A research directed towards identifying issues that flexible working practices have caused in wage systems

Flexible working practices have become quite common with the pandemic in our country and in the world. Even businesses that have never used flexible working in their business processes have started to do business in a partially or completely flexible working model. Flexible work practices are a new practice for both employers and employees, so they can also have some complex situations. It is a business model which requires the update of the wage systems especially when assessed for additional payments to the employee and the fee to be paid. Therefore, flexible working practices bring out some problems within wage systems. In this study, flexible work practices have been analysed in the context of wage systems. Overall assessment of flexible work practices, identifying problems in flexible work that have happened or could happen and developing solutions aimed at these issues are some of the purposes of the study. Others are to examine the wage systems in flexible businesses and to identify the problems that are occuring in this context and finally to determine what solutions human resources managers have provided for these issues. As part of the research, the primary datas have been collected by meeting with human resources managers of businesses operating in the service and manufacturing sectors in Istanbul who completed their organization and carried out flexible work at least two years ago. Human resources managers of businesses operating in different sectors have created the universe of the study. The 17 human resources managers selectes by means of sampling from this universe have created an example of the research. The datas obtained from the discussions have been analysed using the descriptive analysis method. Within the research, it was determined that businesses had signed an indeterminate term employment contract with employees, had paid to workers outside of the basic fee -such as bonuses, commute and food fees- and that businesses usually employ workers during full-time work, and that the remote work and partial time work method had been implemented during the pandemic period. As flexible work, businesses have often used the remote work and hybrid work model and have also benefited from short working and cash-rate support applications during the pandemic period. Shift work, compensation work and partial time work are also other flexible work models. Businesses that have implemented flexible work have experienced problems such as communication, technical infrastructure problems, cost increases, personnel losses and the mixing of work and personal life. Because of flexible work, within businesses that implement time-based wage system there are problems in determining the cost due to the inability to track the working times, making small increments in fees to overcome these issues, delays in fees, trying to make regular payments and trying to resolve the issue, the performance-dependent fee has been determined that employee complaints have increased due to the failure of determining the performance criteria, that businesses are trying to implement a fair wage policy to resolve the issue and that businesses are periodically increasing labor fees against inflation-related wages have been determined.