Exploratory analysis of flexible workday policies in a job shop

The degree to which simple policies for varying the length of each workday can affect job shop performance was investigated. The performance of a job shop operating on a fixed 8-hour day schedule was compared with a job shop that had some flexibility to vary an employee's workday by compensating hours in excess of an 8-hour day with an equivalent amount of time off. Thus, each flexible workday policy maintains an average workday of 8 hours/day for each employee. We simulated a hypothetical job shop to assess the effects of various environmental factors and workday policies on measures of interest to management and labour. We found significant improvement in job flow time with overtime (and time off) as little as an average of 24 min for every 8 hours of work.