Working from Home  

A major outcome in the fight against Covid 19, has been a move by millions of employees to home working.    

The transition has surprised many by being so relatively easy to achieve.     

With employees now, set-up to work from home, the concern of many organisations is now turning to the second wave of issues – and this is where FlexTime can help.      

What is the Second Wave?  

Everyone accepts that the times which we are living through are exceptional. Nobody yet knows the full and longer-term impact of much of the business world grinding to a halt.  Nevertheless, managers will think, with more than a hunch: “if I keep my team productive to the extent that I am able to, we’ll be better prepared for what is going to face us, at the other end”.    

Equally, following the switch to homeworking, managers will feel that there is now a pressing need to ensure they are not losing control of work output.   

So, what can FlexTime do to help? 

Our VisionTime system is fully geared up to help you to manage what’s going on out there, amongst your homeworkers – for example: –  

• Employees can record hours worked, and starting and finishing times each day – differentiating between “home time” and other time   
• They can also record the time on each job that they are working on  
• Time Messenger – while the employee records “in” and “out” for work and you have their attention, focused messages can pop -up 
• “Time off” will still happen – even if the employee cannot really go too far. But they will still want some personal time, without feeling that you think they are being idle.  To manage all of this, both staff and managers can avail of the workflow module in VisionTime.  

What’s on the Screen: What is Open Hours? (relevant images) 

In this phase, if you prefer to allow your employees to work at any time during the 24 hours cycle, then our new module, called Open Hours, might work for you. For example, many couples now each must work from home, while the children are also there too. In order that such employees to able to continue doing meaningful work for you over the current phase, this may need to happen at separate daily times to their partner. 

Then, maybe you are a front-line service and still need staff to return to their base, but also want to ensure that they can distance themselves from others by working at separate times? 

This Open Hours programme dispenses with the use of shifts and having to set up various restrictions to the employees working arrangements.   This is replaced by the employee using specially designed on-screen functionality to denote start/end of the day, break periods etc. 

Time Banking:  

Another method of dealing with the variations in working hours is by Time Banking.  This way, the system can capture and transfer any excess hours worked by the employee into their time bank. This can be useful information for several reasons e.g.  

• So that the employee can keep a check on such hours 
• When we are out of this phase maybe managers would like to recognize that extra effort 

How do staff feel about using VisionTime?

A message from the MultiTime CEO on this:

“We have experience of nearly 40 years in offering flexible working solutions. Our evidence is that staff realise that their management is more likely to agree to these forms of flexibility, such as home working and flexitime, once everyone is clearer about what’s happening.

Our system fills that void, by offering an impartial and open view of activity for both staff and management.

Ciaran Rowsome
FlexTime CEO

Please get in touch if you feel we could be of some assistance.  

sean.gallagher@flextime.ie