Pitch Email: Flexible Working Hours

Write a Pitch email off information below
Pitch Email Your policy topic: offering flexible working hours
Your benefit: productive work outside the office
Your risk: challenges
Main idea: After reviewing the research, I think this organization should adopt the new policy because the benefit outweighs the risk.
Introduction
A)Your supervisor’s name is Ms. Lauren Douglass. Fill in an opening line to acknowledge and thank your supervisor.
Greeting?
B) Main idea: After reviewing the research, I think this organization should adopt the new policy because the benefit outweighs the risk.
Your benefit: productive work outside the office
Your risk: challenges
Benefit
A)Provide a direct quote from one of your sources that offers evidence of the benefit you want to emphasize. Your quote should not be more than 2 sentences.
quote to be included
B)Explain how this quote shows the importance of your benefit.
explanation of quote
Risk
A)State the risk that you believe is less important to consider.
benefit or risk that is less important
B)Explain why this risk is less important than the benefit.
explanation of why this is less important
Conclusion
A)Restate your main idea.
restatement of your main idea
B)Acknowledge and thank your supervisor.
acknowledgment
Your supervisor is looking to modernize your workplace. They have identified a few key areas where they need more information before making policy decisions. You will select one of these areas as your policy topic. First, your supervisor has asked you to write a short informative report to explain the main benefit and risk of your policy topic. Next, after they’ve had a chance to review the report, they would like you to write a pitch email to recommend whether the organization should consider adopting a new policy related to your topic.
Your Pitch Email should contain four paragraphs:
1. an introduction that includes the main idea of the email,
2. a body paragraph that discusses the benefit or risk that supports the recommendation,
3. a body paragraph that discusses the less important factor (benefit/risk), and
4. a conclusion.
Source 1
USA Today
More Employers Offer Flexible Hours, but Many Grapple with How to Make It SucceedBy Paul Davidson
October 20, 2019Last month, Michael Richman, owner of Academy Awning in Montebello, California, waded gingerly into the modern world of flexible work schedules, allowing a 22-year-old designer to come in at odd hours so he could go back to college full time.
It didn’t go well.
The designer wasn’t available midday to answer questions from an East Coast customer and was hard-pressed to quickly address concerns raised by welders and other factory employees at the awning maker, which has 35 staffers. Richman also wondered how much the designer was really working when he was alone in the office.
“It was a disaster,” Richman says. “We have to have a somewhat regimented schedule. To have people coming and going at different times creates disruption.”
America’s new flexible workplace is going through some growing pains. Many businesses are allowing variable hours—as well as work-from-home options—to attract employees in a tight labor market. But as adoption grows, a significant share are struggling to make it work. Consultants say that’s because many companies haven’t put technology and other tools in place to ensure seamless communication and collaboration with co-workers and customers.
“They haven’t integrated it as part of their overall strategy,” says Cali Williams Yost, CEO of Flex + Strategy Group, which helps companies adopt flexible work arrangements. “We’re asking people to work differently but not telling them how to do it.”
As a result, some companies are throwing up their hands and going back to traditional work policies while others are ironing out the kinks through trial and error. The gap among firms is underscored by widely varying measures of the portion of businesses with flexible hours. A spring survey by the Society for Human Resource Management found that 57% of organizations offer flexible schedules, up from 52% in 2015.
A separate poll by Flex + Strategy revealed that 98% of companies provide some form of fluctuating hours based on a broad definition that could include letting employees leave occasionally to pick up kids at school or go to the doctor. At the other extreme are businesses that let workers choose their own hours.
Meanwhile, a survey of 501 hiring managers by USA TODAY and LinkedIn late last month showed that to attract and retain employees, 44% have put in place new strategies to permit a more flexible schedule. In fact, that’s their chief way of coping with unemployment that’s at a 50-year low of 3.5% and spells fewer available workers. Thirty-eight percent of hiring managers are raising pay and 26% allow remote work.
While the 44% share is noteworthy, it’s lower than the other measures because it’s likely capturing only employers that have adopted formal strategies to make flexible schedules work over the long term and are confident enough to tout the policy to job seekers, Yost says.
In late 2017, the vast majority of workers said they had some degree of work flexibility but just 42% said they had been trained on how to manage it, down from 47% in 2015, according to a survey by Flex + Strategy.
Some companies don’t formalize flexible work arrangements because they want to offer them quietly to certain employees rather than across the board, says Sara Sutton, CEO of FlexJobs, which posts jobs for remote, part-time and freelance work and provides related consulting services. That, she says, causes jealousy. Others offer flexibility but still try to reach employees during off-hours.
