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In an earlier post Murph commented regarding confidence to ask for flexibility of working hours. She has seen too many part timers stall their careers as it is assumed that if you only want to work four days per week, you are not committed to the job.
Work/life balance is becoming increasingly important to employees; their reasons for this are dependent on what is happening in their life. For example, you could have someone who wishes to care for their aging parents, a divorced parent wanting to spend quality time with their children, someone who wants to study or even somebody who loves to go surfing when the surf is good. Each particular example would require a different flexible working approach.
With a growing skills shortage and the aging workforce, organisations are starting to see flexible working practices as a way to attract and retain their employees. Organisations are finding that introducing flexible working options provide the following advantages:
- Becoming an employer of choice and realising the employee value proposition
- Reduced absenteeism
- Reduced attrition
- Improved productivity
- Reduced stress levels and improved morale and commitment
- Potential for improved occupational health and safety records
These days flexible working practices are not only about part-time work. Organisations are offering various flexible working practices such as:
- Compressed working week
- Flexitime
- Job sharing
- Telework or home based work
- Rostered days off
- Shorter work days
- Phased retirement
- Paid maternity, paternity, grandparents, carers, volunteering, cultural, study and bereavement leave
- On site or near site childcare (I have been lucky to experience this and I visited my daughter during breaks)
- Sabbaticals
However, I have found that creating policies on flexible working practices is not enough. You need to also have a culture and systems which support flexible working practices. For example, there is no use having a home telecommuting policy if your IT systems do not support it.
Another issue is the unwritten ground rules, i.e. even though there is a policy on flexible working practices there is the culture of "that is not how things are done around here". I call this unwritten rule the 'presenteeism culture', i.e. managers and colleagues who believe they need to see you to believe you are working. For me this also highlights that there is very little trust within a team. Managers and colleagues should be focusing on performance and actually empowering their staff, not focusing on attendance and supervision.
Some sites you may find useful are:
3 Comments
The way I put it is that we should be measuring outputs rather than inputs - hours present is an input, but plenty of people work physically present and mentally absent. As more and more of our productivity comes from mental rather than physical work, the more it matters WHAT people do with their "work" time, rather than when and where they spend it.
BTW - keep writing Alli - blogging isn't about "instant" gratification, it's about building a thought community ... and it can be slow (even if Stephen is a bit of a rock star...)
Hi Alli,
good article - work/life boundary dissolution is a big issue for a lot of people (including me).
And like Ric, I would ask you to keep writing too
Your numbers are better than mine were for the same time into the blog project - it does get better with time, trust me 
Have you thought about joining a community like Australian Blogs over at BUMPzee? It helps to have other people to talk blogging with who aren't, well, already famous like Steve
Cheers, Andrew
Andrew and Ric,
Thanks for the comments. I have to admit blogging helps me keep up with what is happening in my profession as I research the topics I blog about. Which also helps me with my studies. I will take a look at BUMPzee.