Talk about flexi hours has been around for
some time now but the execution is slow in coming especially among the more
established organizations. Start-ups somehow understand this as the new work
trend and adopted it quickly. I think for the others, it’s a situation of when
things don’t need fixing, you do nothing.
But when talent is scarce to come by and
the ones you want to keep decided spending time with family makes more sense at
certain point of their lives, employers need to give “flexi hours” a good hard
look.
And frankly, it’s not so hard to implement
flexi hours, thanks to technology. So if your work can be done with a phone,
computer or internet line, that basically means you qualify for flexi hours.
Some time back, one of my Consultants
decided to cut down on her working hours as she wished to spend more time with
her young children. I have no problem introducing flexi hours because the
nature of our work is such that it’s possible to work from home. If a meet up
either with client or candidate needs to be done, it’s possible to schedule the
appointment that suits both parties and not necessarily need to be at the office. As for other tasks such as research and
screening of candidates, the Consultant can perform them via a computer with
internet access and all these can be done in the comfort of one’s home. So it
was a win-win situation for us. My Consultant gets what she wanted and I
managed to keep a good staff.
But certainly not all jobs qualify and make
the case for flexi hours. We can’t expect a job as a Receptionist to qualify
for that. If a job is office-bound, i.e., you are hired to be present at the
office or the site so called your work place, such as Site Supervisor or Retail
Shop Sales Assistant, then flexi-hours might not be applicable. So if your job
is valued on piece-meal basis or by the results you generate and the process
of how you get it done is immaterial, then flexi-hours makes huge sense. Think
Writers, Programmers, Consultants and Designers.
The other factor that is worth a mention
would be those that have proven to be reliable in an environment in which no or
limited supervision is required. And that can only be established when an
employer had already built some level of trust with the said employee, hence such implementation
without doubt will be successful.
With our work revolves around
technology more and more each day, and people increasingly advocating a
work-life balance, i.e., quality life, the idea of flexi hours in employment is
going to be more of a reality than ever before.
In fact, people are already talking about working from our
smartphones. Our whole office is in that little device, almost everything can
be accomplished with it. So I guess flexi hours and work from anywhere are work
trends that are here to stay.
