What Your Staff Wants You to Know About Flextime

A couple days ago, I wrote about what employees need to understand about how their managers view flextime. But, aside from understanding the benefits of flextime to management, managers also need to understand the role they can play in making a flexible work arrangement succeed, says Ellen Kossek, a professor of human resources and labor relations at Michigan State University.
Flexible work schedules will never be on automatic pilot. These arrangements have to be managed. Most managers intuitively get that - and as a result, many either won't approve a schedule to begin with or take a hands off approach when an employee works flexibly.

But Kossek studied how flexible working arrangements play out in unionized workplaces -- where you'd think it was especially difficult to get everybody on the same page about alternative work arrangements -- --and found that the most successful flextime workers had managers who treated flextime as a set of permissions, checks and balances. Recasting flexwork as an exercise in team collaboration puts the problem solving responsibility where it belongs: on the employees who want flexwork.

It's not as difficult as it sounds. Kossek recommends that managers take these three steps:

1. Create a supportive environment for flextime by talking about it openly. "You need to frame it in terms of the context of the total workflow," says Kossek. "The way to make it part of the group culture is to put it out in the open. At some point, any one employee will have more needs than another. Frame it in terms of trade-offs - maybe the person who's getting more flex for the moment also takes on the unpleasant task everyone avoids."
2. Trust your team to find solutions to each others' scheduling and work flow challenges. Kossek cites the example of a hospital department whose secretaries arranged to cover each others' Friday afternoon workloads to create summer hours for all. "It's about setting an environment in which people can help find their own solutions. And managers set the parameters," says Kossek.
3. Acknowledge that career flex is as important as family flex. Workers will burn out if they don't have a chance to recharge, gain fresh skills, and meet new colleagues. That's especially important for working parents. Integrate career development into the flex schedule to keep the focus on continual development and to ensure that employees gain strategic skills.

Image courtesy of Morguefile contributor Calgren.