Flexitime is becoming a huge trend recently in the corporate world, allowing workers to have more freedom with their time as long as they meet the desired expectations. Depending on the organization's needs, flextime schedules have both advantages and disadvantages. Nonetheless, if you ask the workers whether they like it or not, the obvious answer is big yes. In fact, it is the top factor in evaluating a job prospect for workers according to a survey.
With the boom of freelancing jobs in the Philippines, workers have more options to work from their homes and manage their own time while being together with their families. It is very common in certain industries such as copywriting, SEO, web development, graphic illustrations, online tutorial as well as software development.
Early this year, president Duterte has signed the Telecommuting Act into law. This allows telecommuting or working from home as an alternative work arrangement for employees in the private sector.
Due to this trend and the recently, signed law by the president, the overall labor force in the Philippines has more leverage to demand flexitime to companies. The more options, the more bargaining power for the side of the workers. It's like demand and supply concept. Flexitime is also common for start-up companies.
But, is really flexible time can increase your employees' productivity? Well, it depends on some factors. Let's elucidate more about flexitime using these areas:
1. Flexitime is not for fresh graduates
Fresh graduates are longing for proper training, mentorship, and discipline. Therefore, providing flextime to your fresh graduates should be your last option. It may just lead to a lack of discipline for these young professionals and may cause demotivation in the long-run. Flexitime is more ideal for those in senior role positions.
2. Fit for creative roles
Flexitime is definitely ideal for creative roles such as content creator as creativity comes when the environment is less stiff and more relaxed. Come to think of it, creative ideas arise in unexpected times and places. In many countries, companies even allow their content creators to fully work remotely or manage their own time. If you are in a creative industry, you are lucky enough to enjoy flexitime perks from the companies.
3. Greatly affects work-flow
If you are working on a fast phase environment with teams highly interdependent to each other, flexitime will cause a negative outcome making it harder for teams to work and coordinate with each other. Keep in mind that flexitime will greatly affect the workflow of the teams. A short scenario, if you need to clarify something to a specific person but he is already out of the office during working hours, that would leave you no choice but to wait for the next day or so.
4. Good for work-life balance and retention
If one of your company's mantra is to provide your workers to have a good sense of work-life balance, flexitime would be the perfect channel to foster it. Filipinos are known for being family-oriented and spending quality time for their families every day has huge importance. Considering that Filipinos put so much value on this area of their life, providing such will probably increase your employee retention. Nonetheless, according to a statement released by Monster Philippines, Filipino are generally satisfied with their work-life balance than its SEA neighbors with 65% of Filipinos said they are satisfied with their work-life balance.
Final Thoughts
Flexitime has a lot of advantages and disadvantages not only for the companies but also for the workers. Nonetheless, the most important thing to consider is evaluating the nature of your operations, company culture and demographics of employees and many other factors before you decide. Flexitime isn’t for every employee or every employer. What works for one business could be a catastrophe for another. If you decide to implement flexible time, make sure that you do proper post evaluation of your organization's efficiency and employee engagement to develop your next course of action.
