Education: Flextime
As our nation and our institutions grapple with fluid workplace environments and fluctuating economic conditions due to the worldwide impact of the coronavirus, the entire character of the work day and—for that matter, the school day—is shifting, changing, transitioning, and rearranging. Bearing these workforce influences in mind, libraries and librarians involved in medical library education may find a concept called flextime appropriate as well as thought provoking in light of altered working conditions and/or surroundings, particularly in the area of adapting to hours they did not exactly expect, while navigating the household as a work site complete—in some instances—with spouse, pets, and kids!
Flextime can be referred to as separate distinct words, as one word, with a hyphen inserted, or as a word with a “i” inserted in the middle—as in flex time, flextime, flex-time, or flexitime, respectively. (The last spelling is supposedly preferred across the pond in the United Kingdom.) Flextime appears to be jargon that actually refers to “flexible” time—not to be confused with working remotely or with working from home. Rather, flextime encompasses work hours that do not necessarily jibe with the 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. workplace norm and can be applied to any, and evidently all, work sites, including remote ones. A number of policy manuals that spell out this idea in fairly definitive terms, some specific to libraries, can be found online with a simple search for “flextime AND libraries.”
Such a search unearths a wealth of information about flextime along with a significant number of points to ponder. For example, supervisors might want to investigate the following notions: fixed versus variable flextime, short-term versus long-term flextime, minimum eligibility requirements to qualify for flextime, and mandatory temporary non-flexible hourly schedules for newly hired employees prior to phasing into flextime. The American Library Association (ALA) offers additional information on the topic. ALA posts an article written by Christine Martin on its website [1]. Martin explores flextime from a management perspective. The article identifies sensitive or key areas employers may wish to consider when implementing flextime, including how to handle overtime hours, hidden hazards, and more.
What is apparent and what shines through when contemplating the opportunities—and, perhaps, the pitfalls associated with flextime—is its versatility as well as its modality. In the realm of instruction, these qualities can potentially elevate teaching services in appealing new ways. For instance, can flextime for librarians who are involved in teaching activities or instructional outreaches equal greater accessibility and expanded availability to a wider segment of the overall user base? For health sciences librarians who commonly deal with faculty physicians and other faculty practitioners in addition to medical, pharmacy, or nursing students, the ability to work with and around challenging patron schedules can perhaps open up library services exponentially. Pair this flexibility with virtual or online instruction, and the possibilities are quite mind-boggling.
Besides these factors, library administrators could conceivably improve branch-wide employee retention. At the very least, flextime might well serve as a cushion or as a buffer to ward against burnout or stress, for it is a certainty that a vast majority of workplaces host working single parents who must juggle complex demands with work schedules daily. Add in workers with spouses, second jobs, and aging parents, and flextime makes for an attractive experiment in both outside the box thinking and calculated risk-taking.
Mayhap, concrete statistics already exist on the topic of flextime in relation to employee retention and satisfaction. It could be that some library managers have already taken the initiative and experimented with flextime in the workplace. If so, no doubt documentation for such bold experiments awaits discovery. However, that is fodder for a different column on a different day…