Will Flexible Hours Make Your Team More Productive?

Traditional work hours are a thing of the past. The days in which employees rushed to clock in at 9:00am sharp and waited until 5:00pm to go home are nearly gone. In today’s modern workplace, employees are granted more flexible working hours outside their company’s normal open and close time.

Society for Human Resource Management found that 57 percent of organizations offer flexible work arrangements. Specifically, 54 percent of companies stated that they offer flextime during core business hours.

As a manager, you might be asking yourself “what’s in it for the company?” Productivity may be the answer.

How Flexible Hours Benefits the Company

When flexible work hours are implemented, not only do employees benefit, but so does the organization. Flexible work hours help boost employee satisfaction and morale, which in turn increases productivity and efficiencies helping to make companies more profitable.

According to The State of Flexible Work Arrangement, 73 percent of employees said flexible work hours increased their satisfaction at work and a whopping 78 percent agreed that flexible work hours made them more productive.

Not convinced yet? In addition to boosting employee satisfaction, productivity and profitability, flexible work arrangements provide access to greater talent and ease of management (a big selling point for managers).

Job seekers, especially millennials, are actively searching for jobs that offer flexible working arrangements and a better work life balance. According to research by the Harvard Business Review, 88 percent of workers claim that they would swap a higher-paying job for one that paid less if flexible working hours were available to them. In offering flexible working arrangements, companies can successfully recruit top talent that would have otherwise been out of reach.

Types of Flexible Work Options

Before offering flexible working hours, consider many many formats you can choose from, depending on what the company needs or what your employees want.

Flex Hours: A flex program allows employees to come in later in the morning or leave earlier in the afternoon, but they have to be in the office at specific times during the day, no matter what, like 10am to 2pm.

Remote Days: This allows employees to work remotely one day of the week, like Wednesday, for example. This gives them a chance to cut down on commuting while you maintain an in-house base.

Compressed Week: This option allows employees to work four 10-hour days, and have Friday off rather than working five 8-hour days.

How to Make Flex Hours Work

The key to making flexible time work is having strong strategies in place for keeping employees active and engaged. If your organization is new to having remote employees, even if it’s only for one day each week, or a few hours each day, your leadership team and managers need to brush up on how to build and manage strong remote teams.

Use these tips from Powerful Strategies to Build a Strong Remote Team:

• Use video for meetings to make sure everyone feels connected and attendees can read body language, which leads to less misunderstanding. Even short meetings can benefit from being on video, rather than just audio.
• Encourage flexibility, after-all, this is an initiative to give employees more control over their schedule. “Allow people to set their own schedules within a given time frame, especially if you need their working hours to intersect.
• Set clear expectations for work time outside the office.
• Stay in tune with your team. “You need to keep an open eye for people who don’t seem to interact with others and refrain from engaging in dialogue—be it work-related or informal.
• Leave room for fun—connecting on informal topics build deeper connections.

Anything that makes it possible for employees to do their job outside the office is critical to success. This includes providing the right tools, like chat and messenger platforms, and file sharing.

Time tracking tools are also valuable for managing remote teams, allowing leadership and managers to have a clear understanding of what employees are completing at home. With a tool like ClickTime, managers can estimate how long projects will take, which helps employees prioritize tasks and become more productive—they may even meet deadlines earlier.

No one has to worry about spending extra time on projects outside of working hours and managers are able to see how much is on their team’s plate and then delegate projects accordingly.

If your company is in the beginning stages of implementing a new flexible work program, don’t overlook these details. Finally, don’t forget to work with your Human Resources department to create a flexible work policy and handbook that outlines in detail what’s expected of employees. Team leaders must all set expectations for output, productivity and meetings, just as they would in the office.

Flex Hours Make Your Team More Productive

The numbers don’t lie. Flexible work schedules provide employees and employers with an array of benefits from greater profitability to improved productivity and more. Bring your business into the future and ditch the traditional work schedule once and for all.

Jessica Thiefels is an entrepreneur and founder and CEO of Jessica Thiefels Consulting. She’s been writing for more than 10 years and has been featured in top publications including Forbes and Fast Company. She also writes for Business Insider, Virgin, Glassdoor and more. Follow her on Twitter @JThiefels and connect on LinkedIn.