What’s the deal with flexi time?

[MurdoMunro]

This seems to always come up when people are complaining about public sector workers (I think they specifically mean civil service and local government officers). What is it about flexi time that’s so heinous?

Disclosure: I worked the first half of my career in private sector and am now the second half in public and have been mostly salaried with flexi time for 30 odd years. Am completely fine with it.

Sure, sure, some managers aren’t good at making it work properly, it’s not appropriate for a lot of jobs and some workers take the piss. But these issues are the same, in my experience, whether in private and public sectors and in both flexi time and fixed hours workplaces.

What is it about flexi time that it’s overall an unfair practice?

You are being unreasonable, flexi time is obviously unreasonable and you should cut it out.

You are reasonable, flexi time is perfectly normal in a wide range of jobs and not specifically problematic.

Depends what you mean by flexitime tbf.

If it affects the service received by the public then it’s unreasonable.

Flexi time is great. I don’t take the piss tbh, I usually build up an extra two days a year of leave just by coming in a few minutes early every day. Suits me 🤷‍♀️

Jealousy I guess, the same as all those people who bitch about wfh.
DH has flexitime, it sounds good on paper , but in practice it's just an excuse to avoid paying for overtime. He never gets to take all the flexitime he accrues because his dept is always so short staffed and underfunded.

We had flexi time but also core hours to cover the phone lines for the public. Most people now actually prefer to email as that can be sent at any time. In my office it fortunately fell that certain people came in early, others came in after doing a school run. That meant everyone staggered lunch and some left when core hours were finished, ie me at 4pm to collect my child from nursery, those that came in later worked later. It worked for our department, I built flexi to cover bank holidays as I was part time.

The ability to build flex and take a day off was brilliant but due to having a small department it was harder than you think. In a previous job a group of 5 of us would leave early due to flex, go to a spa for a few hours, then out to dinner. Really helped with mental health and this was 25 years ago.

I work in a large building with checks on entry, where if we all arrived at 9am it would be carnage. Flexi time allows for a staggered entry and exit and also allows me to not have to use annual leave or work time for appointments, I just work around them. Downsides have been that often I work through my lunch, or 1 or 2 hours over my daily hours, due to workload (public sector) and there is an expectation of this in my specific role, with little time to take it back. However there are people in other departments who do take the piss (claim half an hour dinner but take an hour and half, leave at lunchtime every friday with no hours built up to do so etc) and make it difficult to meet business need; this requires strong management which doesn't always happen. I think if used appropriately and still able to respond to business need, there should be no issue

And to me this is what's wrong with flexi.

Why should you be able to add up 10 mins here and there to get days off? What value are you actually adding and are you actually working that extra time or just in early?

If there is a piece of work or a project that makes your role busier for a time then 100% Flexi or overtime.

What does it mean to you Portia?

In my current contract I have core hours and an overall minimum weekly number. No more than 12 hours flexi time off in a month (use em or lose em).

Other contracts have been different, but all had similar short time frame use em or lose em element.

I am with you I think it’s a fair practice. I guess those in industries that don’t have it put in overtime for nothing so there’s a bit of jealousy there.

But that does not mean the practice is unfair.

If she is working over her paid hours why should she not take that time back? Does it matter if she’s building it up in 20 minute chunks rather than, say, working Saturday mornings?

Is your issue clock watching rather than flexi time?

If flexi is managed well it's great.
To be managed well, staff need to actually accrue the time, and then take it the following month.
I've seen some very poor practice where staff take it before earning it so they are in debit. Where managers allow people to accrue weeks worth and then can't allow it to be booked and keep sufficient staff levels.

It’s the thing I miss most in my current role since I left my last public sector job. In the past 7 weeks I’ve worked 35 hours over my contracted hours and I’ve no ability to take them back - no toil, no overtime, no flexitime. But the work still needs to get done so I can’t just walk off at 5pm. So am hunting for jobs that come with flexitime and happy to take a pay cut to get that flexibility back.

I’ve never seen anyone claim that flexitime is unfair?
Flexi time isn’t unique to some public sector roles, I know plenty of people in the private sector who also have flexi time.
I have it in a sense, core hours and as long as the hours are worked it doesn’t have to be set the same for everyone, but it doesn’t accrue.

I see it quite frequently here @Completelyjo. It’s on that ‘public sector workers generally’ thread a few times that’s running at the moment which is what prompted me to ask the question today

And to me this is what's wrong with flexi.

