Flexible Working Time

Flex Time or "flexible working hours" is the new mantra in organizational set-ups these days. There are two dimensions to it, "flexible timings for office hours" & "Working from home instead of office". There is a general belief that employee productivity and employee satisfaction improves when they are given that opportunity. I have been thinking about this myself and understand why this would be the case?. Flexible office timings are fine as far as my thinking goes and is practiced even If we do not have a policy around the same. This is a must in the globalized world we all work in today.

But recently, a friend of mine spoke about “working from home for one day of week” as a way of improving productivity; I started to think about the same. Employee satisfaction is bound to go up as any employee would love to be in a situation where he (she) can spend more time with his ( her) family. But the more intriguing part is "Why would employee productivity improve?”

A simple point is happy or satisfied employees would mean more productive employees. In theory this is an excellent idea. but in practice this does not work. If one can work from home one day of the week for example, why not work completely out of home for the full week? I know of organizations which do this as well. My take on this is, there are organizations which can work from home for the full week and there are organizations which cannot. It is not about one day of the week but about can we work from home or not? A Call Centre or IT services or Management Consultancy Firm can have its employees working from home completely. A manufacturer, R&D firm (Microbiological institute) etc cannot afford to do so. My critics would argue that even a manufacturer has got activities which possibly can be done from home like making a report or learning a new skill online. Then I would suggest that we should leave it at the discretion of employee to decide when he (she) wants to come to office in the whole week and not say one day of the week is available for working from home.

There is another dimension to the working from home. Often points like special needs of women employees (even men at times) which need them to spend more time with family mean that this policy of working from home once in a while is a good idea. I would like to humbly disagree and say that people should exercise the option of taking leave for this purpose. Statistics show clearly that organizations where we have an option of en-cashing leaves, employees never take them & choose to take cash instead. Working from home once in a week seems like a way of ensuring that I have three holidays per week while getting the same money from organization.

Critics who are even more intelligent would argue that In any case delivery is fixed and how does it matter even If employees work from home. The answer clearly lies in the point on how much employees deliver today. All organizations have this constant discussion on employee productivity and in a very subtle way this would actually go down over a period of time If one day working from home were to implemented. This is where rational human behavior would take it to.

To sum my thoughts on this, I would like to say that I am not against the thought of “Working from home”. We either let this happen for all days or not based on the nature of work. Partial roll out of idea which says that one can choose to work for one particular day of the week from home does not make sense.

Visit to Durban

I am currently in Durban Airport as I write this. My flight has got delayed by 2-3 hours. Interestingly I am quite ok with this delay as I quite like Durban. I have been here for last 5 days and I have enjoyed my stay here thoroughly. The food is good. We visited excellent restaurants & a game reserve. I was pleasantly surprised by roads, buildings & most importantly the beautiful harbour Durban has got. One thing however which I noticed and was not expecting was the tension between whites & blacks here. You still notice locations where White Men & Women would not be found, not because they do not want to as in Apartheid era but now more because they are scared. I visited Shopping areas which had both Whites & blacks and then shopping locations with only blacks.

It was interesting to note the newspaper content & TV content while I was here, the problem between whites & blacks is still clearly evident. However the heartening part is If you were to talk to people on street (Blacks or whites) they have moved further and are happy to live together. I am pretty sure Durban is going to turn into a beautiful cosmopolitan city in future.

Overall, South Africans are lovely people, both black & white and I have thoroughly enjoyed my stay here.