Introduce flexible working hours into your business allows you to retain and recruit talented individuals that cannot commit to a standard 9 am to 5 pm, full-time job. Flexible working hours attract individuals with young children, caring responsibilities or other commitments to work for your business.
Also, your existing staff whose family circumstances have changed and unable to continue to work the standard 9 am to 5 pm job to stay and take advantage of your flexible working hours scheme. You save costs on training new staff when you can retain your skilled staff.
There are many types of flexible working hours schemes you can consider to introduce into your business.
Term-time working hours
The term time flexible working hours scheme would attract individuals and staff with young children to apply for the job because they can spend time with their children during school holidays.
Annualised working hours
Annualised working hours set the number of hours for your staff to fulfil during the year. The hours may vary week by week and month by month. This scheme is suitable for seasonal labour requirement business.
Job sharing
Job sharing is to have two or more staff sharing one job. This arrangement gives you the continuity of service if one staff is ill, you have the other staff to cover.
The staff involved with the same job can also share their skills to make their job more efficient.
Voluntary reduced working time
Voluntary reduced working time is you and your staff agreed on the reduced working hours voluntarily in exchange for a reduced salary and employee benefits.
This scheme allows you to open up the job to wide range of people to make up the hours.
Employment breaks
You can offer employment breaks to staff who would otherwise leave for good. For example, if your staff would like to take a year off work for personal reason. You may offer he/she an employment break so that he/she can come back to work for your business after that. With this you retain great staff.
Sabbatical leave
Sabbatical means a break from work. You can allow your employees to take sabbatical leave to pursue their interest outside their work, for example, to travel or study or to write a book etc.
Some companies offer sabbatical leave as part of their employee benefit. For example, you may offer 2 months of Sabbatical leave to employees on the 1oth year of service. Your business will retain talented individuals to stay thus low staff turnover.
This leave is in addition to the standard annual leave, maternity, paternity and sick leave offer to your employees.
Choose the flexible working hours scheme that suits your business and communicate with your accountant or your payroll bureau or your Human Resources department about your decision so that they can set up the payroll system for the scheme and maintain the required PAYE reporting to HMRC.
In addition, if your business is a company registered with Companies House, remember to file your confirmation statement and company accounts promptly.
