It depends on the employees. If everyone is on-board with the company's mission, can respect others' own work-life balance equations, AND the work that is being done over the "flexed" time doesn't suffer, then NO, discipline is not undermined. But this is a lot of "ifs"

Absolutely not - I would argue that it enables you to get more done

No, I don't. It think that those companies that allow it have tremendous trust in their employees. It takes someone who is incredibly disciplined to thrive in that type of work environment.

This is an interesting question.

For the most part, if the employee or individual is disciplined, flex hours do not undermine workplace discipline. My actual observation of flex hour use proves otherwise.

I have observed employees using flex hours to the benefit of themselves and not the company. I think it should be a mutual benefit with the needs of the company being most important.

Not at all, in fact it forces the employees to be more responsible and produces a higher level of work in most cases. Every person is not on a 9 to 5 clock, time magazine did a study a few years ago and found that some people tend to work better in the early morning hours and many people are much more productive later in the day

It depends upon management. With the proper controls in place, flex time is a very valuable perk that employees will use to their advantage (which is what employees do with all compensation). Companies that offer this are likely to attract more employees.

However, lack of oversight will lead to abuse. When abuse is tolerated discipline is sacrificed. Like anything else, if expectations aren't set from the beginning and then managed over time, good results are unlikely.

Maybe not inherently, but it could. I think employees start to wonder if others are working fewer or more hours than them.

I agree with Whelan, for discipline not to be undermined by flex time, there are definitely a lot of IFs that need to be addressed in a workplace.

IMHO Successful implementations of flex hours/time have nothing to do with "management controls" or other such nonsense. I believe it is more about the culture of performance. If you have to engineer rules around flex staffing you have already missed a bigger problem around managing performance.

Flex Staffing is such an industrial era concept. As technology advancements blur the lines between telecommuting and "regular commuting" companies will have to redefine the work week.

The focus needs to be on results, not on spending 40 hours in the office. I see lots of people making up work, wasting time in meetings, etc to fill up that time.