Millennials Started It All
The shift to more flexible work set-ups has been driven by millennials, who could complete and submit their college assignments anytime, anywhere as a result of the prevalence of Wi-Fi, smartphones and email, Sutton says. They also yearn for a healthy work-life balance.
“They grew up with this,” she says. Seventy-seven percent of employees consider flexible work a major consideration in their job searches, according to Zenefits, which provides human resource software. And 30% have left a job because it didn’t provide flexible work options, a FlexJobs poll reveals.
Businesses are responding, largely because they have little choice in the hypercompetitive labor market, Yost says. Technology such as smartphones, cloud computing and work collaboration tools such as Slack also have paved the way. So has a work culture that often requires employees to answer emails late at night or on vacation. Companies can hardly ask workers to make such sacrifices without providing them more leeway to adjust their hours or location during the workday, Yost says.
Yet increased flexibility also boosts productivity, Yost says. Sixty percent of employees with workplace flexibility said they feel more productive and engaged and 45% say it increases their ability to work effectively with their team, according to the Flex + Strategy survey.
Why? The ability to shift hours to avoid rush-hour traffic, for example, increases efficiency. Some people are more productive late at night than mid-morning. And employees granted flexible hours are more loyal and motivated.
“When you give people flexibility, they will give you more,” Yost says.
Last year, Sara Martlage, 31, left a sales job at a freight company where she felt chained to a desk for a similar role at Scottsdale, Arizona-based Trainual, which provides employee training software, largely because the firm lets her adjust her schedule. While the official hours are 8 to 5, Martlage can come in later to attend a workout or yoga class, run errands midday and work from home as much as half the time.
“It’s empowering to have authority over your schedule,” she says. “It makes me want to work harder, be available to take calls and answer email some nights and weekends to go above and beyond to keep my work integrity intact with the rest of my teammates.”
Flex Hours as a Recruitment Tool
Chris Ronzio, CEO of Trainual, says he adopted flexible hours about two years ago, chiefly to attract workers. Four recent hires, he says, accepted job offers because of the policy. And it has freed him from keeping a detailed ledger of employees’ time.
“We’re putting more trust into our team, and measuring them more by the results they produce than by the hours they log,” Ronzio says. The 19-employee firm has begun tracking monthly and quarterly sales figures more closely to ensure workers are meeting targets.
Other companies have hit some bumps along the way. GoBrandgo, a St. Louis marketing company, began letting employees set their own hours and work from anywhere about 10 years ago, says partner Brandon Dempsey. At first, he said, it bred resentment because each division had a different standard for flexible hours and no way to know when co-workers weren’t available.
Several years ago, he says, the company started an online calendar that employees fill out at the start of the week, letting colleagues know when they’re working and when they’re out, as well as project management software that tracks the status of every job. Employees must be available for client meetings every two weeks and work more closely in teams so they can answer a client’s question if a co-worker is out.
“Everybody knows the rules of the game now,” Dempsey says.
Staffers, he says, are more productive, in part because they can clock hours best suited to their circadian rhythms and not think about home while they’re at work, and vice versa. “Be present wherever you are,” he says.
Nicole Turner, 33, the creative director, routinely has put in five or six hours during the day at the office and then toiled at home from 7 PM to as late as 2 a.m.
“I’m more creative late at night,” she says.
Now that she has a 2-year-old son, her hours are more normal, though she still sometimes takes off part of the day to care for him and makes up the time at night.
“No one’s looking over me and micromanaging me,” she says.
RED Group, a New Orleans-based maker of industrial control systems, began allowing somewhat variable schedules several years ago, and last month shifted to total flexibility, says company President Kyle Remont. Making the change possible were benchmarks for the cost and time of each project and software that shows precisely the percentage completed at any moment, as well as a video chat app.
“The biggest positive is employee morale,” Remont says.
From USA Today. © 2019 Gannett-USA Today. All rights reserved. Used under license. https://www(dot)usatoday(dot)com/
Source 2
Arizona Central Flexible Schedules Are Attracting More Workers—What Are the Pros and Cons? By Russ Wiles September 15, 2019
Imagine working whenever you want so that you can find the time to take care of kids or elderly parents. Or maybe just because you don’t like punching a 9-to-5 time card.
More people are citing flexibility, including temporary assignments, as a key workplace desire—a trend that appears likely to continue thanks partly to technological advances.
These individuals look for “work that they enjoy, fewer hours, more flexibility and less stress,” wrote researchers at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College in a recent blog post. On the flip side, some could be sacrificing employer-provided health insurance and other benefits, possibly pay and perhaps even status and prestige.
