We had a meeting with the Assistant Vice President for Human Resource Division in our company this morning. It is actually a “dialogue” between our department’s representatives and HR regarding the issue in changing the “flexi-time” working hours. Currently, we are enjoying a “super-flexi” working schedule wherein we just had to complete the 90 total working hours required per pay period and need to come to work not later than 11am. Now, they were constructing a new policy wherein we have to come to work not later than 10am and have to complete a 9 working hours in a day. There is a resistance in a planned change of policy, as expected. We managed to negotiate it to at least consider the extra working hours rendered in previous day to be able to offset it on the next day since there is no OT pay in our level. Likewise, extra work rendered during weekends can be converted to leave though not convertible to cash. The dialogue ends well… both parties were happy with the agreement.

That’s the beauty of open communication. Involved parties can come with an agreement that is acceptable to both of them. That way, resistance, discontentment, and resentment can be avoided. In our case, HR can actually come up with new policy and implement it without consulting us. We can do nothing about that. But, the result might be non-favorable to the company in the end - employees might leave or their work might not be that productive. We are grateful that we are now under a new HR management which is more competent than the previous one. That one change is a fresh good start for implementing change.