Study: Flexible Work Hours Raise Productivity, Help SMEs

Flexible work hours increase productivity in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and shift consumer spending geographically since consumers spend more near their homes, which benefits small businesses as well as diversifies economic growth.

 

How flexible work hours improve productivity

According to Dr Jesrina Ann, a Design Thinker and Researcher, a flexible working environment has proven to boost productivity by reducing absenteeism, attrition, and sick leave usage.

Higher productivity results in lower marginal costs, which may subsequently be invested in R&D to improve the quality of products and services, she stated on Bernama TV's "The Brief" talk show.

Flexible work hours, she claims, cause a shift in consumer spending in which people tend to spend more time closer to home, boosting demand for products and services from small businesses, geographically decentralising expenditure and diversifying economic growth.

Jesrina stated that her research was conducted using the design thinking ideology, which empathised with employees and identified obstacles of the return-to-office (RTO) settings and post-work-from-home (WFH) situation - which occurred during the COVID-19 lockdowns - had a mixed bag of benefits and drawbacks.

In response to comments from host Gerard Ratnam, she stated that one of the issues of RTO was the lack of work boundaries, which resulted in a worsening in work/life balance as employees were now compelled to travel back to the office.

Managers also found it difficult to oversee the effectiveness of workflow because some employees working from home and others from the office, and there was an obvious lack of staff morale, which reduced productivity.

 

The solution

She said some of the solutions by design thinking ideology for SMEs that worked very well were a combination of flexible working hours, alongside the usage of apps such as Waze or Google Maps, which significantly saved travel time to and from the office.

"This is only attainable if the business owners are willing to allow their employees to clock in or out, at a flexible timing.  To manage productivity and workflow, we tested the four-day work in the office and one-day WFH idea, which worked very well, with the usage of apps such as Evernote, Toggl Plan or Todoist as these apps help with planning, checklists, reminders, and even tracking of projects," she said.

She stated that some of the best design thinking solutions for SMEs were a mixture of flexible working hours and the use of apps like Waze or Google Maps, which greatly reduced commute time to and from the workplace.

The approach of encouraging colleagues to express gratitude rather than viewing companies as transactional places where everyone was expected to be professional also enhanced employee morale and well-being.

One of the drawbacks was that a flexible working environment indicated a lack of knowledge flow among workers, especially when skills were to be acquired through learning-by-doing.

Long-term productivity may suffer in this instance since people learn faster and better when they share a workplace.

 

Workforce agility

Jesrina further stated that organisations should be aware that a flexible working environment is a prerequisite to workforce agility. Offering options in the workplace is more important to the millennial generation than money alone, but Gen Xers and baby boomers don't mind the flexibility either.

"But it is important for employers to realise that millennials and soon, Gen Z, will be looking for workplace agility more than the incentives currently offered," she said.

Companies that can remain adaptive in this dynamic environment may see a rise in production, earnings, and the creation of competitive advantages while attracting and retaining top employees.

However, she noted that there was still a misunderstanding in Malaysia between organisations, management, and their employees about what was required for a flexible working environment, citing a lack of clarity.

Employers should be aware of the various forms of flexible working arrangements, such as hybrid work, in which some employees work in the office and others from home, depending on their preferences.

Then there's the four-day work week, sometimes referred to as the compressed work week, and flextime, which allowed employees to choose when their working day started and ended as long as they worked their contracted amount of hours.

 

She said that the trick to making this work is for organisations and employees to figure out which work environment will allow enough freedom to keep people happy without compromising productivity or job quality.

Source: BERNAMA