Flexible working hours make employees more productive: Study

WASHINGTON - Employees with flexible hours are not only more satisfied with their jobs but they are more likely to work better, a new study claims.

The study from Cranfield School of Management in the United Kingdom suggests that workers allowed flexible hours work more intensely than their counterparts with more rigid office hours.

Management professors Clare Kelliher and Deirdre Anderson, who conducted the study, explain that the phenomenon is a kind of payment to the employer from the worker in exchange for the freedom to choose where and when to work.

They surveyed more than 2,000 employees at three large multi-national, UK-based corporations to reach the conclusion.

The responses to the questionnaire they had set indicated that employees who worked remotely one day a week and workers who had reduced their required weekly office hours tended to report higher job satisfaction, lower stress and higher loyalty to their company than employees who didn’t have flexible hours.

Further, 37 random interviews hinted that flexible schedules are also linked to increased work intensity in the form of higher productivity and longer hours.

Anderson and Kelliher claim that most employees are willing to maintain equilibrium with his or her employer.

“We argue that flexible workers ‘repay’ the choice opened up to them, by means of extending a greater effort,” Discovery News quoted Kelliher as saying.

Kelliher concluded: “In the article, we don’t necessarily present work intensification as a positive thing.

“There is a whole body of evidence which suggests that in the longer term, there are costs to employee well-being. We caution, therefore, that there may be longer-term costs associated with work intensification.”

The study has been published in the January issue of the journal Human Relations. (ANI)