How do I ensure my employees don't abuse my flexible work hours policy?

Question

At my small sized company (~10-15 people) I have always had a very liberal policy on work hours. My employees can choose their own hours as long as.

• They are in the office from 11am-2pm
• They average 8 hours a day during the week.

This means they can come in and leave when they want outside of those 'everyone in' hours and can also work fewer hours one day if they work more hours another etc. This policy has always been very popular, and I feel it works well. It has never caused any issues so far.

However as the company grows (expecting to double in the next year) and beyond, how can I ensure that this policy is kept to/isn't abused when extended to a larger and larger amount of people?

I don't 'distrust' any of my employees and I have no desire for them to 'clock' in or out. But I'm mindful that this system when put across a larger amount of people needs to be managed in some more formal way or eventually it will inevitably be misused.

Just to be clear, being in within certain hours isn't an issue and can be fairly easily ensured, its obvious if someone isn't in. What could be an issue is someone only working 6-7 hours everyday with no time made up.

I want to... Ensure the policy isn't abused.

Not... Ensure 100% all workers are at their desks for X hours a day/week.

Answer 1

However as the company grows (expecting to double in the next year) and beyond, how can I ensure that this policy is kept to/isn't abused when extended to a larger and larger amount of people?

This is what middle management and company culture are all about.

As new employees join, make sure they understand your liberal company culture - what kind of trust they are entitled to, and what is expected of them in return.

Then, as your company grows, make sure all middle managers understand this too. They must hold folks on their teams accountable. If abuse starts to occur, the middle managers must talk to the relevant employee, remind them of the rules, and help get them back on track.

At some point your company will grow beyond the point where your personal span of control can be effective. So your challenge is to find and train middle managers to carry out your company's culture effectively.

Flexible work hours can be very appealing to current and potential employees. That's one perk that can help attract and retain great workers. You are right to be concerned that it might be abused - in my experience such abuse can ruin a great culture. But the way to avoid abuse is not by imposing formal control on an otherwise trusting culture.

Answer 2

I work at a company with 800+ employees, that has flexible hours as one of the perks of working here. The way this is managed is by access control via RFIDs, but this doesn't mean that management is draconian about working 40 hours a week(although it's expected that you're being productive some amount of hours close to 40 each week).

The fact that access control is effectively clocking in/out from the workplace has almost no overlap with the flexible time and the trust between the company and its employees. We are a goal oriented company, so if you're reaching your goals consistently then it's assumed that you're not abusing the system. Whenever some performance issues are detected for an employee, we normally take a look at the logs from access control to find out if the performance issues are coming from actually not being in the office or by some other means. If the employee is not reaching their goals and has low hours in the office, a meeting is called in which the main focus is not the hours the employee is working, but the performance issues that have been noticed. This is accompanied by a suggestion to try to reach the expectation of 40 hours/week in order to get the performance back to normal.

Note that even if we have people clocking in and out to keep a record of their office hours, it never comes up as an issue until it is an issue(no one gets reprimanded for not reaching the expected hours; they get reprimanded for performance issues).

IMHO this kind of system works best when trying to manage flexible working hours for a growing employee population - it doesn't interfere with the freedom of flexibility and the hours rarely get mentioned as an issue. There's a lot of people that probably work around 35-40 hours a week but since productivity is what we measure, we don't consider that as an abuse of the policy.

Answer 3

I have a hard time seeing the correlation between enforcing 40 hours and not clocking people in - such a system is probably being "misused" as it is and you can't tell because of the scale.

You're either enforcing hours or you are not.

Mind that clocking people is not a mere nuisance or a sign of distrust, it is an administrative tool that gives you information to act upon when taking decisions.

How will you be able to tell if someone is even in the office until they are needed, and then you uncover that this person has in fact not been coming into the office for a while and been getting paid for it? If someone in a team needs someone present and they aren't there but there is no record of this?

You're going to have to choose whether a minor inconvenience of having to push a couple buttons compares to something more serious where you need proof and logs over "trust". There is no real way around it if the enforcement of those hours is important to your administration.

Answer 4

Joe Strazzere has an excellent answer.

I will add this answer in case you find that your system doesn't scale.

I have no desire for them to 'clock' in or out

I will mention that clocking in/out is (to some people) a "factory" thing for low skilled workers that aren't trusted. I can see why this might be distasteful.

There are other methods of time accounting though.
Having a spot for them to write in the hours they work each day and give that to their manager weekly is pretty normal in my opinion - especially since they don't have a set schedule.

• It lets you see when they say they worked, and...
• It trusts them to fill it in (it is just them writing in numbers... isn't a time clock).

Answer 5

It depends why you want it not to be abused.

If you're worried about employee not working enough you'll have to put in place performance indicator. Then it'll be another discussion if you let employee come and go as they want as long as performance target are met or not.

If you want employee to be on site around the same time and a minimum of time to promote team cohesion and have people available in case they're needed to answer questions or whatever, then you'll either have to trust them or put in place some device to ensure it. One way is clocking in. Another is to prevent entry after a specific time.

Answer 6

Trust, but verify.

Broadly speaking, you want to trust the people under you. If all of the work is getting done, and there are no complaints, there's NOTHING to investigate/look into. Might be worth asking about people's bandwidth, to see if there's a case of "I have very little to do" or "I'm about to burn out under this workload", but generally, if everything's getting done, there's no reason to look too hard - it will only cause problems.

That being said, if problems do start to emerge, it's worth (quietly) looking into. Perhaps a 1 on 1 meeting with the person involved ("Hey, we're not quite meeting all of our deadlines, what's going on?").

