Working hours and the way they are arranged can help a company manage its business and help its employees balance their responsibilities at work and at home.
Considering the majority of the working population spend more time at work than at home, it’s pretty much obvious working hours can greatly affect our happiness both at work and home. Many businesses however are coming under increasing pressure to satisfy demands 24/7, whether that’s thanks to technology or not is another matter, but what this does mean is that it’s now even more important for employers to try to balance this with the needs of their employees. As a result there is an increasing rise in flexible work, including; flexitime, shift work, job sharing or homeworking.
The Working Time Regulations states that the limit an average employee should work is 48 hours a week, although employees may choose to work longer, must get 11 consecutive hours’ rest in any 24-hour period and one day off each week. As demand grows for employers it has become increasingly difficult for employers to increase the standard working hours while trying to maintain that balance for their employees.
Here are a couple of solutions which have, and are becoming, increasingly popular:
Overtime is becoming popular amongst employees as it’s an easy way to get hold of some extra cash, and we could all do with a little more of that in this current climate. But it’s not just employees who are reaping the benefits of overtime, employers enjoy the benefits of flexibility it gives them if they find their need for workers can increase at short notice. Offering overtime is often less costly for the employer than recruiting and training extra staff or hiring temporary staff via recruitment agencies.
Flexitime is another becoming popular with employees albeit not as much as overtime.
If you don’t know what flexitime is, it’s when your employer allows you to choose, within set limits, when your working day begins and ends. There are often however ‘core’ times when you must work for e.g. 11:00 to 15:00 with flexibility on the number of hours you work before and after these ‘core’ hours.
Flexitime does however still mean you need to work a certain number of hours, typically worked out per four weeks. Often many employers will also allow you to carry over a certain amount of hours you owe or extra hours you’ve worked to the following month.
At Inter Payroll we believe this type of arrangement could be great within payroll. Typically payroll sees its busiest period in a given month the week leading up to pay day. Some argue the other three weeks of the month employers could do with a smaller workforce. With flexitime employers can set core hours for the week the business runs its payroll to ensure it has maximum resources, while allowing employees to choose their work hours for the remaining three weeks of the month. Obviously we’re using payroll as an example here and we’re sure there are much better examples out there. We just can’t think of any right now as we write this!
