John O’Hanlon considers 21st century attitudes to time & attendance, and some 19th century ones that won’t go away.
Time is money – well, up to a point, Lord Copper. There are still plenty of businesses that take that saying quite literally, and for these the reasoning is simple – the working contract between me the employer and you the employee is that I give you pay in exchange for your time, so every day you aren’t there is a cost to my business, and every minute you are late is an act of theft. It’s a clocking-on mentality, and it’s born out of control through sanctions.
That model for a relationship in business ought to have disappeared long ago, to be replaced by a more collaborative model in which employer and employee have shared goals and the motivation for attending at work and putting in the required hours is, perhaps, mutual self-interest if not quite a quasi-religious devotion to the company and general philanthropy!
You still have to manage time, though. As Steve Moore, CEO of the workforce management software provider Rostima said following an implementation by Red Funnel, the Isle of Wight ferry operator: “Like many forward thinking companies in the service sector, Red Funnel has long realised that its workforce is its biggest asset but also its biggest cost. By working together and automating the time-consuming process of staff scheduling, we can help control those costs and have a significant impact in terms of operational efficiency, customer service and profitability.”
Flexible Working and Work-Life Balance
The Flexible Working Law enables parents with a child under 6 or a disabled child under 18 to make a request for flexible working, and places a duty on employers to consider such request seriously and only reject them for good business reasons.
From 6 April 2003, UK employers had a statutory duty to consider applications for flexible working from parents. Eligible employees can request a change in their working hours or a change to the days on which they are required to work. From 6 April 2007 the law extended the right to request flexible working to carers of adults.
Work-life balance is about adjusting working patterns to allow employees more flexible working arrangements. This can increase employee morale, reduce sickness and increase productivity. Typical examples include:
• staggered work hours
• compressed working hours
• shift swapping
• annualised hours
• job-sharing
• breaks from work
The Farrelly Way
The construction industry is probably the last place you’d look to find best practice in family-friendly working. It is traditional, adversarial, and male dominated, and surely getting building work done on time is all about starting early, finishing late and keeping a lid on tea breaks and sallies to the bookie.
That’s why Birmingham base Farrelly Facilities & Engineering is the more remarkable. It has become a benchmark nationally, even globally, and not just in the building trade. Look at…
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