by Anne Fisher @anbfisher
NOVEMBER 13, 2014, 10:41 AM EST
Human resources managers say supervisors resist letting
employees out of their sight.
If your employer offers flexible work schedules—the option
to telecommute, for instance, or to come in to the office at hours other than
the usual—how did you hear about the policy? Odds are it wasn’t from your boss.
Only about one in four (27%) employees report to someone who’s willing to bring
up flextime, says a new survey from the Society for Human Resources (SHRM).
Everybody else hears about it either in job interviews at the company, or from
peers after they start.
Coincidence? Not really. The SHRM study uncovers a big
disconnect inside many companies. While human resources executives want to make
flexible work arrangements available to everybody as a way to attract and
retain talent—especially, but not only, “knowledge workers” who happen to be
Millennials—bosses closer to the front lines often drag their feet. Almost
three-quarters (71%) of the HR people polled say that managers don’t support,
let alone encourage, flexible schedules.
“HR sees flextime as a crucial part of its strategy for
managing talent, and employees clamor for it,” notes Lisa Horn, director of a
SHRM program called the Workplace Flexibility Initiative. “Where it falls down
is at the middle-management level. Flexibility is more complicated and
difficult than managing employees who are all together in one place at the same
time.” In particular, she adds, “some managers are afraid of how it will affect
their own work-life balance if it means they end up having to do extra work.”
To try to overcome those misgivings, SHRM has teamed up with
the Families & Work Institute to launch When Work Works, partly to make
training available on topics like measuring the productivity of remote
employees. (The SHRM survey says 80% of HR departments now have policies that
“encourage managers to evaluate employees based on accomplishments rather than
just ‘face time.’”) But Horn says it’s slow going: “We still have a lot of work
to do.”
In the meantime, When Work Works has put together a
step-by-step toolkit for anyone who wants to request flextime, including advice
on what to do if the boss says no. One suggestion: Ask for help from another
manager who does support flexibility, and who is either a peer or a higher-up
of your recalcitrant boss. Invite him or her to a meeting with you and the boss
who’s against it, to discuss the details of how flextime could benefit both of
you. In a nod to the tricky politics this may entail, the guide cautions, “This
should be presented as a joint problem-solving meeting, not an attempt to go
over your supervisor’s head.”
If that doesn’t work—and if finding a different boss is, for
whatever reason, not an option—the SHRM survey offers one encouraging
statistic: About half (48%) of HR people think flexible schedules, including
telecommuting, will be much more widespread within five years. Managers who are
resisting flextime now will need to get with the program, says Evren Esen,
SHRM’s survey chief, “or else their organizations may become less competitive.”
And who ever wants to take the blame for that?
https://fortune.com/2014/11/13/flexible-work-schedule-denied/
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