Search results

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between the determinants of public employee turnover intent and the use of workplace flexibilities, with particular attention on the role that gender plays on the relationship between these two constructs.

Using a cross-sectional quantitative research design, the data collection specifically targeted employees of US municipalities that had a significant portion of their workforce using some type of alternative work schedule. Nine cities from six different states were included in the data collection.

In support of prior research and conventional wisdom, the authors find that the use of alternative work schedules is associated with lower expressions of turnover intent, but this relationship is only significant for female municipal employees.

One limitation of the study is that it is mono-source data. A second limitation relates to the lack of controls for contextual and occupational characteristics. Further research is needed on the relationship between alternative work schedule choice and turnover, particularly exploring how other characteristics might impact the relationship between employment flexibilities and turnover.

Overall, the results of the analysis align with broader observations of the need for increasing workplace flexibilities and scholarship exploring these flexibilities, especially for female employees who are attempting to integrate their work and family responsibilities.

There has been relatively little research exploring the relationship between the determinants of turnover intent and the use of workplace flexibilities at the municipal level of government. This is particularly important given that employment in local government is larger than both federal and state government employment combined in the USA (US Census Bureau, 2017).

A case study is presented of an organisation′s experiment with job sharing as an alternative work pattern. The arrangement was unusual in two respects. First, the job shared was at the management level; executive director of a not‐for‐profit, private volunteer agency. Second, the accountability was not divided along functional lines. Instead, the partners, as a unit, were held accountable for the operation of the entire organisation. The work arrangement proved to be successful, without many of the problems generally anticipated with partnership arrangements. It is argued that this arrangement is applicable to many organisations. Major ingredients for success are flexibility, commitment and compatibility.

The purpose of this paper is to examine employee satisfaction with an employer-imposed compressed workweek (CWW) schedule within a US municipality (City).

The study utilizes an employee survey (n=779) to test factors related to employee satisfaction with the CWW, a four-day, ten-hours/day workweek (4/10 schedule).

Employee satisfaction with the schedule is influenced by previous 4/10 pilot experience, work schedule preference, and happiness with the 4/10 schedule’s implementation. Additionally, sick leave figures and survey results regarding informal substitute work schedules suggest that worker fatigue may limit the overall organizational value of the 4/10 schedule.

The study is opportunistic in nature and therefore constrained by the City’s HR Department concerns for survey length and respondent anonymity. This meant an inability to collect demographic data or to utilize validated scales.

Analysis suggests that the potential work-life benefits of flexible work schedules may not apply equally to employer-imposed vs employee-chosen compressed work schedules. Further, CWWs engender greater fatigue despite employee satisfaction, an issue managers should consider when weighing schedule costs and benefits.

The study highlights the importance of employee choice in conceptualizing flexibility and for capturing CWW benefits, namely: an initiative’s voluntary or involuntary nature should be considered when determining whether it is likely to be beneficial for employees.

This paper describes an actual aircraft maintenance labor scheduling study. The study’s objective is to determine the optimum maintenance workforce schedule to satisfy growing labor requirements with minimum cost. The main recommendation of the study is to switch from a five‐day to a seven‐day workweek for aircraft maintenance workers. A new integer programming formulation, used to obtain an optimum seven‐day work schedule with no increase in workforce size, is presented. In comparison to the existing five‐day schedule, switching to a seven‐day workweek is expected to produce savings of about 13 per cent, or $100,000 annually.

Corporations want productivity and efficiency, while the work force is asking for more time with the family. The ability of management to juggle productivity requirements with employee demands can be difficult and requires creative solutions. The Analytical Central Call Management (CCM) group at Hewlett Packard recently piloted a compressed work week schedule, consisting of four ten‐hour work days (4 x 10). However this pilot schedule encountered many problems. After careful evaluation the key to successful implementation of this plan is cross‐training. Cross‐training will help solve some of the morale issues caused by this pilot schedule. Issues of unproductive time and lack of staff caused by absences would also be alleviated. If employers want to develop management tools more appropriate to the need of this decade’s work force and the competitive challenges of a global economy, they will have to learn to use work time and space in more appropriate ways.

