Tips & Advice
Flexible working and wellbeing
In a report published in January, the CIPD stated that “The labour market is expected to remain tight in the period up to, and after, the UK’s exit from the European Union.”
In a report published in January, the CIPD stated that “The labour market is expected to remain tight in the period up to, and after, the UK’s exit from the European Union.”
While we’re not ones to be drawn into debating politics (publicly at least!), we were keen to look into how employers plan to attract and retain the talent that could make a difference to their organisation.
For clarity, the Government have released their own definition of what flexible working is, as although it’s a hot topic, it seems to have many different guises.
Two people do one job and split the hours.
It might be possible to do some or all of the work from home or anywhere else other than the normal place of work.
Working less than full-time hours (usually by working fewer days).
Working full-time hours but over fewer days.
The employee chooses when to start and end work (within agreed limits) but works certain ‘core hours’, for example 10am to 4pm every day.
The employee has to work a certain number of hours over the year but they have some flexibility about when they work. There are sometimes ‘core hours’ which the employee regularly works each week, and they work the rest of their hours flexibly or when there’s extra demand at work.
The employee has different start, finish and break times from other workers.
Default retirement age has been phased out and older workers can choose when they want to retire. This means they can reduce their hours and work part time.
Stigma around flexible working remains, with many employers citing a reluctance to pay people to watch daytime TV and be generally unproductive. The topic was even recently brought up in the House of Commons by MP Helen Whately, who argued that unless employers had a sound business reason for having specific working hours, firms should introduce flexibility to every job.
That being said, it’s predicted that by 2020, 70% of the workforce will experience flexible working.
We decided to dig into our own data and see what the impact of flexible working has on people’s wellbeing and their productivity.
Using data from 3826 workers in the UK, when we specifically looked at flexible working, we found the following:
The benefits continue to stack up. Wildgoose anonymously surveyed employees across 114 companies and discovered that:
Robertson Cooper’s holistic approach to creating more Good Days at Work helps you join up all aspects that influence wellbeing in your organisation, and this is just one of them.
