Your best bet for boosting wellness in the New Year might just be a flexible scheduling program. Employees like the flexibility, and management likes the productivity and coverage. And the cost is minimal.
Best wishes for the New Year from all of us at HR Daily Advisor.
Once viewed as strictly an employee "perk," flexible work arrangements are now being recognized as a strategy for creating more effective workplaces, say identical twin sisters Rose Cook and Lynn Faughey, founders of FlexPro Staffing, an Eagleville, PA-based staffing firm that specializes in flexible work opportunities in the pharmaceutical industry.
Enhanced employee performance, less turnover and absenteeism, and fewer stress-related illnesses are some of the positive results that employers experience when they incorporate flexibility into their environment, the sisters say.
Here are their tips for getting flexible scheduling approved.
6 Tips for Negotiating a Flexible Work Arrangement
1. Assess whether your firm’s culture supports work-life initiatives. Flexible work should not simply be a catchphrase at your workplace. Management from the top down must encourage the concept and support work arrangements that actively embrace work-life balance.
2. Clearly define the "WIIFM" (what’s in it for me) for management. Highlight the applicable advantages, such as cost savings, enhanced productivity, reduced absenteeism, better coverage, reduced turnover, etc.
3. Prepare ahead to address management’s possible objections. Think about, and prepare for, the best counterarguments to those objections.
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4. Cite other successful examples of flexible work arrangements in your company or other companies.
5. Propose the flexible work arrangement on a trial basis. Ask management to try out the new arrangement for 3 months, with a formal evaluation at the end of the trial period.
6. Make sure that everyone understands that flexibility is a two-way street. Effective work-life initiatives must work for both the employee and the employer, with both entities upholding their side of the bargain.
Once you get approval, says Cook, before implementing, plan very carefully and communicate widely so everyone knows how the system is going to work, especially regarding the necessity to be there during "core" hours and to schedule meetings during core hours.
"Incorporating a culture that supports flexible work into a firm’s business model proves to be a win-win scenario. If your organization is not currently addressing work-life issues, it will soon be losing out—if it isn’t already," says Cook.
Is a Flexible Work Policy Part of a Wellness Program?
Most experts agree that reducing stress is an important part of wellness, but they don’t have much advice for how to accomplish it. Flexible work schedules will go a long way to reducing employee stress. And do it at low cost with minimal disruption. So, definitely, flexible work scheduling can be an important part of your wellness program.
But what about the other part of wellness, the physical well-being? A complete wellness program is the answer. Well-structured and well-run wellness programs generate ROI of up to 300 percent—music to management’s ears! But the key words are “well-structured” and “well-run.” Poorly structured programs just spin their wheels—no health benefit and no positive ROI, either.
Many readers have told us that BLR’s comprehensive guidebook, Workplace Wellness: Healthy Employees, Healthy Families, Healthy ROI, has helped them get programs up and running that achieve wellness objectives with a great ROI while avoiding the legal hassles that, these days, seem to accompany any worthwhile venture in HR.
Wellness—NO downside! Impressive ROI, so management’s happy. Better health and employees are happy. And that means HR is happy. BLR’s Workplace Wellness is the key to developing your workplace wellness program.
It’s a comprehensive guide that takes you step-by-step through setting up a program, from convincing management all the way through to creating and implementing a workable plan for your workplace. The guide also includes a vast collection of ready-to-use forms, handouts, and checklists that both structure your program and provide the metrics to prove its effectiveness to management’s satisfaction.
If you’d like to examine Workplace Wellness: Healthy Employees, Healthy Families, Healthy ROI on a no-cost, no-obligation basis for 30 days, we can arrange for you to do so. Let us know and we’ll be happy to set it up.
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