Anyone have expeience working flex hours?

[vickyocean]

 Does anyone work flex hours at their job? You know where you work 10 hours a day during a week and have one day off. Or as my office is proposing working 9 days and have the 10th day off

Comments

[beanpot]

Working a flex schedule in the DC area is a VERY common thing. Most people I know either work 10 hours during the week with Friday or Monday off or, like the federal government - nine hours with a day off every other week. From what I understand, the government allows them to choose a monday, tuesday, thursday or friday so as not everyone is out on friday.

Part of why they do is it due to commutes and staggering times when people come in and go home. I do not know if it causes issues at work places.

[a_loquita]

We work "summer hours" where we come in a half-hour earlier and take only a half-hour lunch (instead of an hour) each Monday-Thursday. Then we get out at 1 PM on Friday during the summer. It's nice. But we do a lot of client work and if something comes up on a Friday, people end up staying the regular full time anyway. It means you've just worked a lot of extra hours all week without a benefit. *shrug* I suppose it depends on the kind of business it is.

[morjana]

I've worked a variety of flex hours in several different jobs.

Did you mean working nine days straight in a row? Is that legal in your state?

The one thing I remember is that "extra" day off I earned working a 4/10 plan...I usually spent it catching up on my sleep. (And this was 20 years ago, when I was relatively younger...)

With any type of flex hours, it's how YOU make the most of the advantages that will work best for you in the long run. You actually have to plan ahead for there to be advantages.

It get's a little...daunting at times.

But I enjoyed it in the long run.

Morjana

[surreallis]

Depends if you're hourly or salary. I mean, hours like that are always nice, time-wise. Especially if you're salary. I've worked them before and I really loved the extra time off, but on the other hand, I was hourly and therefore to get one day off I had to use 10 hours of vacation. That sucked.

[lisayaeger]

We wrote a policy about a variety of flex options (telecommuting, compressed work week, reduced time, etc...). The key, as someone pointed out below, is to make sure that business isn't interrupted. So, if you need to be open a certain number of days during the week, then folks need to rotate days off, and not everyone can have a three-day weekend!

I think the other important thing is flexibility. So if someone is out sick or goes on a vacation, then everyone needs to know they aren't stuck in their schedule. People will need to adjust to accommodate the needs of the office.

It can totally work, but it has to be managed properly and fairly.