(not) Flex time in Ohio

American Public Media’s program Marketplace broadcast a story on April 2nd about a big change happening for Ohio state workers. For the past fifteen years, thousands of these workers used flextime schedules to fit a 40-hour work week into less than the standard five days or working a schedule different than the traditional 8 – 5 hours. This involved various arrangements, from coming in earlier (and leaving earlier) to telecommuting some of the time.

At the request of Governor Ted Strickland, Hugh Quill, the state’s director of the Department of Administrative Services, is putting a plan into place that would better be described as inflexible time. Allegedly, the root of this is to “maximize efficiency.”

The report noted a US Department of Labor statistic the: “one quarter of full-time employees in both the state and private sectors, nationally, are on flexible work schedules.”

Okay, this is just my opinion, but sounds to me like Strickland and Quill are authority-a-holics, with a need to exert control over those in lesser positions. So what is this going to net them — forcing workers to keep schedules they clearly don’t like and that interfere with, say, taking care of their families? I’m going to guess a bunch of disgruntled state workers who, while they may be putting in the facetime required to keep their jobs, will quite possibly work slower, daydream more, and revolt in quiet ways that certainly will not improve efficiency.

When are employers going to learn that when you trust people to do their jobs, when you don’t breathe down their throats, that good employees are going to get that job done, and get it done as swiftly and efficiently as possible, allowing them to move on to the next project?

I hold myself up as an example. I write at an extraordinarily fast pace. In one of my jobs — copywriter — part of the big sell is just how efficient I am. Not only do I beat most deadlines, I have less billable hours. Do the people who hire me really want me to dedicate forty hours to work that only takes me fifteen? Would they prefer to trap me in an office, where I work far less efficiently? Or let me work independently (or, of course, cowork)?

Beyond my opinion, there’s plenty of research to back up the idea that a flextime worker can be a highly efficient worker. Here’s just one study about the Seattle Housing Authority’s (SHA) great success with their program. And it doesn’t just help the workers, it helps the clients, too. To cite just one point made in the study, having workers coming in at non-traditional hours allows “SHA to be more agile in responding to emergencies related to its residents and housing units, because it has staff to call on for more hours of the day.”

So Ohio? Good luck. But I’m guessing it won’t be long before you realize the error of your ways.