MultiTime - Products

What are Flexible Working Arrangements ?

MultiTime provides an expert consultancy in the area of flexible working.

Indeed we have has 25 years of experience in advising hundreds of organisations in Ireland and the more recently in the UK on how to introduce new ways of applying working time arrangements.

This can involve working with all levels of the organisation - including working with Staff, Supervisors and Senior Management.

Flexible Working Hours or Flexitime is a"working time concept", and through embracing Flexitime or some similar working time arrangement - employees can balance their personal & working lives with the organisational
needs of the workplace.

In more recent times organisations are using the term Flexible Working Arrangements - to describe flexibility of location as well as flexibility of working time.

So, lets have a look at what these concepts mean :-

Flexible Working Hours or Flexitime

With the concept of Flexible Working Hours or Flexitime, fixed times of arrival & departure are replaced by a working day which is split into two types of time:-

Core Time - the main part of the day when everyone must be in and Flexible Times - at the beginning and end of the day and often at lunchtime, when staff can choose their hours of arrival and departure.

The next component in the flexi concept is the Accounting Period which had typically been based on either 4 weeks or a calendar month.

However, in recent times it is becoming quite usual where certain staff can negotiate the duration of their Accounting Period. So it is not uncommon that one employee might have a six weeks Accounting period while another could have an 8 weeks Accounting period.

The other important elements are the Carry Forward allowance & The "Flexi Day"

The "Carry Forward Allowance" is the amount of hours that can be built up in one Accounting period and which can be carried to the next. This "Carry Forward Allowance" can be used just for utilising the flexibility of the concept - arriving and depart at differing times, and/or can form the basis for the employee taking a Flexi Half day or Flexi Day (or in some situations Flexi Days) in the next period.

Flexible Working Arrangements

Increasingly Staff, Supervisors and the Organisations for which they work are concerned to achieve what is termed a Work: Life Balance, and look to new ways of arranging working times to suit all three parties.

Thus Flexible Working Hours or Flexitime, as a concept, is part of an even larger mix of working time and working location agreements - which are these days referred to as flexible working arrangements. These wider accommodations, encompass even more diverse possibilities such as:-

Job Sharing, Work Sharing, HomeWorking, Hot Desking, Term Time, Variable Working Hours, Annualised Hours, the Compressed Working Week, Part Time Work Voluntary Reduced Hours

Other flexible working arrangements can fall under the headings of Statutory Leave, Non Statutory Leave, Employment /Career Breaks and also more specialised arrangements - such as TeleWorking.

VisionTime

The innovative VisionTime is designed to address these very issues of flexitime and flexible working arrangements.

Working time schedules in VisionTime can be matched to the personal need of the employee (and supervisor) while at same time suiting the organisations vital requirements.

Equally - with the web conferencing aspect of EasiMEET product - it makes it easier for organisations to manage remote working. See elsewhere for description of EasiMEET.

Therefore - with VisionTime, management can agree a specific working time or working location concept with individual employees or groups of employees. One customer has hundreds of such working time or working location concepts running in VisionTime - while equally we have examples where users adopt a "one concept fits all" approach too.

So, effectively all facets of the arrangement can be either be individualised, leading to increasing scope to suit specific employee needs or generalised to suit groups or overall organistions.

The extensive Trend analysis available in the VisionTime Trend Module supports management and HR in ensuring such arrangements are being used both wisely and fairly.

Implementing Flexible working