This article describes findings from a series of recent Catalyst studies. Several of these studies investigated the use of flexible work arrangements in business, exploring employee and employer attitudes towards, opinions about, and experiences with, these alternative arrangements. Together, findings from these studies help to delineate current approaches to flexibility initiatives in business, the increasing interest in these arrangements, the key benefits to business from the use of these alternatives, and the continuing barriers to the use of flexible arrangements. They also help to clarify effective strategies and practices for successful flexibility initiatives, along with critical skills needed by supervisors and employees using these arrangements. Detailed examples from two Catalyst Award‐winning organizations – The Bank of Montreal and Deloitte & Touche LLP – are included.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship of schedule flexibility with performance and satisfaction in the work and family domains, and whether these associations are mediated by the work‐family interface. Possible gender differences in the putative benefits of schedule flexibility are also to be explored.

Using a sample of 607 full‐time employees in either schedule flexibility or traditional working arrangements the authors tested a moderated‐mediation model. Regression was used to test the mediation of work‐family and the moderation of gender to the schedule flexibility to work‐family path.

Both work‐to‐family conflict and work‐to‐family enrichment are mediating mechanisms in the relationship of schedule flexibility with outcomes. More specifically, full mediation was found for job satisfaction and family performance for both enrichment and conflict while partial mediation was found for family satisfaction with enrichment only and mediation was not supported for job performance. Finally, gender moderated the schedule flexibility to work‐family conflict relationship such that women benefited more from flexible working arrangements than men.

The paper adds value by examining a mediation mechanism in the schedule flexibility with the outcome relationship of the work‐family interface. It also adds value by including work‐family enrichment which is a key variable but has little research. Finally, it adds value by demonstrating that schedule flexibility plays a stronger role for women than men regarding the work‐family interface.

Describes a model for adapting successful bidding strategies, placing it in the context of a company's overall structure and competitive strategy. Lists the benefits of the decision system approach, revealing it to be a useful tool in a management information and control system.

This paper examines medical managers' beliefs about the impact reduced‐hour career paths for physicians has on organizational effectiveness. The findings of this exploratory inductive study of 17 medical managers at nine medical organizations in the Boston area suggest that managers believe the benefits of reduced‐hour physicians (RHPs) far outweigh the disadvantages. However, many of their reasons appear to be exploitative of RHPs. In particular, managers believe that employing RHPs results in increased managerial control and that RHPs should: work more than they are compensated for; do a disproportionate share of the undesirable work; and remain extra flexible and available to the organization. An interpretation of the findings based on psychological contract theory is offered, and may help to illuminate other results reported in the literature, including some controversial findings that reduced‐hour workers tend to have poor health outcomes.

This paper aims to discuss the importance of flexible working time arrangements in the United States (U.S.). Section I creates a framework to analyse the various dimensions of working time and their impacts. It examines the availability of flexitime and its potential costs and benefits to workers and employers. Section II describes the current distribution and differential access to flexitime by workers' demographic characteristics and by industry and occupational sector. Section III analyses these data to estimate the probability that workers with a given demographic or work characteristic have access to flexitime daily schedules. The fourth and final section discusses the implications of the findings. The empirical findings reveal that many workers are gaining flexibility in the timing of their daily work schedules, but access to flexible schedules remains uneven by characteristics of workers such as gender or race and by their jobs such as skill‐level, job status and hours status. Having flexible scheduling comes at the expense of working long average hours per week, or re‐locating to part‐time or self‐employment status or “unsocial” evening shifts. One implication of this is that a public policy aimed at flexible work hours for workers benefit must seek first to spread such flexibility to those who are currently not sharing it because of their occupation, industry or other personal or labour market characteristics.