Flexible Working

Flexible working is widely offered and used in developed countries and the trend in developing countries is also rising. Flexible working patterns have various benefits not only for employees but also for organizations as well in the form of retention of its workforce. In this blog, the advantages of flexible working will be discussed.

Flexibility according to Maxwell et.al (2006: p. 138) is “any policies and practices, formal or informal, which permit people to vary when and where work is carried out”. Hall and Atkinson (2006: p. 375) state that “flexible working is for the benefit of the employee rather than (directly) for the employer, involving time, hours and location flexibility but excluding skills flexibility”. Furthermore, “we are seeing a move to more employer-led flexibility, in which the employer increasingly determines the temporal patterns of work, with the emphasis being on whether these patterns suit the needs of the business rather than the needs of the employee” (Rubery et al., 2005 as cited in Dick, 2009: p. 182).

High performance working organizations arrange flexible working arrangements (FWA), and found that one of the main reasons their employees were highly committed was because of availability to flexible working arrangements. Flexibility on one hand is rewarding when there is a balance between job and domestic responsibilities, and on the other hand, it may be expensive because it could create a work life clash between job promotion and family responsibilities.

Survey results revealed that most popular reason for reducing working hours by employees was “spending time with family”, and found that developing work place policies is the complicated task cause of accomplishing  both employee's and employer's interest. Globalization and technological advancement has enormously changed the organizational environment in both private and public sector, as a result leaders and workers are being forced for claiming larger flexibility from their organizations.

Furthermore, employers reported that some of the main reasons which cause employee absence were impact of long hours and home/ family responsibilities, so flexible working play vital role in minimizing absence and help in maintaining work life balance. Research conducted by Cochrane Library in 2010 concluded that employees with flexible functioning patterns and better control over functioning hours had shown constructive results on their health: blood pressure and heart rates. Therefore, flexibility reduce absence rate and keep workers fit, consequently flexible working arrangements could turn out to be a win win situation for both organizations and employees.