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Listen to part of a lecture in a management class.
    Professor:
    Good morning, class. Um… OK, today we’re gonna talk about flextime. Flextime is a scheduling system that… well, it gives full-time employees some flexibility when they’re deciding on their work schedules. So it’s not just the typical nine-to-five workday that most people are so used to. I’m gonna guess that you probably haven’t had a flextime schedule, since most of you haven’t worked a full-time job yet. But maybe if you talk to your parents or some of your friends, you’ll find somebody who has flextime. Anyway, in most cases, an employee can’t just decide that they want to work a flextime schedule. It’s really up to management to say yes or no. And since we’re talking about management in this class, it’s important to understand flextime if you ever want to manage a business.
    Let’s start with, um… let’s start by describing different types of flextime schedules. The first type is called a condensed schedule. Under a condensed schedule, an employee still works the full forty hours a week. But instead of working those hours over five days, which is typical, they work them over three or four days. So, um, the weekly hours are condensed into fewer days, right? Let me just give you an example of a condensed schedule. Um, as I said before, a conventional schedule for an office job would be Monday through Friday, from nine in the morning to five in the afternoon. Now, a condensed schedule might mean that the person works only four days a week—let’s say Monday through Thursday—from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. That’s, um, that’s a ten-hour workday.
    So that’s one kind of flextime schedule. Another type of flextime schedule is called an altered schedule. With an altered schedule, employees work eight hours a day, five days a week. But instead of coming in at 9 a.m., like they would with a traditional work schedule, they come in either earlier or later than that. And their day ends according to when they come in. So maybe an employee will choose to come in at 7 a.m., and they’ll work a full eight hours, so they get to leave at 3 p.m. This could be every day or only certain days of the week.
    Alright, so those are two types of flextime schedules— the, urn, condensed schedule and the altered schedule. If that’s clear, let’s go ahead and move on. OK, next, we need to talk about the pros and cons of a flextime system. Imagine that you are the manager of an office and you’re trying to decide whether flextime is a good way to go. You have to think about the possible advantages and disadvantages, right? So let’s start with advantages. First of all, say you allow your employees to work flexible schedules because of, maybe, family obligations. For example, imagine a household in which both the parents work full-time from nine to five. But their kids are in school, and school hours are from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. every day. With the schedule, getting the kids to school in the morning is no problem, but picking them up after school might be a problem. So maybe the mother decides to start a flextime schedule, from seven to three. That way, the father can take their kids to school in the morning, and the mother can pick them up in the afternoon. In this case, using flextime is convenient. Now, if you’re a manager, and you allow an employee to have flextime to accommodate family obligations, that employee will probably appreciate the flexibility quite a bit. As a result, you are more likely to retain those employees—you’ll build loyalty.
    But flextime is not a perfect system. In fact, there are times when flextime could make life more difficult for you as a manager. For example, let’s say you’re trying to hold a staff meeting. It could be hard to schedule a meeting that everyone is able to attend if different employees are working different hours. Also, it might be harder for you to oversee your employees’ work if they are not always in the office at the same time as you are. And one more thing is that it might be difficult for your employees to work in teams—to work together on different projects—if they are in and out at different times. As a manager, you’d have to weigh the pros and cons and just figure out what works best for your company.