Sites offer workers flex-schedule options

Advertiser Staff and News Services

Pat Katepoo, who helps stressed out employees negotiate options to the 40-hour-plus work week, recalls one woman who was struggling with her job 18 months after having her first child.

Pat Katepoo of Kahalu'u runs a Web site — WorkOptions.com — from her home for employees seeking flexible work schedules. She also works 20 hours a week at the Ala Moana Health Center as a nutrition counselor. Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser

That's the textbook case of what not to do when attempting to get your company to agree to a nontraditional schedule, said Katepoo, a flexibility coach who runs the Web site WorkOptions.com from her home in Kahalu'u.

Earlier this month The Wall Street Journal called her site "the best all-around" for employees seeking flexible work schedules. The Web site covers four options: telecommuting, part-time work, job sharing or a compressed work week.

Don't go in and talk about the emotional side, Katepoo said. "Go in and present it as an advantage to the business. It is a business solution to a situation that you need to handle. We talk about bottom-line benefits. No. 1 is retention, because a lot of people will leave the job if they can't have flexibility. No. 2 is loyalty and commitment. No. 3 is better productivity."

Increased productivity is something employers may be slow to grasp. Katepoo, 45, explained that flexible schedules boost efficiency because shorter hours mean the employee has more energy for the job and is more focused.

"Everyone knows there is a lot of waste in working," Katepoo said. Workers socializing or attending to personal business robs a company of productivity. A worker who shifts to a four-day week, for example, can often get as much done as one working five days.

"At that level they are usually able to get their job done," Katepoo said. "They tend to be much more efficient; not socializing as much or allowing interruptions. There is no time for anything else."

One caveat: It's important for a telecommuter to be screened in terms of personality, Katepoo said. It doesn't work for everyone, but self starters, who can work independently, will thrive. She adds that most telecommuting is done as a combination of two or three days per week in the office and two or three working from home.

That's the rationale for flexible hours for the bean counters. For the employee it's a choice of lifestyle over income.

More than half the workforce wishes for some kind of change in their hours on the job, according to research by the Families and Work Institute, New York. But fewer than one-third of full-time U.S. workers are on flexible schedules.

"A four-day work week can make a huge difference for people," Katepoo said. "And a 20 percent drop in salary is something they can manage."

Whether your company will accept a flex-time proposal is hard to predict. "It is the employer culture and more importantly the immediate supervisor that makes or breaks whether the person will get approval of the flexible work arrangement and how well it works afterward," she said.

Like a growing number of people, Shannon Bryant long dreamed of working from home.

Stuck in traffic commuting for more than an hour a day, wishing for more personal time, she hated "feeling like I was in the rat race," said Bryant, a healthcare consultant. But she hadn't a clue how to ask her boss for a change.

She found help in an unexpected place: the Internet. On a friend's advice, she searched Web sites on job flexibility and found a template for a telecommuting proposal to hand to her boss. After some homework and preparation, she presented the proposal and won approval. She's now seven weeks into her new work-at-home setup, and it's going well.

Judging by the users of Katepoo's Web site, most workers seeking flex time are women. Ninety percent of her customers are women. She has also been surprised by the lack of interest so far in Hawai'i. She gets from two to eight orders per day for her templates for written proposals to management, which cost $29.95 each.

"I have sold thousands in the Mainland, Canada, England, Australia, even Africa. I can count maybe 10 orders from Hawai'i. Don't you think there could be a local thing to that? People aren't as bold at asking for stuff."

Or perhaps a more supportive work environment in Hawai'i cuts down on the need for flex time, Katepoo said. "A lot of times the work setting is an 'ohana. Maybe it is a more fluid interconnection. The work and family is less separate."

As for Katepoo, her Web site has become her ticket to flexible hours without a reduction in income. She works 20 hours a week as a nutrition counselor at the Ala Moana Health Center and 10 to 15 hours a week at her home overlooking Kane'ohe Bay. She earns more from the Web site than her part-time job.

"It is perfect because it's home based, part time, no inventory, and has a huge impact on people's quality of life," she said.

Putting together a proposal for flex time may require a lot of homework, but it can pay off.

Kristin Scharfen's vice president was against her part-time telecommuting plan when her immediate boss first mentioned it to him.

"He was kind of shoving her out the door, saying, 'That's not going to work,' " recalled Scharfen, a program manager who lives in Missouri.

But after her boss handed him her well-documented written proposal, based on a template she found online, "he came back and said it was the most impressive proposal he'd seen, and that given the time I'd put into it, we ought to give it a try," Scharfen said.