Employee satisfaction with work-life balance has risen from 39 percent 10 years ago, when the program launched, to nearly 100 percent today, according to company surveys. Last year the Denmark division of Great Place to Work, a global organization that ranks companies based on employee satisfaction, named AbbVie the top middle-size company in the country. “The flexibility actually empowers people to deliver the best possible results,” said Christina Jeppesen, the company’s general manager.
A 2018 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management, which represents 300,000 H.R. professionals in more than 165 countries, found that 57 percent of its members offer flexible hours, 5 percent more than in 2014. “Managers who give it a try often find that employees’ morale, engagement and productivity all go up, because they are working at a time that works best for them, and able to get the most work done,” said Lisa Horn, the group’s vice president of congressional affairs.
Some companies restrict meetings to “core hours,” between, say, 10 a.m. and 3 p.m., to accommodate various schedules. Others build flextime into the workweek. At Phase 2, a software development firm in Oklahoma City, each week ends with “productivity Friday,” when employees are expected to work remotely in a place of their choice — whether that be from home, a coffee shop or at a weekend house at the lake.
Stefan Volk, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney Business School, has suggested that businesses can leverage chronotypes to maximize team success. For example, members of a surgery team should have similar chronotypes because they need to be in top form simultaneously. But at a nuclear power plant, workers should have different energy peaks, so that someone is always on the alert.
But while lots of corporations promise flexibility, veering from the traditional 9 to 5 work hours requires a cultural shift. A 2014 study led by Dr. Barnes found that many managers have an ingrained prejudice in favor of early birds, whom they perceived as more conscientious simply because they arrived at work early, a view that could dissuade some workers from using flextime.
But sticking to traditional hours can be counterproductive, leading to “presenteeism” — employees showing up and being only minimally functional. “Companies are wasting the potential of their people,” Dr. Volk said. “You have someone sitting there from 7 til 9 a.m. sipping coffee, being completely unproductive, and then you send them home at 4 when they actually start getting productive.”
For many office workers, the answer may be as simple as delaying work start times an hour or two — say until 9:30 or 10 a.m. Since many people are in the middle of the chronotype continuum and wake naturally around 8 or 9 a.m., such a modest shift could provide widespread relief. “We’re talking about one hour,” Ms. Kring said, “not a revolution.”
Source : Nytimes
