Flexible work arrangements.

• Position: Second Tax Executives Institute Roundtable - Discussion

Flexible work arrangements have been around for several decades now but--with the Internet and laptops and the rise of millennials--have become more prevalent for many professionals, including tax executives. For our second TEI Roundtable, we convened a conference call in January 2015 moderated by Tax Executive Senior Editor Michael Levin-Epstein with Vice President, U.S. and International Tax Randy Harvey, ConAgra Foods Inc.; Property Tax Adviser Ashley Krahn, Shell Oil Company; and Senior Director, U.S. Tax Marcy Miller, McDonald's Corp.

Michael Levin-Epstein: Welcome to the second Tax Executives Institute Roundtable. At this roundtable, we'll be discussing flexible work arrangements that have been successful and the lessons learned from those programs. The participants will be talking about flexible work arrangements at their companies and what this concept means for tax professionals.

Ashley Krahn: I am currently participating in a flexible workplace option, so I work from home one to two days a week, and I travel into one of our Houston locations three days a week. I have found that this flexibility has definitely helped my work-life balance. In my experience, it has proven to be beneficial to keep a structured schedule when possible so that everyone--both work and family--is familiar with the days that I'm going to be in the office and the days I'm working remotely.

Marcy Miller: I've been doing a flexible work arrangement for almost 20 years. I think the first six months I had to prove myself. When my children were younger, I would work four days a week--a compressed work schedule. So I squeezed the 40 hours into four days a week, with the stipulation that I would be available for that fifth day. When tax time came, I would work overtime. Most of the year I could do it, but obviously during tax time, I couldn't. Right now I work one day a week at home, and I think that in our department, out of 27 people, all but three do some kind of flexible work arrangement. Workers with younger children seem to do the compressed workweek, because they gain an extra day at home with their kids. People who are older tend to work one day a week at home. So we've been very successful with this.

Randy Harvey: I'm coming at it from a different perspective than Ashley and Marcy. My comments will be about managing the folks who use flexible time versus using it myself. We implemented telecommuting and more formalized flexible work arrangements as a company about two and a half years ago, and, at the time, we discussed how it would work for us in tax. We came up with offering to anyone who would like to take advantage of telecommuting could work one day per week from home. And we laid out some ground rules: It's truly a workday--it's not a day to keep your kids home from day care or for running errands or doing housework or whatever else. You need to be available for meetings and phone calls if somebody has questions, just like you would if you were in the office. Initially, only six or eight of the 30 folks on my team took advantage of it. For various reasons, other people were not interested. As time has gone on, I think a few more people have taken advantage of it. After laying out the ground rules and emphasizing to people that the most important thing to me is getting your work done on time, meeting your deadlines, and supporting the business as needed, we have not really had any issues with the telecommuting part or with people not keeping up with their workloads or being available as needed. Sometimes something important is going on, or they need to be in the office for a meeting, or provision time may trump the telecommuting, and that's just where they need to use their discretion. But I think people generally make good choices. In addition to telecommuting, we also offer flexible scheduling, where some people come in earlier or later, and we're also very flexible around family activities or personal time or anything else that might be going on in their personal schedule that impacts the workday. We've had good success with all that. In addition, the company has implemented what we call summer Fridays. So between Memorial Day and Labor Day most people in the company--now obviously the plant situation doesn't work, and there are also some restrictions around customer service and things like that--but most people in an office environment are able to work forty hours in what would be called a compressed work-week from Monday through 1 p.m. on Friday and have kind of a two-and-a-half-day weekend. That's been successful and very well received by the employees. We also have had the same summer hours schedule between Thanksgiving and New Year's as part of meeting our United Way contribution goal.

Miller: We have summer Fridays too at McDonald's.

Feedback from Employees

Levin-Epstein: From the point of view of the employees, what do you think is the greatest...