Flexible-schedule positions often overlap with “gig” or short-term jobs, as both typically deviate from traditional 40-hours-a-week employment. Both also reflect new ways of thinking about jobs from the perspective of companies and workers.
The two developments often intersect with telecommuting and other ways of getting jobs done outside of a standard office, store or factory setting.
At large employers with 1,000 or more workers, the proportion of contingent, non-traditional jobs has risen to about 22% on average, stable over the past couple years but roughly double the percentage from a decade earlier, according to Staffing Industry Analysts, an employment-research firm.
But this only reflects the trend at large employers.
“Other surveys suggest that the number of freelancers, used by companies of all sizes, is rising,” said Jon Osborne, vice president of strategic research at Staffing Industry Analysts, in an email.
If you include independent contractors such as Lyft or Uber drivers along with people striking out on their own, flexible schedules count even more adherents.
Being There for Kids
Sarah Vert is one of those people.
She said she greatly values flexibility in her job as a personal shopper for Shipt, a delivery service owned by retailer Target. Two years ago, she was working in an office but decided to find something more flexible so she could spend time with her two children, now 10 and 15 years old, one with special needs.
“I needed something that was flexible,” said Vert, 37, who is married and lives in San Tan Valley, Arizona.
Flexibility doesn’t necessarily mean fewer working hours—just something outside the typical 9-to-5 routine. Vert said she works about 40 hours a week spread over parts of seven days. “I’m OK working seven days a week because it’s my own schedule,” she said. “It’s perfect for someone like me.”
Vert describes her duties as being on a constant “treasure hunt” to find all the items, mostly groceries, that customers order. Shipt fulfills orders at Target as well as at CVS, Petco, Safeway, Fry’s and other retailers.
“Either my customers hate shopping or they don’t have the time,” said Vert, who doesn’t like shopping that much for herself. As a side benefit, she has become friends with some of her regular customers.
Helping to Fill Needs
Flexible-schedule jobs, including temporary gig positions, are one way employers have scrambled to fill vacancies in a tight labor market. Yet the trend could be permanent, even when the job market softens, said Travis Laird, a regional vice president at staffing agency Robert Half in Phoenix.
“A lot of people just don’t like being on an eight-hour shift,” he said. “They like to turn on or off the work clock, when they want.” Osborne cautions that people working flexible schedules could be more vulnerable the next time the economy slips into recession.
“Contingent labor is often first hired, first fired,” he said. “It’s here to stay for the long run, but in a downturn it will suffer disproportionately.”
Laird credits technology, especially cell-phone apps, for making it easier for employers to connect with workers for flexible scheduling or for people to pursue other business opportunities on their own. Several cell-phone apps allow people to search for part-time or gig jobs, sometimes just hours before they need to be filled.
Myra Gonzalez has used her cell phone to build a part-time business selling women’s clothing and accessories, both used and new. A job with traditional hours wouldn’t fit her needs.
“I have five children, two are twins, so I’m pretty busy at home,” said the 32-year-old Phoenix woman. “This has allowed me to have income yet stay at home to nurture them.”
Using her cell phone, Gonzalez uploads photos of clothing items, often modeling them herself, and posts them on social marketplace Poshmark.com, where she has been a seller for the past three years. “At first, I just wanted to clean out my personal closet,” she said. “In my first week, I made $1,000 (in sales) so I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to stick with this’.”
Her husband, who owns a landscape-gravel business, is the main breadwinner, but her side job provides extra income.
“I enjoy it a lot—I’m super into fashion,” Gonzalez said, adding that she sells on Poshmark a couple hours a day over a few days each week.
Potential for Retirees, Too
A desire for flexibility cuts across demographic lines, said Laird. It includes middle-aged workers and baby boomers now reaching traditional retirement years.
Many people in their late 40s, 50s and 60s might be facing burnout or seeking to leave physically demanding jobs, according to the Boston College report. For them, other lines of work, including those with flexible schedules, can be the ticket.
While job changes for older workers often entail financial sacrifices—lower pay or reduced benefits in particular—that isn’t always the case. At any rate, going back to work for a few extra years, even in part-time, flexible-schedule positions, can help many of these individuals shore up their finances.
For example, doing so might allow a person to delay claiming Social Security, thus qualifying for higher retirement benefits later, or avoid tapping into personal retirement savings prematurely.
But finances are only part of the story. Lifestyle concerns also weigh heavily.
“One thing that nearly all (categories of workers) agree on is the growing importance of adaptive work schedules,” said a recent report by Mercer, a workplace research and consulting company.
