Flexible working hours in the civil service
Print
Flexible working hours in the civil service By Miss Oramon Bunditsukumarn
Hello everyone. I’m honoured to be with you today. My name is Oramon Bunditsukumarn. I’m a Human Resource Officer in the Office of the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) Civil Service Commission. My main responsibilities include developing work system and applying appropriate techniques to BMA’s units.
I’m going to talk about “flexible working hours in the civil service”. That is my new project to create work-life balance for BMA’s officers. We can break this area down into three sections: Firstly, an overview of flexible working hours; Secondly, types of flexible working times and finally, how to apply this system of work to BMA.
Let’s begin with an overview. Like many of you, Every morning I rush to get to work in a car, a bus or train and work until very late in the night, but everything will change soon.
A flexible work schedule is a way of working that suits an employee’s needs and determine when they will work and where they will work. Thus, it will save time in commuting between the home and the work place. More time will be spent working and the traffic on the road will be lessened.
Nowadays, this system of work is commonplace in both the private and public sectors in many countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany,the United States, Australia and even Thailand.
Common kinds of flexible working plans include:
- Working from home or anywhere else outside the office.
- Compressed working hours. Employees complete their total designated hours over fewer working days. For example, a five-day working week can be compressed into four days to work 10-hour days from Monday through to Thursday. Therefore, an eight-hour day will become a ten-hour day, so workers can take every Friday off.
- Flexi-time. Employees can choose when they want to work and the rest of the working day is time off.
- Shift-work. Employees begin and end at different times of the day.
Finally, this system can only be applied by staff doing different administrative and back-office functions of BMA. For example, Staff doing back-office functions may work from home and front office staff from the district office can choose which day the need not report for work.
We will be communicating this to the BMA staff and run a small pilot project for some positions in some departments next year. I hope all of you will support this concept. If it successful, we will extend this right to request for flexible working hours to all employees of BMA.