The employee is not only facing this issue at his workplace. He is deprived of quality time with his family. It adds to his frustration. These issues affect his health as well as productivity. A Forbes survey (USA) in 1991 highlighted the fact that nearly 80 per cent of the wealth in America is owned by women over 40. Most of the men who worked 18 to 20 hours a day to accumulate wealth did not live long enough to enjoy it.
How organizations are responding to these issues? Although not dramatic, a trend is emerging in which some organizations are trying to accommodate diverse employees’ needs by offering flexible work arrangements. Example of flexible work arrangement includes job sharing, flextime, and telecommuting. Job sharing is a work arrangement in which two or more employees divide a job’s responsibilities, hours, and benefits among themselves.
Several steps are critical to the success of such job-sharing programmes, including identifying those jobs that can be shared, understanding employees’ individual sharing style, and matching “partners’ who have complementary needs and skills.
Flextime is another type of flexible work arrangement in which an employee can choose when to be at the office. For example, an employee may decide that instead of working five days a week for eight hours a day, he prefers to work a 4-day/10 hour per day work schedule. With this schedule, the employees do not have to be at the office on Friday.
To avoid peak rush hour, other employees might use their flextime to arrive at and leave from work one hour later Monday through Friday. One research study concluded that flexible workweek schedule had a positive influence on employee performance, job satisfaction, and absenteeism.
The key of flextime programmes should not be too unstructured and that they lose some of their effectiveness over time. Telecommuting refers to the work arrangements that allow employees to work in their homes part- or full-time, maintaining their connection and communication with office through phone, fax, and computer.
It is believed that by allowing employees more control over their work lives, they will be not only better able to balance their work-home demands but higher recruitment and retention rates, improved morale, lower absenteeism and tardiness, and higher levels of employee productivity.
Family-friendly firms are moving forward to attract, motivate, and retain employees with diverse non-work needs. Organizations need to consider three important issues when developing and implementing such flexible work arrangements option. First every attempt should be made to open these programmes to all employees. The risk here is that if only certain groups are offered these options, then excluded groups may feel discriminated against.
Second, having the CEO of an organization announce these programmes is not enough to effect change. Many career-minded employees do not take advantage of flextime, or telecommuting for fear of being derailed enough to effect change. These individuals will continue to experience stress as they attempt to balance career and family priorities.
While most of the companies have long working hours, there are people who really care for their employees’ benefit and are finding ways to satisfy them. For example, an American bank encourages all its employees to spend two hours each week visiting their children’s school or volunteering at any school on company’s time.
It may seem inconsistent that we are asking employees to work harder, but the need to pinch pennies and reduce head count plays to the short term, while flexibility is important to our long–term health. Now the trend is catching up in France where the government has changed the length of the work week from 39 to 35 hours. A software company encourages its employees to stick to a 35-hour workweek. If you do more “by the end of the day you are just producing total garbage’.
Another well-established trend is for employees to define success in terms of personal self-expression and fulfilment of potential on the job. They are frequently less obsessed with the acquisition of wealth and now view life satisfaction as more likely to result from balancing the challenges and rewards of work with those in their personal lives.
Two important factors that affect individual productivity are ability and motivation. Now they need to ensure that work and family programmes are designed and implemented in a way that recognizes employees have “outside lives” and different values and needs.
Ignoring backlash may affect the working relationships of employees with and without family responsibilities. Managements now in the 21st century need to realize that employees are people with certain desires and needs.