FWH - the bane of management

The suggestion is being made that all workers should be entitled to flexible working hours. During my working life, flexi-time was a boon to me as a worker, but a nightmare to me as a manager. It always seemed to me, and still does, that the whole concept of flexi-time is based on two false premises. The first is that provided the work gets done, it doesn't matter when it is done, and certainly in most office situations, this just isn't so - quite apart from targets and deadlines, if you have a system whereby A does something, and then passes the work onto B to do something else, who then passes it onto C and so on, then this requires everyone to be there to do their bit at the appropriate time, otherwise the whole thing falls apart. The second fallacy is that 60 minutes equal an hour, and whilst this may be so mathematically, it is by no means so in the workplace - under flexi-time, people tend to give in minutes and take in hours, and the idea that you get the same amount of work out of them in the extra fifteen or twenty minutes they put in here and there as you lose when they take half a day off or whatever, in my experience just isn't so. From a managerial standpoint, flexi-time is a curse.