UK blazes flexible working trail

Added by The Editor, 3 months ago.

View Comments (3) | Leave Comment

Compared to the rest of Europe, the UK is doing well in providing flexible working, but there is still plenty of room for improvement. That's the conclusion of recent research commissioned by Avaya, which found that the large majority of companies are still unable to provide it on a daily basis.

The report, ‘Flexible working in Europe and Russia', says that the UK is ahead of most of Europe when it came to universal provision of flexible working. Still, only a fifth (22 per cent) of UK businesses made provisions for all employees to work flexibly on a daily basis, despite the fact that almost all (93 per cent) of employees want flexible working in their workplaces.

More importantly, the research suggests that business may have trouble holding on to staff if regular flexible working is not provided. Almost one-third (31 per cent) of employees would definitely quit for another job if they were granted access to flexible working, all other conditions being equal.

Across the entire respondent pool, the majority (78 per cent) of European workers would consider changing jobs for flexible working, and 94 per cent wanted their companies to provide it.

That's a trend that seems set to continue - and its effects will become more pronounced as the younger generations enter the workforce. In last year's ‘Realtime Generation' survey of young people between the ages of 13 and 17, commissioned by Logicalis, the majority said they would think negatively of an employer who asks them to choose between their home and work life (81 per cent) and 11 per cent said they would leave an employer if asked to choose.

While the survey did not ask the reasons for this, the near 50 per cent expectation of use of Instant Messaging and Video Conferencing to communicate with colleague's leads Logicalis to believe that the UK Realtime Generation is both aware of the challenge of work-life balance but also of the technology that can enable flexible and remote working.

In other words, they are aware of the problem, but also of the solutions available to combat it. Maybe it's time that UK businesses got those solutions in place in preparation.

Comments

There are currently 3 comments about this blog.

Victoria, 3 months ago

Leaving aside people's views about the government plans announced today to allow firms to discriminate in favour of women and ethnic minorities (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7474801.stm), this could have a knock-on benefit for flexible working if we're assuming that it's mainly women who are requesting to work more flexibly (and I suspect that is the case).

Mandy Shaw, 3 months ago

Not all work can be done from home, and hopefully the issue Gary highlights will lead, over time, to an assumption that workplaces must be easily accessible by public transport. I avoid travelling by car if remotely possible. The customer and vendor sites I visit vary from the easily accessible (frequent bus services from the nearest railway station, carefully documented on their website) to the almost completely inaccessible (miles from the nearest station, which has no bus connections). Perhaps I am in a minority, but I wouldn't even consider working for an organisation in the latter category.

Gary, 3 months ago

On top of the time-saving and efficiency savings that remote/flexible working offers, there is currently an additional driver: the rising price of oil and the knock-on effect in terms of rising travel costs.