Less pay for more flexibility
November 10, 2008 by Bill MeltzerPosted in: Company culture, Compensation, In this week's e-newsletter, Latest News & Views, Work-life programs
Would your employees want to work fewer hours even if meant taking a pay cut?
A growing number are willing, according to one analysis of Department of Labor stats.
Female employees in favor of the tradeoff greatly outnumber males. Approximately 10 % of women would prefer working fewer hours, compared to 5.6% of men.
The big reason, analysts say, is that full-time female employees are more likely to get caught in a work-life balance crunch.
In the typical U.S. family, women still perform a disproportionate share of the household tasks. Women who reported having a child under the age of 3 were the most likely to want work cutbacks.
On the flip side, 23% of employees say they want to pick up more hours to make more money. These trends make work-life benefit and flex-time opportunities easier for you to offer, while also cutting overtime costs for your non-exempt workers through work hour-pooling programs.
November 14th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
“while also cutting overtime costs for your non-exempt workers through work hour-pooling programs” What is work hour-pooling?
November 14th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
This will just add to the statistics that say that women get paid less than men.
November 17th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
I have an employee who is asking to telecommute 2 days from home to care for his infant son. We are a small company, 35 employee’s and he is asking to do this for 2 years. He is an exempt employee so his pay would remain the same even though his hours have decreased. His job involves issues which are not funtional for telecommuting so we decided to offer to change him to an hourly employee and pay him for 3/eight hour days. The offer is still in a planning processes but now we have another issue that has come up.
We recently cut our 401k match because business has fallen below expectations, like everyone else we are feeling the crunch and we may be faced with making more cuts. This particular employee’s job falls within that margin. We don’t want to be placed in a position where it looked like we discrimimated against him because he asked for the time off. In fact we are very willing to work with him on these terms, but if business warrants us to do a lay off he may be one of the ones that has to go besides others.
What can you suggest I do to make sure the company is in complience if there is a lay off?