TIME & PLACE
Adapted from Bob Fortier's paper on "Timeshifting"
As printed in Office Life Canada, October 2003

An office that learns timeshifting can save money
and jobs – not to mention employee sanity

Timeshifting is based on the premise that the industrial revolution's nine-to-five work day no longer makes sense for everyone all of the time. With new forces such as the information revolution, free trade, telework, tele-commerce, distance learning and telemedicine™, people are doing more with less in both their personal and working lives. Add to this, the world's uncertain economic situation, global villages, and clients and stakeholders wanting longer hours of service including weekends and there is increased pressure for work to be carried out around the clock and across the world's time zones.

What is Timeshifting?

Timeshifting is when an employee is permitted to carry out his duties under certain circumstances at any time, day or night, weekends, holidays or religious holidays - in other words, it’s like flexible hours “on steroids.”

A typical timeshifting scenario would see Bill, the early bird, start his day at 6:00 a.m., work 7.5 hours, and leave at 2:00 p.m. Then Sally, whose spouse is a shift worker, can start her day, sharing Bill's office.

In another case, Jacques, who works from 6:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., from Saturday to Wednesday, can share his office with Liz, a part-timer who works from 2:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. A final example sees three people sharing the same office: Jean the translator works all night, while Diane the lawyer works in the same office during the day. When she leaves in the early afternoon, Robert, the part-time researcher, sits in the same office.

Though timeshifting might apply only to a relatively small number of employees, even small numbers would be sufficient to yield large benefits.

A proper timeshifting arrangement is one that mutually benefits managers and employees. It gives more flexibility to managers who need to reduce expenditures (including overtime) and capitalize on resources, and to employees who want more voluntary flexible work arrangements to help balance work and life.

For timeshifting to be effective, certain conditions must apply. To start, it should make sense for that employee in that particular job and have managerial approval. Also, it should not cost more, and not prove a hindrance to operational effectiveness. What’s more, it would need to be voluntary on the part of employees and they would have to be prepared to share their offices.

What's in it for Organizations?

While the concept of Timeshifting can apply to any organization. In this article we’ll use the Canadian Federal Public Service as an example, but it would be a relatively straightforward matter to adapt this concept to any organization, public or private. A government survey of flexible work arrangements in 12 federal departments found that over 10,700 employees were out of the office at least 50% of the time during their normal work day. A key advantage to timeshifting is its ability to harness this empty space.

Further advantages can be found by combining timeshifting with another measure such as teleworking. A major telework study in the federal government, found that teleworkers left their offices empty and unused on telework days. Furthermore, if it ever became a condition of telework, almost all of them were willing to share their offices Because teleworkers want the flexibility to work anytime, anyplace, the study recommended the adoption of fully flexible working hours, thereby eliminating the need for teleworkers to respect core hours of work.

As a low-cost option, timeshifting has much to offer:

Office Space Savings: Along with telework and other flexible working arrangements, timeshifting stands as an alternative to acquiring more real estate. Organizations experiencing rapid growth and the need to build or lease additional buildings can save significantly by adopting flexible working arrangements, including timeshifting. Like defragging your computer’s hard drive, timeshifting, in concert with the growing number of flexible work arrangements such as telework, can consolidate empty office space, resulting in savings across the board.

As a dramatic example, consider the costs of office space within the Federal government. According to rough calculations, we can assume the average employee's office costs $7,000 per year. Based on earlier surveys, about 190,000 of its approximately 220,000 employees were found to need offices or workstations, for an annual office space cost of approximately $1.3 billion - making real estate one of its larger expenditures!

The return on this capital investment is astoundingly low - approximately 83% of the time, its employees do not use their offices. The cost of this "lack of use" is a whopping $1.1 billion per year.

The arithmetic is simple: the average employee works 7½ hours in each 24-hour period; 220 working days per 365-day year; and takes an average of 9.1 sick days per year. Not counting time spent at meetings, travel, various types of leave and employees absent due to alternative working arrangements, this translates to only about 17% usage.

A Little Goes a Long Way: A modest number of timeshifters can result in significant benefits. In the Federal government scenario, for every 1% of offices shared by timeshifters, the yearly savings can be up to $13 million (1% times $1.1 billion mentioned above). Even with a modest number of eligible or interested employees, each new and voluntary flexible work arrangement joining the broad range of already-existing ones would have very positive effects.

