My best management idea: Tailored flex-time plan offered benefit without the hassle

Ginny Priborski knew employees were clamoring for flex-time — but she also understood total flexibility wasn’t in the cards for most people at her company. The solution: a tailor-made compromise.
Here’s her story:
Flex-time is a highly desired benefit these days, and our people desired it just like everybody else. But we were worried it wouldn’t work for us.
Most of our people have jobs that require their being at the workplace for set hours each day. Our business just didn’t lend itself to flexible scheduling.
Explaining this to our employees didn’t help much. Let’s face it – in today’s workplace, people are dying for a morale booster. And extra family time would help.
So we tried to figure a way to give employees what they wanted without going to a formal flex-time plan.
Four hours, every two weeks
We found the answer: “Flex 4.” The program gave workers four hours to use as they saw fit within each two-week pay period. They could use the four hours of flex time, but they had to total 80 working hours at the end of two weeks.
Example: If an employee left early one day, he or she had to make up the time by the end of the pay period.
It didn’t matter what the hours were used for, but most of them went to our employees’ family activities. Bottom line: Employees love the program, and there’s been very little disruption in our schedules.
(Ginny Priborski, HR manager, Mac Tac Nellis, North Las Vegas, NV)