Varia Ranah - Sorotan Ilmiah Perkhidmatan Awam

81 Varia Ranah: Sorotan Ilmiah Perkhidmatan Awam INTRODUCTION The term flexible or flexibility connotes the ability to change or compromise a certain activity or practice from the normal norm. From the context of an employee, the change or compromise undertaken is due to the need to fulfil certain expectations, obligations or needs which require certain changes to the normal norm of the organisation. In this regard, to fulfil the obligation of the employee’s needs and responsibility, organisations have recognised flexible working arrangement (FWA) or flexible working hours (FWH) as one of the ways to enable employees to fulfil his or her social obligation. According to John (2017), FWH has gained a lot of attention from academicians and practitioners as a remedy to various issues. A flexible arrangement from a societal point of view may lead to a happier life and have great implication to the employee or individual well-being and can lead to organisational performance (John, 2017). Traditional fixed working hours have gradually been replaced with a more flexible working hours or arrangement to accommodate employees’ life- changing needs which include financial, social, political and economic constraints. Besides, the advent of technology has made FWA relevant and inevitable as assignments, projects, meetings and discussions can be organised and completed without the need to have an office space. Historically, the implementation of FWA started in 1967 by an aerospace company in Germany called Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm Messerschmitt became the first to introduce the flexitime for nearly 3,000 of its employees (Abid & Barech, 2017). The introduction of FWH by Messerschmitt was to reduce the lines of clocking on and off and subsequently trimming down the jamming of traffic emerged when every employee was required to start and finish at the same time (John, 2017). According to Abid and Barech (2017), flexible working hours are reciprocally advantageous accord between employee and employer to enhance employee productivity and higher profitability of the organization. The Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm is a clear example where both employees and employer benefited from the flexible