Flexible working doesn’t have to be the left-out element of the workplace

According to the government website, all employees who have worked for their company for 26 weeks or more have the right to apply for flexible working.

Broadly, flexible working just means work which is more suitable for the employee than their current assigned hours. Examples of different types of flexible working include job sharing (splitting workload and hours with a colleague), compressed hours (same number of hours over fewer days) or flexitime (assigned core hours but start and end times can vary).

Employers don’t have to agree to a request, but do have to consider it. However, recent reports have shown that it’s not necessarily sunshine and roses if your employer does agree.
A survey by flexible working experts, Timewise, found two-thirds of part-time workers feel isolated and struggle to make or maintain professional connections.

Several women who work part-time hours report feeling “punished” and “left-out” by managers and colleagues as a result of their reduced hours. Their friendships dissolved, and the whole ordeal was “soul-destroying”.

Timewise founder Karen Mattison has coined a new word for this situation: “flexism”. This expresses the structural discrimination and disadvantages that part-time workers can face thanks to the continued old-fashioned insistence on 9-5 Mon-Fri model, such as missing out on professional network opportunities, failing to connect with their colleagues, and becoming de-skilled due to no available training sessions.

Obviously, with the popularity of flexible working hours steadily increasing, it is clear that businesses need to undergo a rapid and thorough cultural change.

______________

Time and Attendance UK supplies an extensive range of workforce management solutions that cater for all the requirements of the modern workplace, including flexible working. We make it easy for you to keep track of and pay your flexible workers – so companies have no excuse to claim difficulty or hard work for treating their flexible workers differently.

The system can supply working rules for a variety of purposes, from simple determination of overtime by the number of daily hours worked, to the more complex payment of overtime hours adjusted when periodic targets are not met. The system also contains special rules to accommodate the formal flexitime contracts worked by many public sector employees. Workers paid on an annual contract basis can receive reports stating how many contracted hours they have yet to work.

Additionally, our top-range WinTA suite features a Self Service Module which allows staff to clock IN or OUT, check hours, request leave and a range of other functions via their browser or their mobile phone.

With the mobile Self-Service Module, staff can call in from outside the office. The system can even record their GPS location when they call in, in order to make sure their location is correct. This makes it an ideal system for remote workers, freelancers, or roles with a lot of time away from the office such as salesperson, social worker or carer.

If you’d like to find out more about the range of workforce management and Time and Attendance solutions supplied by Time and Attendance UK and how we can help your company implement thorough and reliable flexible working arrangements, just contact us or book a demo.