What is a flexible schedule?
- A flexible schedule is an alternative to the traditional employee scheduling policy and allows employees to work outside the normal business hours.
- Examples of flexible schedules include compressed workweeks, remote working, and customized working hours.
- Regardless of how your flexible schedule looks, Homebase can help optimize your schedule and build it with ease.
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What is a flexible schedule?
A flexible schedule is an alternative to the traditional employee scheduling policy and occurs when a worker, whether they have a full-time or part-time job, is allowed to work different hours from the normal start and stop time of your business.
Generally, a traditional workweek staff schedule consists of 40 hours per week from 8 am to 5 pm or 9 am to 6 pm with a lunch period in between. Today’s businesses and employees, however, are requiring flexible schedule jobs with differing departure times or plans that vary their arrival at an increasing rate.
Schedule flexibility is important to many employees who can’t have a beneficial work-life balance with a fixed schedule. If someone needs that type of flexibility for their life, they might look for a full-time or part-time job with flexible schedules.
Some employees don’t always require the flexibility but might need a flexible work arrangement in cases when they need to take kids to the doctor, if they need to attend appointments for themselves, or if a life change occurs that requires them to be home during part of the normal day-to-day, 9-5 core hour type of work week.
Employers and employees can also agree on alternative work arrangements that work for everyone, like allowing the employee to work from home a number of days a week
Regardless of what type of schedule you use to operate your business, Homebase’s employee schedule maker app makes it easy to schedule any type of employee. You can build a smarter staff schedule in minutes by dragging and dropping shifts, right from your mobile app.
Our free work schedule app helps you make changes whenever you need to, making it easier to implement a flexible schedule policy if an employee needs to swap shifts, trade shifts, or fill an open shift.
What are some flexible work schedule examples?
If you allow for a daily flexible schedule at your business, your employees would be able to come into work at an earlier time and leave sooner than normal, stay later after coming in at a later time, or take a longer lunch when needed and make it up with extra hours.
You may also allow a schedule that still operates on regular hours but strays from the normal workweek that employers and employees generally accept. But if your business allows for it you may also consider an even more flexible schedule that allows employees to come and go when they see fit, as long as they fulfill their duties or continue to get their work done from a remote location.
If you still want to maintain a 40-hour workweek while also providing flexibility, you can offer a compressed workweek schedule template by adding flexibility to when those 40 hours are actually worked.
For example, you may allow employees to work 10 hours a day for 4 days a week and take the 5th day off. Many job seekers see this as a great schedule plan, but only if they have the commitment to work those longer hours and remain productive.
You can also implement a rotating schedule policy that gives different employees the opportunity to take advantage of a flexible schedule at different times. Homebase auto-scheduling can make this type of shift schedule template easy by allowing you to copy over one weekly schedule to another week with ease.
How do I implement a flexible work schedule policy?
If you are thinking about trying out a flexible work schedule, it might be a good idea to try out the different methods of each schedule type and see what works best for both your business and your team members.
Whether you’re using a compressed schedule type, flexible vacation hours, flexible start times, or another type of flexibile scheduling, Homebase scheduling makes building your employee shift schedules easy and efficient.
You can create work schedules in minutes and immediately share it to your team, and even forecast your labor costs to help you build smarter schedules in the future. Employees will always be able to see their flexible schedules from their mobile app.
They will receive notifications about upcoming shifts, reducing no-shows. The Homebase app even lets you manage shift trades from wherever you are so you can get back to running your business.
