The good, bad and ugly.
If you’re considering flexible working arrangements in your organisation, it’s important to know the good, the bad, and the ugly.
First up, let’s take a look at a few of the main benefits that flexible working practices can bring to employers.
It should come as no surprise that by empowering employees with choices over where they work, at what times and for how long, will boost their motivation. And this has some lovely results for company productivity.
According to CIPD (and HSBC), 81% of those who have access to remote working believe it increases their productivity. That’s not hard to believe, is it? Feeling like you must work arigid 9 to 5, versus working when you’re at your best: flexibility wins every time.
What’s more, if employers can offer homeworking arrangements, the time employees would have spent commuting might be spent doing a bit of extra work instead.
51% of employees say job flexibility is more important to them than salary when making job choices. Want to keep hold of your staff? It’s about flexible working options – and that might be the case for more than half of your workforce!
Why’s that? Well, employee engagement is driven (in part) by the quality of relationships that employees experience at work. By giving employees choices over certain aspects of their working day, you’re giving them your trust. And trust drives loyalty.
39% of employees have seen an improvement in their mental health due to flexible working. With mental health seeing a worrying decline in the last few years, this is something employers should take very seriously.
Further, employers have a ‘duty of care’ to their employees. This means they have a legal obligation to do all they reasonably can to support health, safety and wellbeing. This is an important consideration for organisations that are striving to achieve best practice.
81% of those with access to remote working believe it increases their productivity
One of the potential cons of flexible working is the headache it can give your payroll team.
Employees working compressed hours or doing flexitime can be treated the same as full-time employees i.e. their pay stays the same, as does their holiday entitlement. So that’s nice and easy.
However, where employers allow employees to work different/fewer hours, this is going to change things for payroll. For part-time workers, it’s fairly straightforward as the hours are fixed each week/month.
But for workers who work annualised hours things get more complicated. Will employees be paid in equal instalments throughout the year? Or only for hours worked during the pay period? When can employees on annualised hours take holidays?
To avoid confusion, the finer details need to be stated in an employment agreement and shared with your payroll team.
Another potential issue with this more flexible approach concerns employees who can work anywhere, any time. If we shift to this way of working, then surely it doesn’t matter where an employee lives. But what does this mean for the job security of UK employees? Will their jobs be taken by offshore workers?
On the flip side, offering flexible working arrangements will widen your talent pool. And not just to offshore workers! Think about primary carers who have plenty to offer an employer but can’t start at 9am due to childcare commitments. The provision of flexitime could open the doors to a raft of talent.
On this basis there’s also good reason to believe that increasing flexible working opportunities could reduce the gender pay gap.
Find out more
