Abstract:
Productivity is an important factor for an organizations survival. Organizations do a
lot of things to improve employee productivity in order to gain maximum profits.
This is no different in Software Development organizations. Software organizations
differ from other organizations because they are totally dependent on the mental
ability ofsoftware engineers. Therefore common productivity improvements such as
increasing the number of units created per hour are not feasible for the software
industry
However, currently there is a growing trend towards offering flexible working
arrangements to employees around the world. Flexible working arrangement (FWA)
simply means flexibility to choose how an employee chooses to work and when to
work. Research done in western countries shows that FWA has an impact on
employee productivity. But there are very few studies that can be found which
focused on Asian organizations.
There are many flexible working arrangements in existence throughout the world,
but this research is focused only on four practices which are commonly used in Sri
Lankan organizations. These were determined using a pre-survey. The main focus of
this research was to investigate the relationship between flexible working
arrangements and employee productivity and thereby determine how a company
could align their business strategy to gain maximum productivity while providing
their employees a family friendly working environment. There are very few studies
done on this subject and this research is intended to fill the gap.
The research model is based on an extension of the general productivity model by
Seppo Sari (2006) and Service Productivity model by Jonas R (2006). Using this
framework it is easy to map software engineers’ productivity as a combination of
quantity, quality and how it can be related to flexible working arrangements in the
Sri Lankan context.
There are four main flexible working practices used in this research. Namely
Flextime, Telecommuting, Part-time Work, and Compressed Work-week. These are
tested against two productivity measurements, 1) Quantity, which can be determined
by Source lines of code, number of bugs fixed, and CR functionality completed. 2)
Quality, which can be determined by number of bugs introduced, comments and
documentation, and reusability ofthe software code.
According to the analysis results, the most commonly used flexible working
arrangements are Flextime and Telecommuting. The popularity ofCompressed Work
Week and Part-time are below average with a usage percentage of around 40.
The result of this research show that Flextime and Telecommuting increase the
quantity of the software delivered. It also reveals that the flexible working
arrangements such as Part-time and Compressed Work Week improve the quality of
the software delivery.
