Want to know the secret to attracting 7x more qualified candidates than traditional job postings?
Offer flexible work arrangements.
According to research by CareerBuilder, jobs allowing remote work (also called telework) or part-time work they attracted 7x more candidates than in-person roles.
This statistic proves the effectiveness of flexible work options, which have become increasingly popular recently.
Since employees got a taste of remote and hybrid work during the pandemic, they haven’t looked back. In particular, employees are drawn to the superior work-life balance that flexible arrangements provide, such as choosing when and where to work.
Yet, the benefits of a flexible work environment are for more than just employees.
Employers are also seeing positive effects from implementing flexible work schedules, such as elevated levels of engagement, boosted productivity, and much better retention rates.
A 2018 survey found that 80% of workers would choose a position with a flexible schedule over an in-person role.
So, it’s clear that flexible work arrangements are here to stay and can yield significant benefits for both employees and employers.
In this article, I’ll cover the four most common types of flexible work arrangements so you can determine which will work best for your organization.
Stay tuned to learn more!
The rise in popularity of flexible working arrangements
Before 2020, most of the work was done on-site at offices or other locations.
Commuting was the norm, with employees traveling from their homes to their workspaces daily, typically with their car (and at their own expense).
Workweeks were also more uniform, with most organizations opting for five 8-hour workdays with weekends off (the origin of the classic ‘9-5’).
The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 ended that, as flexible work arrangements have become the norm.
To put things in perspective, before the pandemic, only about 6% of employees worked from home, and three-quarters of the workforce had never worked remotely.
As of May 2020, over 1/3 of employees were working from home.
This massive shift strongly impacted workers, as they could find more time for their personal lives due to working flexible hours.
Besides fully remote work, hybrid work schedules also became popular in the years following 2020.
Hybrid work involves splitting the workweek between in-person and remote work, but we’ll explore this model later.
Employees also found that remote work arrangements positively affected their mental health, making them more productive and motivated.
Research from Owl Labs found that remote workers spent ten fewer minutes each day unproductive than on-site employees. Also, flexible workers were 47% more productive than full-time, in-person employees.
Their research also discovered that 70% of remote workers during the pandemic found virtual meetings far less stressful.
Changing priorities for modern job candidates
All these factors led to flexible work schedules becoming a top priority for job seekers, with some claiming they’d take a lower-paying position than they’re used to for flexible work hours.
42% of office workers claim they’d take a 10% pay cut to be able to work remotely, and only 16% of white-collar employees would consider positions that don’t offer remote work at least some of the time.
In the current era, flexible work arrangements have overtaken the classic 9-5 model to become the norm. The return-to-office mandates earlier this year mostly failed (or at least received negative backlash), so it’s better to work with employee demands instead of against them.
What makes a work arrangement flexible?
Workplace flexibility has undergone a severe transformation in recent years, with new models popping up constantly (to varying degrees of success).
In summary, a flexible working arrangement is any schedule that eschews the typical five-day, eight-hour workweek model for full-time positions.
Technically, part-time work qualifies as a flexible working arrangement, but it’s been around for many years, so we won’t cover it in this article.
Examples of modern, flexible arrangements include:
Working four 10-hour days (still 40 hours, but workers gain an extra day off)
Job-sharing arrangements. This is where two part-time workers split the duties of one full-time job. This is common in the healthcare industry (and other organizations that operate 24/7), like when nurses split hospital shifts to ensure 24-hour coverage.
Telecommuting. While telecommuting does involve working from home, it differs from remote work in that employees aren’t restricted to their home office. Telecommuting enables working on the fly at a coffee shop, inside a vehicle, or at the public library.
Four-day workweeks. An emerging model is the four-day workweek, in which employees work 32 hours per week instead of the traditional 40. Unlike the 10-hour day model (where employees still put in 40 hours), the four-day workweek involves working four eight-hour days with three days off. This model showed promising results in an experiment, with 82% of companies reporting positive effects on employee well-being.
These work arrangements have effectively reduced employee burnout, a severe problem in recent years.
The benefits of flexible work arrangements
Are you still hesitant about implementing a flexible work model at your organization?
If so, that’s completely understandable.
After all, many of these models are in their infancy and have yet to see widespread implementation.
However, that doesn’t mean there haven’t been highly positive effects associated with flexible working hours.
Remote work makes things like child care far more accessible for employees and saves them the hassle (and money) of commuting daily.
Here’s a closer look at the main benefits employers see from implementing flexible work arrangements.
Improve retention rates
Retention became a severe concern for many companies during ‘The Great Resignation’ of 2021.
While that trend has waned in recent years, retention rates remain a cause of concern for many companies.
