Description
Employees with a flexible work schedule as a percentage of total employees.
Formula
End of period headcount . Flexible work schedule / End of period headcount * 100
Interpretation
Flexible Work Hours Rate indicates the percentage of the workforce that participates in flexible work arrangements and may not work the standard operating hours of the organisation.
Many organisations offer some employees options to work hours that are more convenient for them than standard office hours. Employees may work ten hours four days a week with the fifth day off , or nine hours a day for nine days with the tenth day off.
Other employees may start work at 6:00a.m. and leave at 3:00p.m. for traffic or day care reasons. Regular telecommuting part or full time may also be considered a flexible work arrangement.
These and other flexible work arrangements are often seen as a desirable work-life benefit and can be beneficial to employers for multiple reasons.
Employees who might otherwise leave the organisation may stay because of the personal flexibility of their work hours. Such work arrangements might attract or retain working parents who otherwise might not work outside the home.
For some organisations, it may be useful to have employees working odd hours to provide coverage of systems or client work that spans more than a typical workday.
However, flexible work arrangements may also present some limitations, primarily related to productivity interruptions, increased operational costs and personnel processing costs.
Therefore, it is useful to monitor an or ganisation’s Flexible Work Hour s Rate, understand which employee populations have high or low percent ages of flex workers, and then assess the related impact.
Data Sourcing
Organisations may source fields capturing flexible work arrangements from payroll tables, timekeeping databases or HRIS tables of jobs or personal characteristics.
Analysis
Employers may find it useful to measure Flexible Work Hours Rate by certain job characteristics to understand which populations are availing themselves of flex-time offerings.
Dimensions for such analysis include job family, job function, occupation, pay grade, employment level and performance rating. It may also be useful to analyse this measure by organisational unit and location to understand where flexible arrangements are more practical, more accepted or more likely to be allowed.
Limitations
Flexible Work Hours Rate, without further analysis, does not indicate the types of flexible arrangements under which employees work.
It also does not directly measure the impact of those arrangements on employee commitment, employee engagement or workforce productivity.
Additionally, it does not measure the cost of flexible work arrangements.
Targets
Targets for this measure will depend in part on the percentage of the employee population that is eligible to elect such arrangements. Targets must also consider any potential negative impact on client relationships, customer service and work unit productivity.
Targets relative to a benchmark group are not likely to be useful because of the wide variation of work policies across organisations, though general benchmark information may be useful to understand how other employers have structured their work hours for their own employment brands.