In favour of family-friendly working
The school summer holidays have come round again and I find myself juggling and trying to balance the demands of work against wanting to spend time with my teenage son and be around for him. It got me thinking about the benefits to organisations and employees of family friendly working.
A while ago – in 2009 – the Secretary of State for the DWP set up a Taskforce to look at the challenges of improving family friendly practices in relation to working hours and patterns.
The belief is and was that there are business benefits for adopting flexible working such as providing a greater pool of talent from which to recruit – I have a client for example, who is a first class learning and development manager working within the public sector. She has 2 young children and although for the moment, she is working in an organisation that is used to people working flexibly – she in the office during school hours and then works evenings and some weekend time at home to fill in the gaps - my client is also mindful however that she will soon be looking to further develop her career to director level, but doing so will be a challenge as she requires term time working. Other organisations may be missing out on the opportunity to increase productivity by adding her skills and experience to their business.
It’s not just those with young children that we should consider in this way though, as carers and older workers often have the same needs from their career pathway; in fact up and coming generations now look more than ever to be able to balance work with leisure time so why should we limit flexible working just to particular categories of employee.
Flexible working enables businesses to meet the demands or changing peaks in productivity as well as enabling employees to enjoy work-life balance which can only add to levels of employee engagement as staff commitment and loyalty increase; particularly if organisations have open and honest discussion about what will work for both parties. The pay back is retention and a reduction in absenteeism which in turn reduces costs.
Employers have also reported other, perhaps less thought-of benefits including a positive impact on team working, customer service levels, knowledge sharing and innovation. Employees on the other hand also report feeling less stressed and being more productive when working.
In a world where economic and social changes are greater than we have ever experienced, I think it’s high time we challenged the 9 to 5 default for working hours.
How does your organisation embrace flexible working?
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