Thank you for joining me for this session of IndeavorTalks. Today we’re going to begin a multi-episode series around how to increase flexibility and how you can leverage modern tools to give employees the flexibility they increasingly demand, even in industries where this has historically been a challenge.
Today in episode one, we’re going to discuss the following topics. The increased need to give employees an increase in flexibility. What we mean by employee flexibility and what it can mean for your business. What is the spectrum of employee flexibility? And finally, we’re going to discuss the different categories of employee flexibility.
Why is there an increased need to give increase flexibility for employees? Well, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed our relationship with when employees were off of work. Or working jobs remotely that traditionally had to be on-site. People across the world realized that planning their work around life was more important to them than planning their life around work.
Now that the workforce got a taste, flexibility has become something they demand when seeking new jobs, or just for staying in the job that you’ve already invested time and money to train them in. So what do I mean by employee flexibility and what can it mean for your business? If you’re here watching this IndeavorTalk, chances are you’ve been involved in a program to improve employee flexibility for your company.
What does that mean? It’s kind of a nebulous term, and if you ask several different people to define it, you’ll probably get several different answers, particularly in industries where employee flexibility has not historically been a concern, such as manufacturing, public safety, or energy, where the work needs to be done at a set schedule and needs to be in person.
This series will be focused primarily on these industries, but the lessons here can be beneficial to any business wanting to meet their employees’ needs. Employee flexibility is giving employees some control over when, where, or how they complete their jobs. In this series, we’re going to focus mostly on the wind part of flexibility since in the industries we’re talking about where it’s been challenging to deal with.
It’s because, in these industries, there’s not really an ability to affect where or how the work gets done. This can mean anything from letting employees create their own schedules to taking their preferences into consideration, to simply improving the communication of a variable schedule in order to allow employees to plan their lives outside of work.
So, what do I mean by a spectrum of employee flexibility? Well, just like many other elements of workforce management, everything exists as a spectrum. So, employee flexibility is no different. And at one end of that spectrum is employees being able to work whenever they want, as long as they get the job done, it doesn’t matter.
The other end is a rigid schedule that’s created last minute based on ever-changing production demands where employees are forced to work overtime with no notice, no visibility, and no input into even the type of work they’ll be doing. Now, in a manufacturing setting, for example, it’d be really hard to go at the end of that 1st end of the spectrum, because it’d be hard to line up workers with any consistency to meet your production demands in the strict timelines that lean manufacturing requires.
Plus, employees need to work together in a specified order to get goods from one end of a production line to the other. If that same facility was completely at the other extreme, it might be able to predict what the staffing levels are for the next shift, with the exception of a whole bunch of call-offs.
But, good luck retaining or recruiting quality employees who could just leave for another job at any time that would give them some level of flexibility. Finding the right balance to include elements of employee flexibility while still ensuring labor needs are met is an art. Fortunately, modern automated labor scheduling systems can be the paintbrush that facilitates that art.
Let’s talk a little bit about the different categories of employee flexibility. Over the next several episodes of this series, I’ll be discussing the following categories of employee flexibility in detail and show you how you can implement some of them to improve the employee experience. First is transparency and accessibility.
That is the place to start for employee flexibility. Because if you don’t know what an employee wants or needs when it comes to their time, how can you take that information into account when coming up with a plan? And if employees do not trust that they were scheduled without bias, it is in our nature as people to assume the worst when we don’t get what we think we deserve.
Now, it’s also important to be able to meet employees where they are and in a convenient way for them. Next is scheduling preferences, which is really what flexibility is all about. Once we know what employees want, if we can accommodate those preferences while still meeting our labor standards, It costs us next to nothing to do this and it improves employee morale, productivity, and retention while reducing absenteeism, and if done right, even marginal labor cost.
Then we’re going to get into overtime management. A truly flexible schedule can help reduce overtime as a percentage of total work time. And at the very least, smart processes and good technology can make it so overtime that you do have is mostly with volunteers, unless by forcing employees to stay for longer shifts or coming in on their day off when they don’t want to.
Employees love overtime when it’s convenient for them, but they hate it when that overtime is an inconvenient time. In fact, this has recently been one of the main drivers of employee dissatisfaction and some of the major labor disputes we’ve all been reading about in the news.
Finally, We’re going to talk about analytics as with any initiative. It’s important to track the success of a program by gathering data to show what you are doing is getting the expected results. Also, if we gather data, we can use that data as part of our employee flexibility process to encourage the behavior we want out of our employees because people will always work towards their incentives. So if we can incentivize positive behavior with employee flexibility, why not do it?
Thank you for joining me for this episode of IndeavorTalks Employee Flexibility Series. In the next episode, we’re going to discuss that first category of employee flexibility in more detail, and I’m going to show you some innovative ways to increase accessibility and transparency of the scheduling process for your employees.