The good news?
Flexible work options encourage employees to stick with employers.
According to Gartner, retention rates improve by 10% whenever a company offers remote working to employees.
Beyond that, 57% of workers claim they’d consider leaving their jobs if their employer no longer offered remote work.
Attract the most qualified prospects
As stated, flexible work arrangements are a big draw for job candidates, including top talent.
Advertise options like remote, hybrid, or four-day workweeks to attract qualified candidates.
This will ensure you get to pick from the cream of the crop to fill your open positions. As a bonus, your Human Resources department won’t have to work as hard on recruitment, which they’ll thank you for.
Boosted productivity
There are many reasons why employees on flexible schedules get more done during their hours of work than workers who are always in the office, including:
When working remotely, employees are surrounded by fewer disruptions (e.g., loud phones ringing, office chatter, and frequent meetings).
Improved focus due to being in their home environment (i.e., not feeling weak and hungry, being able to use the bathroom, etc.)
Remote work is often results-driven, which boosts productivity (i.e., focusing on the tasks that need to get done more than the number of hours an employee works).
A study by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) analyzed its remote workers and found that they were 4.4% more productive than their in-house staff.
The four most common types of flexible work arrangements
Okay, now that you know flexible work arrangements yield many employer benefits, it’s time to learn how to put them into practice.
There are quite a few ways to approach flexible work, but we’ll look at what I’ve found to be the most popular:
Remote work
Hybrid work
Flextime
Compressed workweeks
Let’s take a closer look at each one.
Type #1: Remote work
Remote work is the most common flexible work arrangement (and the one that exploded during the pandemic).
Glassdoor defines remote work as an employee’s ability to do their job from any location in the world as long as they have the proper equipment, which is most commonly a computer and access to the internet.
Most of the time, remote workers operate from home offices, areas of their homes that they set up with the necessary equipment to do their jobs.
Some remote positions require additional equipment, such as printers, phone systems, a computer, and an internet connection.
Remote work comes with its own set of unique challenges for managers. Since their team is no longer face-to-face, meetings must occur over digital conferencing software like Zoom. Also, the way employees log their hours is different. Remote employees can either:
Use digital clock-in and clock-out systems
Log their hours
Operate on a results-driven basis (i.e., get this task done by this deadline)
Type #2: Hybrid work
Hybrid work combines remote work with traditional office work, hence the name ‘hybrid.’
There’s quite a bit of creative freedom involved with hybrid work models.
For instance, there are some hybrid work models that:
Allow employees to choose which days to work remotely and which to show up at the office
Designate which days employees work from home
Let employees work outside traditional working hours (i.e., working on a results-driven basis)
Combine telecommuting (working in coffee shops, client’s offices, etc.) with remote work and on-site work
As you can see, many ways to implement a hybrid model at your company exist, so don’t be shy about experimenting.
Type #3: Flextime
Flextime is a unique model where employees can choose when their working hours occur each day.
It’s important to distinguish this from results-driven work, which only cares about task completion.
Instead, flextime still wants workers to complete regular shifts; it’s just that they have the complete freedom to choose when those shifts happen.
For example, an employee may work from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM one day, 5:00 PM to 1:00 AM the next day, and so on.
While this provides enhanced freedom, flextime can be challenging to manage, especially if you have many employees. Two employees trying to work the same hours can quickly occur, leaving you with uncovered shifts.
If you run a business that requires 24-hour coverage (like in healthcare or hospitality), there might be better models than flextime. However, flextime can be a great option if your business is more lenient on coverage (like sales or marketing).
Type #4: Compressed workweeks
The idea of the compressed workweek has become extremely popular in the last few years.
I already mentioned the four-day workweek experiment that yielded impressive results, but there are multiple ways to approach compressed workweeks.
For instance, you could maintain 40 working hours by having employees work 4 10-hour shifts.
Employees enjoy the freedom of having three days off each week, so staying for two extra hours each day is bearable.
The model you choose will depend on the nature of your business and the needs of your employees. If you manage hospitality workers at a hotel, remote and hybrid work are off the table, but you could try flextime or compressed workweeks.
Final thoughts: Flexible work arrangements
The work landscape was forever changed after the pandemic, and the prevalence of flexible work arrangements is proof of that.
Employees love being able to choose when and where they work, and it’s become one of their top demands when seeking new positions.
The good news is that offering flexible work arrangements also benefits employers, so managers and business owners also have incentives to implement them.
More Resources:
Act your wage: How young workers are responding to stagnant pay
Digital age workplace: Why soft skills matter more than ever
Flexible working hours: Do they work?
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