What is stopping your employer from giving you so much work that you are forced to work on Fridays so your employer only has to pretend the policy works?
We use a bottom-up work planning system (scrum). We have a backlog of work items that we (the people doing the work) assign point values to based on how complex we think the work is. Management knows about how many points of work we can complete in a 2 week period, and they decide what items they want done this work period based on their priorities. If we don’t get something done, it slips to the next 2 week sprint. If we get everything done and still have time, we pull additional items from the backlog. So long as the number of points we complete every 2 weeks stays relatively steady they are happy.
I know it’s hard to believe, because I’ve worked other places where it wasn’t like this. But some employers really do respect their employees and try to treat them with dignity and respect.
I will say that occasionally we have looming deadlines and more work to get done than we can normally do. When that happens we will be asked to dig in and work extra hours to get things done. It sucks but it’s also pretty rare. I’ve been with the company for going on 9 years and I think it has happened 3 times, for limited periods, and afterwards management will make it up by giving us time off as compensation. Most of us like working here enough that we don’t mind the occasional brief crunch.
What is stopping your employer from giving you so much work that you are forced to work on Fridays so your employer only has to pretend the policy works?
We use a bottom-up work planning system (scrum). We have a backlog of work items that we (the people doing the work) assign point values to based on how complex we think the work is. Management knows about how many points of work we can complete in a 2 week period, and they decide what items they want done this work period based on their priorities. If we don’t get something done, it slips to the next 2 week sprint. If we get everything done and still have time, we pull additional items from the backlog. So long as the number of points we complete every 2 weeks stays relatively steady they are happy.
I know it’s hard to believe, because I’ve worked other places where it wasn’t like this. But some employers really do respect their employees and try to treat them with dignity and respect.
I will say that occasionally we have looming deadlines and more work to get done than we can normally do. When that happens we will be asked to dig in and work extra hours to get things done. It sucks but it’s also pretty rare. I’ve been with the company for going on 9 years and I think it has happened 3 times, for limited periods, and afterwards management will make it up by giving us time off as compensation. Most of us like working here enough that we don’t mind the occasional brief crunch.
That’s not how most jobs that can offer “flex time” function. The employer literally cannot just “invent” work to do.