There are all kinds of variations on the flextime theme, many of which are seasonal. But even these perks can go a long way to improving employee attitudes and loyalty. When I worked for Money magazine in New York, for example, we could leave early on Fridays during the summer months—
anywhere from noon to 2 P.M. I loved it, and I respected my employer for giving us that sweetener and trusting that we would be accountable for our work.
The most popular flexible arrangements are telecommuting, job sharing, phased retirement of older workers, and schedule shifting or flexible schedules. Some of these arrangements can be temporary, such as
permitting you to shift your workday to end an hour earlier than usual to take your mom to a doctor’s appointment. Others can be more permanent, such as negotiating for a four-day-a-week schedule.
Or perhaps there’s a job-share available where you could be loaned to another department for a few months. If there’s an employee out on leave, maybe you can fill that job in the interim. If it’s flextime and a reduced schedule you’re dreaming of, you might be able to pair up with a younger worker—perhaps a new parent—who is looking for flextime to pool efforts in a way that gets the job done and makes your employer happy at the same time.
Companies report a wide variety of such options. “My company grants flexible schedules in the summer to enable employees to care for out-of- school kids or enjoy the sunshine by working, say, from 7 A.M. to 3 P.M.,”
says Zeynep Ilgaz, cofounder and president of Confirm Biosciences and TestCountry.
“We encourage our people to work from home or find alternatives when it makes sense,” Shannon Schuyler, corporate responsibility leader at the auditing giant PricewaterhouseCoopers, told me. “When done well, offering flexibility results in better job satisfaction and increased productivity, all while helping manage our overall environmental footprint.”
Scripps Health, based in San Diego, earned AARP’s former Best Employers for Workers Over 50 award eight times since 2004. Here’s why: Scripps
offers a number of alternative work arrangements, including a phased retirement program. Employees have the opportunity to gain new
experience by working on temporary assignments in other departments, on team projects, and by having access to formal job rotation and mentoring programs.
Google allows many of its employees to establish their own work hours. At Microsoft, employees can opt for when to begin their day, as long as it’s between 9 A.M. and 11 A.M., and many telecommute. Other large
companies that champion telecommuting include American Express, Apple, Dell, the auditing firm KPMG, and Xerox. Overall, according to a June 2014 report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor, about a quarter of employed Americans work from home some hours each week. And Forrester
Research predicts that telecommuting will rise to include 43 percent of workers in the United States by 2016. According to Global Workplace Analytics, 50 percent of the workforce currently have jobs that can be done from home.
Not all of us are in a position that permits this liberty, however. Many jobs demand that you be physically present. Classroom teachers, retail sales clerks, and assembly-line workers, for example, cannot realistically do their jobs anywhere but on-site. And if you’re managing a cadre of workers, you probably need to be present. If you have to be on-site to perform your job, chances are slim you’ll be able to transition to teleworking full time. But there are options for you, too. For example, you might be able to negotiate with your boss flexible hours or an occasional work-from-home day.
But many professional, technological, and scientific occupations are more likely to offer workers flexible options, studies have found. The accounting industry as a whole, for example, has been a groundbreaker in offering workplace flexibility. Ernst & Young, for instance, offers formal flexible work arrangements, which could be one of, or a combination of, the following: reduced or variable hours, compressed workweeks, short-term seasonal schedules, and telework, including working at home and other office locations.
The best work-at-home jobs are often those that demand a quiet space with few distractions. Web-based jobs in accounting, translation, sales, public relations, medical transcription, and customer service are some of the
growing areas that I write about in my book, AARP’s Great Jobs for Everyone 50+, and more are coming on stream all the time. Nonetheless, you should always be aware of the need to keep your people skills sharp.
A variation on teleworking is sharing desks or offices. Also called
“hoteling,” sharing desks and offices is gaining traction at numerous organizations, including federal government agencies such as the General Services Administration (GSA), the Patent and Trademark Office, and the Departments of Agriculture and Homeland Security. The Fish and Wildlife Service and the Broadcasting Board of Governors have pilot programs, too.
Corporate converts include pharmaceutical firm GlaxoSmithKline and the consulting firms Deloitte and Accenture. The impetus: Cutting the soaring cost of office space in some cities. But, hey, that can be a win for unhappy employees who would benefit from being sent home.
At the GSA headquarters, hundreds of telecommuting employees
participate in a desk-sharing program requiring employees to reserve their workstations either daily or weekly in advance. On days when they’re physically in the office, employees bring in their laptops and plug into
desks they have reserved through an online booking system, which includes maps of the building and e-mail reminders sent out before the reservations begin.
“It really changed dramatically how this agency works and collaborates,”
Komal Rasheed, 31, a senior adviser on policy and strategy at the agency, was quoted in a New York Times article as saying. She finds it “liberating and freeing,” she said, to work at different desks throughout the agency and to connect with other workers no longer restrained to one specific desk.
To help the shared-desk program work, government agencies offer telework training sessions, and the GSA web site includes copious pages dedicated to how to use the new workstations, including etiquette guidelines for sharing desks.