Positive Productivity: The work can be done in the quiet hours with fewer interruptions. There can be fewer absences from work for family-related reasons or for medical or dental appointments. Furthermore, since employees work at times that suit their lives or even their biological clocks, timeshifting helps to relieve stress.

Less Overtime: Increasing productivity or having another tool to help manage the distribution of work can help to reduce overtime payments, thereby achieving further savings.

Quality Service: For many managers, timeshifting can improve efficiency and the quality of their services. Expanding the hours of service to clients can bring many benefits; for example, carrying out business over extended hours, can help deliver services seamlessly, especially in cases where clients are in different time zones, both in Canada and globally.

Good PR: Timeshifting can help build bridges with employees and for their unions. This would be especially so if gain-sharing (performance or productivity bonuses) were considered, where some of the savings can be shared with employees. Timeshifting can be one more way for stakeholders to see that the their organization is taking positive steps towards achieving savings, and leadership in people management.

Less Lay-offs: Savings can offset and may reduce the need for layoffs, thereby helping in the management of labour strategy. The resulting diminished need for salary or accommodation dollars can ease pressure on the need to declare employees surplus in order to achieve reduction targets.

What's in it for Employees?

Options: Employees like having the option of flexible work arrangements, and timeshifting provides yet another attractive and voluntary work option.

Balance: A growing numbers of employees share child or elder care with their spouses, or live with spouses who may have "McJobs"™ requiring shiftwork. Timeshifting can better balance their work and personal work lives, and they can move towards tailoring their work hours to suit their lives rather than the other way around.

Surveys have determined that balance is highly sought after by employees. A survey conducted by Dr. Linda Duxbury at Carleton University's School of Business reveals that most employees and 80% of parents wanted flexible work schedules. One of the not-so-surprising recommendations was that employers review the nine-to-five workday.

Morale: Initiatives that respond to employees’ needs and reduce stress levels are very likely to have positive impacts on morale.

Commuting: Timeshifting can help employees avoid rush hours, reduce congestion and pollution at peak hours, and help spread out public transportation usage resulting in mutual benefits for employees and municipalities.

Impediments and Challenges

Unions: In most organizations, it would be relatively easy to introduce timeshifting but there can be some challenges in introducing it in unionized environments since the buy-in or even agreement of unions would be required.

Whatever the strategy, the preferred option should involve serious attempts to gain union support. Some unions may be very interested in the concept of timeshifting. Because of the benefits involved, and because timeshifting can be good news for unions, any bargaining strategy should consider the potential advantages (savings, reduction of layoffs, greater flexibility and possibility for gain sharing, to name a few).

While there is every chance that unions would be amenable to examining the concept of timeshifting, some unions might resist. In such cases, the option can be offered to non-unionized employees first. Given the desirability of flexible working arrangements, this would likely lead to unionized employees encouraging their unions to be more amenable to timeshifting.

Costs: It would not make sense to permit timeshifting in situations where additional expenses were incurred, for example, to provide for additional supervisory staff, and for special heating or security arrangements.

Savings: Some savings would not be immediate, for example, accommodations savings would begin to accrue once leases were renegotiated, or buildings sold or leased.

Overtime: Provisions such as overtime can be muddied. Regularly scheduled hours of work allow easy accounting for overtime, a big expense to the organization, but also a much-loved source of revenue to many employees.

Health: Timeshifting could negatively affect the health of some workers who have difficulty acclimatizing to night work. But with employees being intelligent and capable of making informed decisions, along with built-in safety mechanisms, such problems would be minimized. As with telework, timeshifting would be completely voluntary and can be cancelled at any time. What’s more, as with telework, some level of training would be recommended.

Scheduling: For timeshifting to be smooth, managers would need to ensure schedules of timeshifters do not conflict with one another, and that work assignments are delivered on schedule in the same way as for other flexible work arrangements.

Objections: Some supervisors might think: "how can I tell my employees are working if I can't see them?", or "how can I trust them to do a good job when I'm not there to guide them?" This reaction is dealt with in most programs that deal with flexible hours of work, where employees may work later or earlier than their supervisor, and with telework, where employees work at different locations than their supervisor. One of telework's biggest accomplishments is that it emphasizes performance rather than presence, and that thinking would be extended to timeshifting.

This article was reprinted with permission from InnoVisions Canada and the Canadian Telework Association.