None of this requires knowing exactly what hours people are working - to take an extreme example, if someone's successfully automated their entire job, and they spend 5 minutes a day checking that their program is running and doing their 60 hours of work, you're getting the full value of what you pay that person out of the work they do - even though they're not spending the full time. (This is assuming a salaried position, instead of hourly, where wage fraud could be a factor - but you didn't mention this as a concern)

The last thing to be careful of is a morale/perception issue. If Joe thinks Bob is working half the hours and getting the same pay, it might not be obvious, but that's where talking with your team regularly comes in.

TL;DR: If the work's getting done, no need to dig into it. If it's not getting done, ask why, and try to figure it out.

Answer 7

How can I ensure that this policy is kept to/isn't abused

The simple is, you can't. You have to trust your employees, that's how the flexible working system tends to work.

I have no desire for them to 'clock' in or out

This is pretty much the only way to ensure that nobody is abusing the flexible working and that everybody is doing the time that they are supposed to. Although you trust the employees, it's really not going to cause them much inconvenience by doing something as simple as clocking in and out.

Answer 8

IMO the answers to this question and similar on workplace are missing a significant point – Health & Safety.

In the USA & UK, H&S regulations require that in the event of a site evacuation all personnel on site need to be accounted for. I assume many other countries have similar legislation.

Ref. USA OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) & OSHA - How to Plan for Workplace Emergencies and Evacuations(PDF) page 4 Quote “and: A system for accounting for personnel following an evacuation.”

Ref. UK Disappointingly I’m unable to find the actual UK regulation at the time of writing, but am 100% sure it exists. Edit. Following a discussion with @motosubatsu and my own research; the current UK regulations do not explicitly state that an employer needs to account for all personnel following an evacuation. However you may be liable to prosecution should an employee be injured/die as a result of you the employer not being able to account for all personnel after an evacuation.

The USA example above does not state how you have to account for all personnel; only that you have to. So in order to comply with these regulations, an employer would need to devise a robust system that records all employees, site visitors and contractors arriving and leaving the site: obviously this needs to include the time.

So regardless of trust, company culture, etc. You as an employer may:-

• a)have a legal requirement to know which employee is onsite at any given time.
• b)be liable to prosecution if in the event of an evacuation you cannot account for the whereabouts of all employees.

And on an ethical level you do have a duty of care to all your employees whichever country your business is based in.

Of course as an employer whatever else you would like to do with these records is up to you.

Answer 9

My UK government employer has "flexitime" for all grades. Core time (when staff must be present) 10:00 AM to 3:30 PM, working week 37.5 hours (5 notional days of 7 hrs 24 min). Workplaces are open from 7:00 AM to 6:00 PM. At the end of each four-week period, staff are allowed to carry over three days "up" or two days "down", and may take accumulated "up" time, or borrow time from the future, as additional leave, in half or whole days. Attendance is recorded by staff personally on a custom Excel four-week spreadsheet, which shows accumulated credit or debit time day by day. At the end of the period, it is printed, signed off by the staff member's line manager, and kept in a folder for six months. The manager is expected to be alert enough to spot abuse. "Flexi abuse" is very rare and generally noticed by team-mates before management. They feel that the scheme is a privilege and a benefit and that they are being let down by abusers. It is this latter aspect that I feel helps the system to be self-policing to a large extent. Staff are happy to record their hours if, by so doing, they can accumulate extra leave days, or borrow them. The supervision is usually nominal and very light-touch, which makes people feel trusted and valued. If a manager was concerned about a particular individual, they could note his or her arrival and departure times, and everyone knows that. Bottom line, if people feel valued, trusted, and "looked after", they tend not to abuse the system.

Answer 10

There are two issues you are facing.

One is how to check 40 hours a week and obligatory hours to be present in the office. This can be easily enforced by simply calculating time "logged in". It may of course require some more paper work on your side (depending on country and legislature) but it will just work as backup. Your company state "we trust you but if there will be some issues with deadlines or quality, time spend will be the first thing to look at".

Because, your second issue is: Does everyone in your company should be using this policy?
There are some departments that cannot have such luxury. Your IT would either need to be staffed to support people coming in at 8am but also leaving at 7pm or be set strict hours to be reliable.
Second sub-question - Does people really need to have clocked 40 hours a week, so be managed in time-table manner or should be switched to tasks? From personal experience, you cannot have task quality with time spend on-clock quantity.

Answer 11

"Work from home" is also called "going to university". It's a natural extension of the workplace for people who have shown they can be trusted to produce without direct supervision.

As someone suggested, have middle managers monitor this; preferably those with experience managing remote teams. Just periodically review performance, and ensure they understand it is a privilege to be earned, not a right.

Answer 12

Let's get it straight: not every person is able to work in "flex hours" environment. Sooner or later, you'd hire someone who will abuse the system. And the bigger the company is, the more of that "incompatible" people would be hired in. So, performance tracking is your #1 choice. If there are too many people do not match the tracking criteria, it is a big chance the criteria is incorrect. Otherwise, just use it as is (and tackle others who're not matching the criteria).

Next step: your company became big enough to have two brunches (in different cities, sic!). You can't physically be in both places same moment, quickly you'd be bored traveling between the cities daily basis, so let people just do their work. Performance tracking is still your #1 choice.

Next step: your company is big enough to step out of a single timezone (let say, 12h difference, so there is no any chance 100% all workers are at their desks within a same moment). What is your #1 choice still? You know the answer.

P.S. Several thousand people, multiple brunches around the globe, working environment still the same. Yes, it's possible.