Why should you be able to add up 10 mins here and there to get days off? What value are you actually adding and are you actually working that extra time or just in early?

Only someone who hasn't had flexitime would think this way.

If the workload is heavy or there's a deadline coming up, I'll start early and/or finish late, working more hours to get the work completed.

If it's quieter, I'll take advantage of that to finish early.

It's about using my working hours more efficiently to align with the demands of my job.

It's way more effective and efficient than being at my from exactly 9am to 5pm every day regardless of work demands.

Jealousy.

It's the same as all the people who complain about working from home, or a four day work week, or businesses that close on bank holidays or for two weeks at Christmas.

Lots of people have an odd "race to the bottom" mentality where if they can't have X, they don't see why anyone else should have it either.

I have flexi and think it works really well, but appreciate there may be people who take the piss with it- however that’s the case with anything.

In practice (for my current team & work) flexi time allows for us to work longer days to get things that urgently need doing, done, because you know you will get the time back so don’t mind the longer days as you know the shorter days can follow them.

My last role had all the same time pressures and urgent cases etc as this role however no flexi and no paid overtime, the result being the clients suffered because of course nobody was going to stay late or come in early for no time back AND no extra pay.

It also helps with work life balance.

I have flexitime and overtime they are not mutually exclusive.

Flex time is entirely reasonable and it also benefits the employer in that late starts/early finishes due to car trouble or drs appointments get made up, as hours are recorded.

Flexi is good but so is more informal autonomy to manage your hours. I don’t technically have flexi time in my current contract but I act as if I do- eg it makes no difference if I start at 8.30 or 9.15 and I adjust my hours accordingly. In practice I think it is applied more for more junior roles. Senior staff are most likely doing over hours and not claiming back.

When I was local government (10 years ago) I think the maximum number of flexi days you could take was 7. You could be in minus within the month, so the first two weeks could be negative but you could work those hours in the last two weeks. You could carry a maximum number of hours which was a day or day and a half each month but only for 3 months. I have had flexi in all my jobs in some form or another, although in private sector it’s a less formal policy and can be therefore interpreted differently by managers.

I assume people who don’t get it are either prepared to give their time freely, which is their call, or have a fixed workload which doesn’t change. I know that some weeks are going to be busier than others, I wait on other people sending me stuff and when I receive that, I’m busy. I’ve gone into negative before I know the following week and week after I’m going to be busy. I’ll try to take any time owed to me within a couple of weeks but sometimes it can only be taken before the fact.

When at local government, flexi was used to cover doctors etc appointments, whilst not in local government I’ve always been given a grace of an hour to do appointments that can’t be scheduled outside the working day. I used flexi time heavily when at local government because I was doing my masters part time. I would go into negative whilst I was doing assignments or revising and build it up the following weeks because that work would still be there, if just delayed it because the deadline wasn’t immediate. My employer wasn’t paying for my masters but they were supportive and so everyone was really transparent about deadlines with me knowing it helped me to plan my workload and when I could build flexi time and when I could use that flexi time to study.

I think it's like everything, you need to use common sense with it and it is open to abuse.
I am very good at building flex but would I use it when I have a big deadline or a couple of others are off? No, that's the common sense.
It is invaluable to me and one of the few things that keeps me in my relatively low paid CS job instead of bolting to the private sector where I could earn three times the amount. Is it not a good thing to keep workers like me with a rare set of technical skills in public service with this kind of trade off instead of causing a skills drain because we're all forced to work 9-5? Can't see that being much benefit to the public, that's the way I see it anyway.

I think it's like everything, you need to use common sense with it and it is open to abuse.

But as with anything else, if a colleague taking the piss or not doing their job properly, then that's a management issue, not a flexitime issue.

I've seen this argument before in these terms:

Say each employee has a target to complete five tasks/cases/events per week. One person works an extra 30 minutes per day, so that they have one day of flexi leave after three weeks. When they take their flexi day they only have to do four cases that week, because of their day off, but each day they worked an extra 30 minutes they still only did one case each day, because 30 minutes is not enough to start a new case... etc. So they've "got away with" producing less work overall.

I'm not arguing this is right - it depends on the type of work. If you literally only have one case available to you each day then the above might be the case (but, as PPs have said, it's a management issue), but many workloads are not like that. I've had flexi for my entire career, public and private sector, and it's been fine. Many parents would be stuck without it to be honest.

Public sector here, our office is extremely flexible but you have to get the OK from our Line Manager if you want to bank up hours to ensure we have adequate cover.