Abstract:

The changes in the surrounding workplace’s environment have mandate organizations to adopt Flexible Work Arrangements (FWAs) as part of their benefit system to ensure attractive Work Life Balance (WLB) practices towards well-being workers, along with enhancing organizational performance, and to survive in case of disasters as in case of COVID-19 pandemic.

This study aims to investigate FWAs in the public sector in the Kingdom of Bahrain, besides highlights the Home-based Work (HBW) arrangement applied in the government organizations with insights of employees’ and managers’ assessments. Exploring whether the application of HBW arrangement - an example of FWAs - has effect on government performance through three success factors; support, communication and trust; by which those factors influence the relationship between the HBW arrangement and the productivity as part of the organizational performance.

This study is an exploratory and descriptive applied research, which has a quantitative approach that describes sample of (365) teleworkers in government sector thoroughly; besides a supportive qualitative approach which is mainly the two conducted interviews with managers in Civil Service Bureau (CSB), were interpreted and analyzed with the aid of word clouds. The study’s results based on the analysis ran by the IBM SPSS 26 software; reliability and factor analysis output, cross-tabulation, correlations, and multiple regression analysis.

Study’s findings briefly are; Trust and Communication factors considered the most influencing factors to take attention in adopting and developing FWAs in the government sector to ensure achieving desired levels of productivity and performance; additionally, there were no big differences between employees’ and managers’ opinions on the biggest concerns of applying HBW arrangement in the public sector, in which the least concern chose by both groups, was “performance concerns”. Focal study’s implications have three views; organizational, being knowledgeable organization of recent FWAs would grant flexibility to government sector; managerial, being inspiring manager who transfers confidence and trust to his/her team plays a role in succession of FWAs; and individual; creating an enabler employee who manage his/her own/personal time to accomplish government work efficiently and effectively.

Keywords: Flexible work arrangements, government sector, Bahrain, Support, Communication, Trust, Factors, Home based work, Productivity, Performance, Employees, Managers.