Clearly there needs to be a base of support staff available but most disruptive project work, and some essential maintenance is much better done when users are not hammering the system.

The management of flextime is easy and best left to the individuals in the department, and most firms timesheet staff to death so highlighting slackers is easy.

I have managed IT teams in accountancy practice and have implemented flexitime with no downsides at all, in fact if you do it right it offers a greater spread of support and allows staff a better work life balance.

Most assume that this means people won’t put in the hours or somehow work less. When I worked flexitime I often worked until midnight and beyond, mainly so I could work some shorter weeks.

I never see an issue as long as people deliver on time to the same quality, all flexi time systems are based around office core hours anyway and any organisation that has flexitime can often reduce wages they pay as the flexi is seen as a massive benefit.

Unfortunately the british are a “keep it close and keep em working hard” culture. This means in my opinion lots of companies miss recruiting certain individuals as they would prefer to have a decent work life balance, which is a phrase that others also sometimes misunderstand to mean “this person doesn’t want to work hard”.

Having worked in both systems both in IT and in other industries I always found flexitime a real boon and was always more productive and I also charged out less overtime to the company because I was working within a system.

Flexi time does bring with it an admin overhead but there are automated systems to deal with this to make everyones life easier.

I totally agree the IT should put in the hours when the business needs them, my argument though was more about giving the flexibility and seeing the benefits this will bring in terms of staff morale as well as cost savings that, in my opinion, this brings (my guess is most secretaries for example don’t work the extra hours for free).