With great power there is great responsibility. If you happen to be in the decision maker / leader shoes, empathy is one of the useful practise. Time works differently for human, and we know it. But knowing without doing anything, is nothing. When we started to have more people in office, we’re aware that “needs” are different.
So we introduced flexible working hours (FWH). Our team members have the flexibility to come in based on three options — 9AM, 10AM or 11AM. Why?
Many reasons that motivate us to apply this practise. There’re people living in congested area force them to face heavy traffic if they hit the road at normal peak hour, say 8AM~9AM. There’re people need to pick up their kids, want to hit the gym or play sports by ~6PM, so it is mandatory for them to leave office by that time, ideally, start their day by 9AM help them.
The thing with FWH, it works differently for different teams / organisations. Some organisations apply daily flexible hours, and some organisation apply quarterly flexible hours — where their team members can change their hours once in 3 months. And some organisation didn’t put any cap on what time their team members should be in (we’re not talking about organisations that deal with different time zones). The practise is depend on the organisation objective(s). And in our case — monthly basis.
When we examine our team members requirements and team objective — we’re well aware that we can still help our team members in their time schedule, but at the same we able to achieve team objective that needs everyone involvement such as daily standup (~11AM), mid-day / afternoon activities / discussion. “Loos” (no cap) fwh, where there is no parameter hours given, or daily fwh, will contribute to collaboration challenges and potential chaos (guessing game of “what time that/this person will come in today as I need to arrange something related to him/her”).
How’s yours? Does your current organisation apply fwh practise?
Read more about our culture related to this here : core values, 1:1 catchup, remote, peers review and self growth
