Flexible Staffing Arrangements
Options for flexible work schedules--once nonexistent--have become a reality, with benefits for workers and employees alike. Job sharing, compressed work weeks, reduced hours, work at home, and flextime have provided employees with the means to realize a better balance between work and family and an opportunity to engage simultaneously in more than one endeavor, e.g., school and work, two careers, and work and leisure. They can also lead to economic and emotional stress and to limited opportunities for professional growth. This Digest examines flexible work options, including the characteristics of workers who select them, the organizations that offer them, and the influence they have on worker satisfaction, performance, productivity, and career progression.
Flexible Staffing Arrangements
Over the years, employers have established employment arrangements with workers that include working in shifts, on "temporary" assignments, in a part-time capacity, and through independent contract work. The impetus for these arrangements is the organizations desire to realize its short-term service and production goals and to reap the low-cost benefits of a contingent work force.
Today, with businesses facing increasingly competitive markets and unprecedented customer demands for services, the employment of workers in shifts to cover a 24-hour day is increasing. In fact, one in five workers is hired to work outside the typical 9-to-5 time slot ("No More Nine-to-Five" 1998). Manufacturing companies have traditionally operated day and night, often to capitalize on equipment usage. However, many other types of companies are now offering their services around the clock, e.g., financial services, 24-hou...
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The theme of transformation is affected by Forster’s “light” and “darkness” in the novel because they both emphasize how Lucy’s path in life is more favorable. At the beginning of the story, Forster reveals Lucy’s character when she enters her room with a view: “she opened the window and breathed clean night air, thinking of the kind old man who had enabled her to see the lights dancing in the Arno.” (Forster, pg. 11). This sentence shows that Lucy is excited and open on her trip ...
Imbalanced, our lives are imbalanced. We do not have time to climb the ladder of success if we want to be home to raise our children. We do not have time to raise our children if we want to climb the ladder of success. There are not enough hours in the day to do all the things that we need to do to have a fulfilled life. We do not have time to cook a healthy meal from scratch. We grab a box of Hamburger Helper, a can of peas, and a bag of rolls and we have dinner. Exercise consists of walking between the car and the door and maybe a little wrestling around with the kids before bed. At work productivity is counted by how many hours you spend doing your job instead of the results that our produced in that time. Mindsets like this hold us back. Flexibility for the employee is the future to balancing our lives.
Trying to maintain positive employee morale is a constant struggle for many organizations. People struggle with day to day life responsibilities. Many people have different personal and family obligations. Most organizations do not have time and schedule flexibility which becomes overwhelming for some employees. Employees can face setbacks or roadblocks due to lack of flexibility within an organization that can create poor attendance and work performance. These issues create many difficulties for an organization. Flextime benefits have shown to be both beneficial to the employee and organization. The concept of flextime is timely, important, and also controversial within the human management field. Utilizing flextime is a current human resource challenge. Flextime has both positives and negatives which will be further discussed below.
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I am an organ donor, are you? Organ donations can help many people around the world, all you have to do is tick a little box at your local Department of Motor Vehicles (D.M.V.). People do not ask to have organ failure, they just do. Who are we to deny someone else the chance to live, if all we have to do is just share our organs when we are finished with them, we can not take them with us so what are you going to do with them? Lives may come and go, but organs can be passed on to the next person in need.
Organ donation, over the years, has grown its reputation to being one of the main life savers that humans have access to. Since the first successful organ transplant 50 years ago, many recipients have had their lifespans extended and have seen their health improve. As a result of organ transplants, thousands of people now live a full life with functional bodies. In the United States as well as other countries in the world, there are many different organs like kidneys, hearts, and livers that are used every day to save the lives of thousands of people. Every year there are thousands of deceased donors who provide transplanted organs in the United States to people who need them. While the number of organ donors has increased over the years, the
The environmental variation now and then shifted the roles of Human Resources vis-à-vis the working patterns in current business world. For example, the growth of female labour in workforce, the organizational changes to new flexible form, the enforcement and further amendment of Employment Act 2002 in flexible working, the arising awareness of work-life balance for working healthy, and so on (McOrmond, 2004; Honeyball, 2008; Redman and Wilkinson, 2009; Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service, 2010). These caused employees and employers to cater to their needs and wants, changing their expectations in flexibility and work-life balance from time to time. Therefore, the intention of this essay will be to discover whether employers’ need for flexibility and employees’ need for work-life balance can be reconciled to a certain extent or vice versa. In order to fulfill this discussion, many references such as books, journals, reports and other relevant websites will be used and referred.
Obtaining a job that will be flexible enough for someone to still live an outside life can be challenging. It is important to some to have the ability to be able to choose their work schedule. In fact, a study showed that “. . . one-third of wage and salary workers have flexible schedules. . .”, which means that an employee’s work shift could change daily (McMenamin, 2007, p. 3). For example, most fast food employment has the ability to grant a more flexible schedule for the employees. Some employees enjoy the work flexibility schedule, which allows the employees, with the assistance of a good manager to create a schedule that benefits both parties. However, a flexible schedule most often benefits the organization more than the employee (2007, p.3). For instance, if you worked for a fast food chain, an employee would not want to work from 10 in the morning until 11 at night. Flexible schedules allow for them to keep long hours available to the public, while still being able to keep the employees content with their work
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In line with the continuous improvement initiative to uplift the service delivery system to the public, flexible working hour’s schedule which is also known as Staggered Working Hours (SWH) has been implemented in the Federal Territory of...
Flexible patterns is one of the most central issues and concerns for the 21st century societies and balancing work and family is one of the major challenges for the current generations of employees. During the 80s most organizations deemed employees as machines restricting flexible work patterns. The structures and systems used were formalized and centralized to a point where the workforce was limited. Flexible work methods is defined as the flexibility of how, where and when employees should conduct their contractual duties.
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89). Typically, and in order to extend the daily working time, the reasons behind the implementation of shift work are threefold: social (e.g., to ensure health care or public safety), technological (e.g., certain manufacturing process can’t be stopped as is the case, for example, in the chemical industry) and/or economic (e.g., increase production capacity and/or secure short-term profits from high investments in equipment, such as, for example, the textile or automobile industry). Within this context, it is important to note that shift work context been changing since the beginning of the XXI century in comparison with previous centuries. Shift workers are now spread over different sectors ranged from telecommunications to media and also beyond traditional sectors, such as health and transportation (Matheson, O'Brien & Reid, 2014). Due to production processes or cost, many industries need to labor 24 hours a day so they can survive in a competitive market where customers' needs are always changing. Consequently, it requires adaptation of the workforce to different shift work formats (Costa,