Providing Flexible Work Arrangements to Your Employees

Four Steps to Ensure Your Flex-Time Program Works

More and more companies are offering as employees are asking for flexible work arrangements and hours. This trend has increased dramatically throughout the Great Recession. Now, 77 percent of companies say they permit and/or encourage flextime, up from 66 percent in 2005, according to the 2012 National Study of Employers by the Society for Human Resource Management and the nonprofit Families and Work Institute.

Almost 67 percent of those surveyed said they permit employees to work from home on occasion, bringing a 34 percent increase in the past seven years. The practice of overtime has shifted as well. Employers surveyed, 44 percent, said they now give employees a choice as to whether they work overtime hours or not. This has led to it becoming more acceptable for employees to turn down overtimes.

With the new flexible work arrangements come some potential pitfalls that employers must be aware of and avoid. Below are four things to keep in mind as an employer looking at flexible work schedules:

1. Follow the Established Rules. Our current wage-payment laws were put into effect years ago and were not designed with the new flex-time in mind. Be proactive and avoid unintentionally violations.
2. Update Your Recordkeeping Process. In order to have a successful and compliant flex-time program, you will most likely need to update your current time tracking system. Make sure that your tracking system can provide you with precise and accurate time stamps. When establishing the new system, make sure that all of your supervisors and employees are properly trained. Then you will have to discipline any who violate the new rules.
3. Overtime and Misclassifications. It is vitally important to keep track of all overtime hours worked, even for those employees who are on a flex-time schedule. The vast majority of litigation regarding flex-time is due to the employers classifying their employees in the wrong category of exempt or non-exempt. The basic rule to follow is all employees are to be presumed as non-exempt from overtime pay provisions of the FLSA, unless you can prove that a specific exemption applies directly to them.
4. Test the Program First. Before jumping in with a new flex-time program, give it a dry test run first. Inform all employees about the test run and remind them if the program is not a success, you will return to the old way. After your test run, analyze what worked, what didn’t, employee and supervisor feedback, pros and cons, etc., then make any needed adjustments.

Flex-time is proving to be a well-appreciated benefit to employees trying to strike the balance of work and everyday-life. For more information on how to set up a quality flexible work program at your company, call 770.248.0401.