You can mix and modify the four major flexible work arrangements to precisely match your specific personal needs. Be creative!

Need some ideas? Consider the following flexible work solutions to ease your work/life time crunch.

The Seasonal Part-time Solution
The 10% Solution
The Trade-Time-for-Pay Solution
The Fridays Off Solution

The Seasonal Part-time Solution

Maybe you like the idea of working three or four days a week but a long-term, open-ended arrangement isn’t practical right now.

Why not propose a short-term, part-time schedule to last about two months?

Strategy Tips:

• While summer, school sports seasons and November/December holiday time are appealing short-term picks, match your request to your workplace’s seasonal, slower times of the year.

• Emphasize the closed-end, short-term aspect of the proposal, pointing out that two months is shorter than the typical flexible work arrangement trial period of three to six months.

• When it comes to department budgets, managers are looking for pain-free ways to save money. Emphasize the cost savings that come from your temporarily-reduced salary.

• Redesign Your Job to Part-time to show your manager how the job will get done in fewer hours.

• Present your proposal to work fewer hours at least a month before that seasonal shift is due to occur so there's time for the negotiation and approval process.

Assuming all goes well, you can repeat it annually until the time you're ready to propose a year-round part-time arrangement.

The 10% Solution

Your employer has just announced that they can avoid job lay-offs if all employees take a 10% pay-cut for six months. Could you trim some of your lifestyle expenses to live on 10% less in order to keep your job?

Would you be willing to do the same thing in order to buy yourself a few extra personal hours a week?

If you’re living on less than you earn now and avoiding consumer debt (smart money moves no matter what), managing a 10% pay cut is doable and has the potential for improving your quality of life.

The 10% Solution assumes you currently work five days a week, eight hours a day (40 hours). It has you proposing a 10% reduction so that you still work five days a week, yet work seven hours a day on four out of those five days (28 hours + 8 on the fifth day = 36 hours a week).

Variation: Proposing 35 hours—that’s seven hours a day all week—would be The 12.5% Solution.

What busy person hasn’t wished for more hours in the day?

While an hour a day may not sound like much, those “extra” 60 minutes either before or after work, or ½ hour on both ends, could release a pressure valve which reaps you healthier meals (more time to pack a lunch or start a home-made dinner), a calmer commute (or at least saner driving habits), or a walk with the dog (you may not be the only one whose pounds are creeping up from lack of exercise!).

Strategy Tips:

• The (US) federal government definition of part-time employment is fewer than 35 hours a week; when crafting your proposal, use the term “slightly-shortened workday” instead of “part-time”.

• Nonetheless, you’ll want to use the “part-time” set of Redesign Your Job worksheets to address your manager’s concern of how the work will get done.

• Emphasize the salary savings to the employer.

The Trade-Pay-for-Time Solution

At your next performance review when you're expecting and offered a raise, acknowledge your employer’s recognition of your performance and contribution to the company. Then say you’d like to forego the pay raise and trade it instead for time. From that point, negotiate for more hours than pay.

For example, while a 10% raise could be traded for four hours off each week, that's a hefty pay hike most people are unlikely to see in one shot. However it costs your employer nothing in direct pay dollars to give you more time, so it's possible to negotiate those same four hours off (10%) as a trade for a raise of 3 to 7%.

Do this for a few years in a row and you could end up working 30-35 hours a week for your current pay. At that point, you could start accepting pay raises in dollars.

The Fridays Off Solution: 3 New Ways to Work

There are three variations of the usual flexible work arrangements that give you 26 to 52 long weekends a year—with little or no pay cut.

I've given the popular Fridays Off solution its own page. Read it here.

The Fastest Way to Write a Convincing Proposal

If you're looking for a short-cut way to put together a professional, organized, convincing proposal to work flexibly, order Flex Success Proposal Template.

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