In my first blog, I went way back to the 1960s to look at the origins of flexible working. Now I want to bring you right up to today and to look at what is happening now with Flexible Working and the role which our company, FlexTime, plays in this environment.

Incidentally, in Blog 1, I hope you enjoyed the picture of Hollywood icon, Cary Grant, arriving to work in his Bubble car.

So, keeping with that theme of the motor car, and as I would like our blogs to be as interactive as possible, please remind me about my experiences with the Delorean motor car company, when it was located in Northern Ireland.

Flexible Working in 2020:

A combination of social and cultural changes connected to advances in new technologies and their rapid adoption is driving how society is organising itself. This has quickly become one of the biggest workplace challenges. Resulting from these changes, organisations are becoming increasingly concerned to grow a modern, attractable and flexible workforce.

One stimulus for much of the change is the transformed mindset, particularly amongst those employees under 40, who are soon to form most of a workforce, in which: 

• more demand is placed on how employees want to work, which is towards the flexibility of working times and locations
• parents have to cope with a job, a family and with rising mortgage and childcare costs
• many people are living distances from jobs which are often located in overcrowded urban centres

This scenario, in turn, is impacting on Talent Acquisition. According to multiple research studies on human resources, the current number one focus is on:

• recognising employees’ desire for mobility and flexibility
• realising how that is critically linked to attracting and retaining skills.

Equally, organizations are eager to look at ways to reduce costs and ask – do employees need to be at work in a set location every day? Can we reduce the number of premises we hold?

FlexTime – Who Are We?

Flextime is an award-winning, world-leading system developer and supplier of cloud and mobile-based solutions for

• Flexible, mobile & shift working
• Job timing
• HRMS

Headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, Flextime has over 500 customers with more than 3,000 implementations and 200,000 users across multiple sectors and territories.  

Flextime supplies to government, manufacturing, universities, health, call centres, retail, service industry and financial services in Ireland, UK and the Netherlands.    

What do we do?

Flextime designs and implements solutions for all types of issues related to the subject of time in the workplace. The solutions can either be “ready to go” or can have a bespoke element, where needed.

By applying software features which fit with the needs of management while equally supporting working time and location arrangements of each employee, our solutions helps customers to     

• attract and retain staff while reducing absence, overtime and facility costs
• Control increasingly diverse working time and location arrangements 
• enhance payroll and cost management

Over the coming while, my Blogs will look at the significant impact Flexible Working and Shift Working has on the management of organisations and also the lives of their employees.  Oh, and, of course, there‘s my Delorean story…..but only if you remind me!.

Ciaran Rowsome

CEO

FlexTime