EMPLOYERS are being urged to look at flexi-time as a way of cutting down on lateness and absenteeism.
Executive director of the Barbados Employers’ Confederation, Tony Walcott, said sometimes lateness/ absenteeism was due to something as simple as transportation woes.
Speaking as the National Initiative for Service Excellence (NISE) launched the 2014 version of its 100 Improvements In 100 Days – Moving Barbados Forward campaign, Walcott said addressing the issues of absenteeism and productivity was “extremely complex”.
“One of the first things we need to understand when we are looking at absenteeism is what is driving the absenteeism,” he said, adding that employers should get to the “root cause” of the problem.
He gave an example of an employee, from St Andrew, who usually made it in half an hour before the start of her schedule, but then started arriving late for work. He said when her employer investigated, it was discovered that the Transport Board had changed the schedule of its bus service; as a result, the 6 a.m. bus
was no longer available and the employee was left with no other options at that time.
“In instances like that there are a few things the employer can do and it is something we have been trying to get more and more employers interested in – understanding the concept of flexible working hours,” Walcott noted.
“If you can only make it in for 8:30 for whatever reason, either the bus service or you may have an ageing parent or grandparent you have to look after until house help comes in – you can make it for 8:30 rather than 8 o’clock – why not adjust individuals’ hours to allow them to get there for 8:30 or 9 o’clock, whichever works best?” he suggested.
Walcott noted the employees would put in the same eight working hours but might finish an hour or half an hour later depending on if they chose to give up part of their lunch hour.
Adding he did not think that employees “[set] out to get work late every morning or [set] out to do a lousy job”, Walcott added: “I would guarantee you if that kind of flexibility of thought was practised by more employers, you would have a lot less stresses and strains within an organization.
“You need to understand what the issues are before you determine what the solution ought to be and too often we only see the symptoms and try to think of a solution without understanding the causes,” Walcott stressed.
The BES executive director also urged employers to recognise that they were employing “people with brains – people who can think independently, people who have their own ideas about the way things can happen”.
“Unfortunately, some of our managers have not kept apace with the new developments,” he said, while hastening to add that that was not an indictment on all managers as some were progressive.
“But I think people need to understand that the quality and nature of the new employee coming in is different from the [employee] we had 30 years,” he stressed.
 Meanwhile, chief executive officer of NISE, Kim Tudor, said organisations could use the 100-day period to try flexi-time.
(HLE)
