pm after two years of having flextime in place. Previously, employees were required to be in the office between 10:00am-2:30pm as core hours and could work the remaining part of their eight-hour day anytime between 6:00am and 7:00pm. Employees were free to manage their own time and you did not track their work hours. Everything appeared to be working well, but recently an auditor from the accounting office determined that your workers were only working seven hours a day on average. Two employees were only working during the core hours (4.5 hours per day). Your manager discontinued the flextime program upon hearing these findings.

What are the pros and cons of a flextime program? How could you have kept this problem from happening? Are there any other workplace flexibility options that you could use to replace flextime?

Answer 1

What are the pros and cons of a flextime program?

Flextime is the employees work schedules that allow employees to begin and stop work at alternating times but that still preserves a set number of hours throughout the work week.

Flexitime is an employee benefit here employees are given flexibility in terms of working time in a day. Usually,

• employees must be at work at a particular period of day for compulsory and
• The remaining hours are flexitime-employees can choose to work at any time during this period. No strict in/out timings

Advantage

• Helps employees manage work life and personal life
• Reduces stress, increases employee satisfaction and improves productivity
• Helps in carrying extra working hours to next period. For example, if an employee has to work for 50 hours during a work period of 6 days and he has worked for 52 hours, the additional two hours can be carried to next period as credit.
• Employees are paid only for time in attendance

Disadvantage

• In the absence of supervision, this leads to abuse of the system by employees
• Extra efforts should be made on part of human resources department- additional administrative expenses

How could you have kept this problem from happening?

As said above in the absence of a monitoring and regulatory system, flexitime can be abused by employees.

I could have, maintained an attendance register with frequent audits. I also could have maintained a register of the clock-in/ clock out time, a number of hours worked each day and hours worked each period.

I trust the employees but I should not have allowed leniency to set in. she should have kept track of the workers.

Are there any other workplace flexibility options that you could use to replace flextime?

I can sue the following arrangements for improving morale

Paid leave

Employees can be offered voluntary leaves so that they can take time for their personal issues, added with the benefit of pay.

This also reduces paperwork in case of maternity leave, sick leave etc

Job sharing

The same job is shared by employees reducing their working hours, but pay per employee also decreases. However, this offers them considerable stress reduction and time for family, especially for women employees.

Telecommuting.- work at home for possible situations, jobs and time

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