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Work Arrangements
The job of the consultant at Accenture, Keyur Patel’s work arrangement wasn’t exactly an exceptional one and had turned into quite the norm. in the very recent assignments, Patel had been so busy that he had to keep three clocks on his desk all set to three different places, one of the clock was set to San Francisco where he currently was, staying four days of each week trying to lend his help to a major store to implement the IT systems so as to increase the sales, the other two clocks are set to Manila and Bangalore time as he had the major team of programmers working on projects located there. While his desk clocks kept way of all these times, his mobile phone on the other hand was set to the time of Atlanta where his family stayed and where he went to on every Thursday evening.
Meet the new and extra talented Bree of executive professionals for home life is nothing but a mix of office and home where they sift between pleasure and work respectively. Due to the advancement in technology, it is now easy to complete all your work, from anyplace and at any point of time. most of the current organizations are adopting themselves to the current change and to the new structure and hence they have started introducing and following the concept of flexible arrangement of work. This particular arrangement is not just technology friendly but it also makes sure that the companies are at the leisure of deploying their employees as and when and where needed.
This particular sub chapter will give your idea about the different types of work preparations available such as compressed workweeks, telecommuting, jib sharing and flexitime. As far as other structures are concerned, it is the job of the manager to decide on the work arrangement after evaluating each of them and making their decisions through communication, authority and accomplishing their work tasks.
Telecommuting
As a project manager at the SCAN health plan, it was the job of Eve Gelb to spend about 1,5 hours commuting every morning and the evening in the Los Angeles, right in the 405 Freeway. As of recent finding she has transformed her entire garage into the office and does all her work from there. She now works like a telecommuter. During those days when it necessary for hr to visit her office, she shares her work space with three of her subordinates, who can also follow a flexible work structure. Due to the advancement in information technology, telecommuting has become possible and due to the physical condition, it has now become a necessity for most of the organizations. The method or arrangement in which the employee works directly from her house and she is linked to her place of work via the computer. However, you can’t telecommute for all jobs and only applies for certain jobs only.
Earlier, the very concept of working from home was considered to be quite the luxury and employees who got it were considered to be lucky since the arrangement was not always allowed. In the current day, telecommuting is necessary by most of the organizations and hence it is important that most of the companies saw telecommuting as an opportunity to make more business without having to invest in additional expenditure of getting parking lots, office buildings and other infrastructures. Also many organizations feel with telecommuting the talented employees will be dragged to the company as it will give them flexibility and freedom when it came to their work.
Although telecommuting has its appeal, the managers are quite reluctant about it as they feel it will make their employees nothing but “laptop hobos”. The employees will spend a lot of time falling around, surfing the internet and playing games instead on focussing on their actual job. also the clients will be ignored and the employees will miss out on the much needed ambience as presented by the corporate office. Also the simple matter of managing the employees will be challenging and making suggestions for their work, in case their performance has been bad, will also be difficult, since they won’t be present physically in the scenario. Hence interacting with them and giving them a few pointers about doing the jib correctly will be impossible. Also the fact that the employees will be working with information which are supposed to be top secret and trusting them with this information outside of the office will be quite a difficult task to do.
Not just the manager, but telecommuting can also seem to be quite of an obstacle by the employee themselves. They feel that they are missing out on being in the ambience a work office offers, also they have concerns regarding isolation they face while Working from home. Accenture is a company where most of the employees are spread through all over the world and as the chief officer of the HR department has rightly said, managing them will prove to be quite the trouble. But the companies try to ace their employees feel friendly and not isolated, have arranged for a number of events and conferences over the web, each of the employees are assigned to their individual career councillor and also organizing community gathering and get together for the employees of the office to maintain the sense of team effort. Not just this, another problem is, the employee may find it difficult to distinguish between work and the home since bit of them have juxtaposed somehow thus leading to a lot of stress. Thus it is important for the manager to supervise and find solution to these plausible problems.
Now for the purpose of establishing telecommuting, the organization starts having some plan. The first strategy is to address the advantages of working from home. The employees can save a lot of their money which would have been otherwise spent at eating lunch from outside like at the office or the money spent at dry cleaning and paying for the gas. Some companies even preach but using the environmental issues. The employees will save air pollution as they will not have to drive their car over long distances every day from home to office and vice versa. The SCAN health plan took a similar approach and offered the purchasing as well as the setting up of free office type furniture’s at one’s house and the company will also pay for high speed internet connection.
Compressed Workweeks, Flexitime and job Sharing
KPMG, an accounting firm had to cut down on quite some cost due to the sudden economic crisis. Thus the best way to reduce cost so to introduce the concept of flexible work options to his employees. This feature of the company is known as Flexible Futures and it gave four different options to the employees to choose one of the following: workweek for a period of 4 days which will result in a 20% reduction in their original salary, at a pay of 30%, a two to twelve-week sabbatical, they can also choose both the options or they could stick to their original schedule of work. It was even that about 85% of the employees were more than happy to go with the first option of reduced workweek. Thus KPMG did not have to of maximum salary cuts and only 10% was cut off for the year in most of the cases. Also there was no need for the company to lay off its employees.
Thus it is clearly understood that at companies at time need to go for the flexible work structure plan as they work quite well. The compressed workweek is one approach which can be taken where the employees will have to work for long periods of time but they have done so for a few days every week. The 4-40 program requires the employee to work for 10 hours every four days in a week. This structure is a low in Utah where offices remain closed on Friday so that energy costs could be reduced. This law actually paid off and there was a 13% reduction in the energy at the end of a year meaning they helped save about 6-million-dollar worth of gasoline. In flexitime, the employee will have to work a certain number of hours in a week but they are given the choice to decide on these hours and distribute them throw-out the week as per their convenience.
However, one condition under flextime is that it requires the employees to be at the office for a certain predesignated hour. Flextime also them the starting time, the ending time as well as the time to get lunch. A survey of current companies shows flextime benefits shows by about 81% of respondent. Watson why at also performed a survey and found the benefits of flexible job timing.
Next comes in the concept of job sharing. It is being implemented by McDonalds in Great Britain and it states that the family member of the employee can fill in his/her shoes if the employee can’t make and they don’t have to talk to the manager about it. This is known as the Family Contract. It is basically offered to people who wish to do the job but not be pinned by it.
Links of Previous Main Topic:-
- What is social responsibility
- Managing change and innovation
- Managers as decision makers
- Foundations of planning
- Strategic management
- Basic organizational design
- Adaptive organizational design
Links of Next Fundamentals of Management Topics:-
- Contingent force of work
- Todays organizational design challenges
- Adaptive organizational design
- Case application 1 drivers seat
- Case application 2 the virus hunters
- Chapter eleven summary by learning outcomes
- Preparing for my career adaptive organizational design
- Managing human resources
- Managing teams
- Understanding individual behavior
- Managers and communication
