Scheduling flexibility helps keep top workers

By J.K. Wall
Indianapolis Star

In the game of recruiting and retaining the best workers, small-business owners increasingly find that accommodating employees' scheduling requests allows them to compete with larger firms, which typically hold the edge in wages and insurance benefits.

One example is flextime, which allows employees to choose when they begin and end their shifts. During the past five years, the percentage of all companies offering flextime has risen to 64 percent from 56 percent, according to an annual benefits survey by the Society for Human Resource Management.

This trend holds true for companies large and small, human resources experts say, but small businesses are leading the growth.

"Small businesses are more adaptable to the new reality," said Karl Ahlrichs, a human resources consultant for Professional Staff Management.

In 1998, during a tight labor market, the National Federation of Independent Businesses surveyed companies with fewer than 100 employees about their hiring issues. Of businesses that had no trouble hiring, 67 percent said the flexibility and independence they offered was above the market norm. Another 53 percent said their work environment beat the average.

At the same time, only 28 percent of these businesses said their wages beat the market rate, and only 23 percent said their benefits were above average.

While two years of a down economy have eased tightness in the labor market, hiring remains a critical issue for small-business owners.

In a Dun & Bradstreet survey of small-business owners, a lack of qualified employees ranked as the biggest problem of 2002, beating the poor economy and cash flow.

Once a company finds good workers, flexibility plays a key role in keeping them.

Now that Generation X is entirely of working age, companies recruiting 20- and 30-somethings must respond to their demand for work-life balance. Human resources experts report that as an added wrinkle, aging baby boomers, who were more likely to be workaholics, now are beginning to negotiate for time to care for parents and address other life demands.

"We're starting to see baby boomers act a lot more like Xers," said Nancy Ahlrichs, an Indianapolis human resources consultant and author of "Competing for Talent" (Davies-Black Publishing, $32.95).

Ahlrichs said entrepreneurial businesses have the advantage over their larger competitors in this changing environment.

Small businesses often agree to juggle their employees' schedules because ultimately it helps the bottom line. It costs more time and money to advertise, interview, reference-check and choose new employees than it does to work around unpaid leave or odd hours.

Such low-cost benefits as flextime and compressed workweeks rose by double-digit percentages in the past two years, according to SHRM's Benefits Survey.