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Flex-Ability: The necessity for employees,
enterprises and the employment market
The ability to
rapidly adjust operating processes to ever-changing market conditions is
the crucial competitive edge for businesses today. To survive in an
ever-changing environment, the enterprise of tomorrow must have the
ability to be independent, quick, efficient, sufficient, and most of all,
be results-orientated to fit into determining factors or to operate
flexibly.
A boom, for example, often promotes the automation
of manufacturing which has dramatic results and puts a strain on liquidity
if expected higher levels of utilization actually decrease. On the other
hand, too little growth potential can lead to the inability of
satisfactorily processing that long-desired large order due to the
inability to meet deadlines, or because of the lack of necessary
machinery, or the inability to set up personnel capacities.
However,
economic cycles, changes in economic and political paradigms, or demands
that increase on a seasonal basis, are not the only factors that increase
the necessity for flexibility. Today, much of our work life appears to
underlie deregulation rather than regulation (i.e., open collective
contracts). Employability (occupational ability) must repeatedly be newly
acquired. New structures in organisations are becoming more level and the
remuneration systems define a career where division, leadership and
project careers are on equal footing. Customers tend to inquire on short
notice and expect instant delivery, which leads to the need to have
flexible and suitable human capital.
Flex-Ability as a
Management Approach
In order to satisfy these requirements a
toolbox was compiled which points out the approaches and models to modern
flexibility management. In the demonstration of this management approach,
it is assumed that each organization has a certain level of actual
flexibility. Each enterprise is thus a flexible enterprise. The goal is to
bring a differentiated flexibility level to an enterprise through
selective measures.
Some of the contents from this toolbox are
presented here in part:
Flex Organization
Flexibility
leeway for different organization forms - functional organization,
divisional organization and matrix organization – is offered here.
Additionally, the creative potential of project organizations (per se
flexible) is addressed in detail. The development of more flexible
procedures in businesses as well as outsourcing and its special forms of
cooperation and pooling of services round this area off.
Flex
Skilling
Flex Skilling guides the expected future
specifications of employees and management-level personnel, how one can
reach them, and what portion of their jobs contribute to the connecting
framework of education and training. It deals more closely with the topics
of multi-qualification, the ascertainment of a target-group’s educational
needs, the development of new functions and career profiles in businesses
as well as the creation of basic favourable learning conditions, in order
to finally support and accelerate a flexible employment pool in the
company.
Flex Time
Flex time deals with the variants
and margins of organising work schedules. Flexible work schedule formats,
e.g. annual work schedules and a fluctuation margin model as well as
making more flexible possibilities in shift models are presented, and the
chances and risks are thereby identified. Furthermore, the concepts of
flexitime, part-time work as well as sabbaticals are better defined.
Flex
Workforce
Flex Workforce demonstrates how businesses can react
to additional or reduced personnel needs and represents flexible
opportunities for employment pools for key employees and outsourced
personnel. The hiring of key employees can become more flexible through
in-company rotation concepts. Outsourced personnel are, however, made up
of employees whose affiliation to the company is temporary, for example
through employee leasing, employees on a project basis, interim managers,
or workers from an employment pool.
Flex-Ability contains a central
theme dealing with the balance of interests between employer and employee,
whether it’s regarding work scheduling models, payment structures, the
management of services; questions about core and outsourced manpower, and
its relation to employment contract models, the process of employee
cutbacks, or the application of operative instruments in labour market
policy on the interface of the organised labour market.
In all of
these questions, it is necessary to define expectations, regulations and
obligations and a balance of interest between jobs and capital.
(source:
Flex Ability, Havranek Christian, Linde Publishing/Linde Verlag)
See
our offer for flexibility
consultation in Vorarlberg.
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