Flexibility in the workplace? Is this something you wished your former supervisors provided for you in your career? Does this seem like something you could provide for your employees? I guess it depends if your employees need to greet people each day or cover the front desk. There are also times they need to be at work for a meeting or training. If you can’t offer flexibility with start times, you might be able to find other ways to offer flexibility in the workplace that could include special graduation, wedding or other days off.

My interns are usually surprised when I ask them what hours they want to work. I ask this question for two reasons:

1. The truth is that I don’t care if they work from 8am-4pm, 9am-5pm or 10:30am to 4:30pm. The only time I care is if a training starts at 9am and they need to be there to set up. But they might be able to set up the night before and show up right before the training starts.

2. If staff or interns have the opportunity to work at times where they feel they are most productive, they will produce better results for the company and be happier. They won’t have to stress to fit into a “box” of set times that do not work for everyone.

I am fine enforcing basic rules that people should just know (give 100% to customers, respect co-workers, don’t lie or steal, etc.). But I don’t like to control people at work. I prefer to inspire and motive. I also resist rules that don’t make sense, for me and for others. Why? Because once you have rules, you have to enforce them weather they make sense or not—and there’s no more tedious task in life.

I believe in providing flexibility in the workplace partly because I had many great bosses in my career that didn’t care if I worked from 8am-5pm. Based on my performance results, my supervisors knew that I would work my socks off to implement the best programs on time. Nobody ever said, “I am so proud of you for working 8am-5pm each day and then didn’t care about my results. I had bosses who knew I would come in on weekends and work nights to produce the best programs and products. They also knew they got more than 40 hours out of me each week. Oh, there was one boss who made sure all his staff got there at 8:30am and didn’t take more than their two 10 minute breaks. Guess what this supervisor produced? A team of 6 robots who came in at 8:30am, who did what they were told but NOTHING MORE. There was no team spirit, trust or loyalty. This was a true example of a Lose for the Employees, a Lose for the boss, and a Lose for the company. No one wins when employees are not engaged.

And so that’s how I’ve always managed people who worked for me. I’ve trusted them to get the work done on time and on budget—and they have. Treating employees like grown-ups made it more likely that they would behave the same way. Of course, this also implies that no one person’s schedule should mess up anyone else’s: we all work collaboratively and to do that, it’s helpful to be in the same place at the same time occasionally. But I’ve rarely had to spell this out.

I trust that people are doing the best that they can. As long as I can continue to trust who I work with, there is hardly ever anything that can’t be worked out. There have been very few instances of being disappointed by this approach. Instead, I’ve had the privilege of working with hundreds of dedicated, committed, energetic interns, Recreation Leaders and other individuals whose stamina was hugely enhanced by the freedom to work as they saw fit. They more often exceeded expectations than under-delivered.

Of course I’ve had poor or under-performing employees and employees in the wrong job. But in rare cases were hours the problem. Managers are often afraid of being ripped off. I can remember only 2 employees out of 200 who would lie about their time. But I didn’t have to walk around ostentatiously staring at my watch. There were much better ways to spend my time. I found out through the lack of results produced that these employees had a lot of time on their hand or were not at work to produce results. I had straight conversations with both of these people, gave them warnings and eventually let them go. But they were not surprised either.