Flexitime helps to maintain a Work / Life balance

Flexitime is a scheme where an organisation offers its employees the opportunity of a flexible working hours arrangement.

Borer's flexitime system is designed to offer employees more flexibility in the workplace. With more and more emphasis being placed on work life balance, organisations must define procedures to support employees. One way to do this is by implementing flexitime.

How does Flexitime work? 

Essentially, your organisation will agree standard or core hours that must be worked by employees as well as flexible working hours where employees can come and go as they please.

For example, you might agree to:

• Arrive for work between 07:30 - 10:00 (Flexitime)
• Guarantee to be there between 10:00 - 12:00 (Core time)
• Take your lunch break between 12:00 - 14:00 (Flexible Lunch Hour)
• Guarantee to be there from 14:00 - 16:00 (Core time)
• Leave between 16:00 - 19:30 (Flexitime)

The hours you work between these times are credited to you. In effect, you set up a time bank with your employer. An employee is obliged to work between the basic core hours and has the flexibility to clock in / out between the other hours.Most schemes allow you a credit or debit margin, often of about 10 hours.

For example, if you work a 35-hour week, then, over four weeks, you will ‘owe’ your employer 140 hours. These four weeks are your ‘accounting period’: if you work more than 140 hours in four weeks then you will be in credit, and if you work fewer hours then you will owe time to your employer.

If you go beyond your credit margin, into surplus, you may lose those extra hours; if you go beyond your debit margin, into debt, you might be disciplined or lose pay.

One of the best-liked features of flexitime is flexileave. You can turn your credit hours into time off. Depending on the scheme you are in, this might be one or two half days a month or one full day, or you may be able to add days to your holiday entitlement.

Borer Message Display Terminal - Reads Mifare multifunction cards or Proximity cards. The screen displays the time of day and shows attendance balance when you clock. The keypad has 'IN' and 'OUT' keys for out of hours clockings. The keypad also enables you to input absence notification codes.

What are the advantages for employees?

• Allows you to schedule your travel; time to avoid congestion
• Peronal matters can be sorted without havint to take time off
• Parents can schedule their day to pick up their children
• Reduces absenteeism
• Reduces stress, fatigue and unfocused employees
• Increase morale
• Increase employee satisfaction and production

• A benefit to retain and attract new employees
• Work time visits to doctor/dentists are in employees time
• Measures employee’s attendance – you only pay for time in attendance (delayed arrival caused by traffic congestion, delayed trains etc. are at employees expense)
• An incentive to complete tasks instead of being carried forward to the next day as extra hours worked count towards the final target

• A centrally administered or paper based scheme will make heavy demands upon resources and can be a significant overhead (we estimate one full time administrator is required for every 200 to 300 members of staff

The attendance plan update menu allows the flexitime administrator to create / amend work plans to suite individual groups of employees

ATRACS can assist - cut overheads and reduce management time

It is very labour intensive to manage and maintain a centrally administered or paper based flexitime system. Invariably, queries arise in relation to flexi balances and the process can become a very complicated one, particularly for the HR department. Implementing an automated time and attendance system makes things very easy for both employees and their managers alike.  

Borer has developed ATRACS and ATRACS Web Interface to reduce management involvement and the administrative effort required to manage a flexitime scheme.

ATRACS Web encourages staff participation in the administration of their individual flexitime accounts by providing a set of web based tools to allow them to view their own flexitime statements and suggest adjustments where they have forgotten to record or have omitted to justify absence during core time.

Managers are notified and asked to approve any adjustments requested by members of staff using management tools provided by ATRACS Web. By enabling and encouraging staff participation in the administration of the flexitime scheme the administrative overhead can be significantly reduced.   ATRACS features:

• Acts as a time bank, accumulating employees attendance, managing employee absence Unbiased only factually recording and reporting on actual activity Provides management reports allowing management to better plan staff resources Provide a web interface for employees allowing them to: - resolve simple queries without management involvement; log requests for annual leave and make adjustments (missed clockings), which are then referred to and approved by managers prior to posting – significantly reducing time and effort in the management of the scheme Provides a web interface for managers allowing them to review staff in attendance and allocate staff resources as well as approve staff web based adjustments and holiday, flexi leave requests
• Automatically generates an attendance history and maintains a management audit trail

One of the main advantages of automating the process is that via ATRACS, employees have access to their own attendance information e.g. hours worked, flexi balances etc.

In terms of flexitime, this means that employees are always aware of when they are close to reaching their target banked debit or credit hours and can take time off or work more hours accordingly. This, in turn, significantly reduces the number of queries to HR and payroll allowing these departments to get on with more strategic initiatives.

Helping to promote employee self service in your organisation, ATRACS allows employees to enter their flexi day requests and then routes the request to the appropriate person for approval.

In the past, flexitime was mainly associated with the public sector. However, now more and more companies are realising the benefits of flexitime and schemes have been put in place by banks and other financial institutions, insurance companies, hospitals, solicitors and accounting practices among others. 

For further information or To arrange a demo of the Flexitime system, please use the Contact Form or call on 0845 155 9623