Flex-time at the workplace

By Adam Gellert, Founder / HR + Recruitment Consultant at Linkus Group

The average full time employee works 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, with the same schedule through the length of their career with a certain company.  Employees often spend more time at work than they do at home.  How do you ensure that employees stay focused and motivated, maintaining their ambition and drive, throughout their entire career with your company?  The answer lies in flex time.

What is flex-time?

Flexible work arrangements or flex-time are options given to employees to help ensure their ability to achieve work-life balance.  These arrangements could include allowing employees to work part-time, job-sharing agreements, customizing work hours to 10am-6pm instead of 8am-4pm, or compressed workweeks where employees work longer hours to have more time off on weekends.

Benefits of flex-time

From an employee perspective, flex-time option could be a unique benefit of working at a company, as it is not a widely offered.  Flex time allows employees to better control their day, avoid rush hour commutes, and of course provides work-life balance – allowing individuals to complete errands and appointments while they are not at work.  As a result, employees stay focused, motivated, and efficient during work hours.

What does flex-time mean for an employer?

Employers have historically found a structured and streamlined flow of continuous work to be an effective format for organization design. Flex-time may sound like it could cause havoc for employers. However, if planned correctly, flex-time actually benefits employers. It allows for employers to schedule work across a longer portion of the day, it helps retain staff who have important interests outside of work, it creates a more efficient shared workspace, and it can improve staff coverage when someone is away.

Implementing flex-time does offer challengers for the employer, including ensuring fairness between employees, finding ways to have effective communication while some employees are off-the-clock, and maintaining trust and supervision.  In order to overcome these challenges, clear policies should be created and implemented in the organizational strategy. Tracking hours worked is one such effective strategy to ensure employees are committing the required hours of work.

There is no reason to lose valuable employees to repetitiveness and work-life constraints.   Incorporating flex-time in an organizational strategy can improve the overall health of an organization.