In a survey conducted by Mercer, 54% of respondents said managing work/life balance is one of the top things their companies can do for them. That was up from 40% in 2018 and 26% in 2017.
That sentiment is “reflected in the 82% of employees saying that they would be willing to consider working on a freelance basis,” the Mercer report said.
From The Arizona Republic. © 2019 Gannett-Community Publishing. All rights reserved. Used under license. https://www(dot)azcentral(dot)com/
Source The Conversation
Four Ways You and Your Company Can Make Flexible Work Better
By Jane Parry
November 7, 2019
The world of work is fast changing. As life expectancy lengthens and labour markets shift, our working lives have become more complicated. The old expectations about how we work have become unsustainable—not least the expectation that we religiously travel to and from a fixed location ten times a week during rush hour, with all the knock-on effects that this has for carbon emissions.
Flexible work has the potential to solve many issues that see people fall out of the workforce. For employees, this means being better able to fit their jobs around other responsibilities, such as looking after children or elderly relatives. For businesses, this means retaining staff and saving the tens of thousands of pounds it costs to replace them.
Yet many remain stuck in positions with rigid working hours. One of the sticking points for employers seems to be that flexible work is equated with the one or two formats that they are familiar with—most often, letting staff work from home or work part-time. So a whole battery of ways in which flexible work could be used to align with the needs of a diverse workforce gets overlooked.
Recent research mapping the various combinations of flexible work found over 300 possible ways in which jobs could be organised flexibly. This includes job shares, compressed hours, term-time working, flexi-hours and tapered working. There is considerable scope to draw upon this host of working practices.
Here are four ways that businesses can get flexible working to work for them and their staff.
1. Get Line Managers On Board First and foremost, managers need training in how to manage flexible work. My own research found that line managers are the single biggest block on flexible work uptake. And even where flexible work supported, too often it is assumed that managers know the unknowable and can just run with new working practices.
But without any investment being made in managers, flexible working arrangements are set up to fail. Alternatively, the buck gets passed onto the flexible worker to make a success of a new arrangement, giving him or her one more task for their workload, and one with a high penalty attached to failure—a stressful experience in itself.
Realistically, achieving this buy-in will also need some nudging, particularly for smaller businesses and sectors where there has been less flexible work. Giving managers access to success stories and practical guidance, backed up by lots of leadership and peer support, is vital.
2. Be Flexible About Flexibility
Managers and employees need to come together in a safe space to assemble flexible working arrangements that work for everyone, with a real understanding of what is at stake and what is possible. A part of this is the need to get flexible about flexibility—recognising that circumstances change and that work arrangements may need to be tweaked or even reversed over time to ensure that they remain fit for purpose.
Flexible work has been used as a management tool to achieve savings by imposing remote or zero-hours contracts on workforces, with little input from those called on to do their jobs differently. So it’s necessary to give people space to make suggestions and give feedback about flexible work. And it is also about making use of a range of flexible working arrangements.
3. Redefine Productivity
Flexible work demands a shift away from seeing productivity in terms of being present for fixed working hours. Indeed, the problem of presenteeism—where people feel compelled to show their face at work even if they are ill—only feeds into the UK’s productivity puzzle.
Companies (and managers) need to devise better measures of output: has a project been completed within schedule, did the team work well together, is the report of a high quality? These are much more effective yardsticks of success than whether staff clock in at 9 o’clock each morning.
4. Advertise Your Flexibility
Making flexible work available at the point of hire will widen the talent pools available to employers, as people who already work flexibly will be more likely to apply for positions where they won’t lose a valuedpart of their contract. The demand for such a move is significant—flexible working consultancy Timewise’s latest Flexible Job Index found that 87% of employees either work flexibly or want to. But in 2019, only 15% of UK jobs were advertised as flexible. Employers who ignore this demand will be poorly prepared in the war for talent.
The evidence base for the benefits of well-managed flexible working arrangements is getting more and more compelling. It offers increased retention and productivity, and drops in absenteeism. And it’s not only employers who stand to make business gains from getting good at managing flexible work, employees with a good work-life balance are more motivated and content. Plus, as the latest gender pay gap figures show that older workers are seeing the greatest disparities, flexible work is a key tool in creating more age-friendly and equitable workplaces.
On a societal level, by organising work more thoughtfully we can make inroads into tackling carbon emissions as our car use becomes more efficient. We could see reduced demands on health and social care systems as workforce stress levels fall, and balancing care and work demands become more manageable. But we will only achieve this through good management, a fresh approach to job design, and enthusiasm from all involved.
From Jane Parry (Solent University), “Four Ways You and Your Company Can Make Flexible Work Better,” The Conversation, November 7, 2019. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.