The Flexible Working (Procedural Requirements) Regulations 2002 established details of the ways in which firms and employees can adjust their usual working practices to achieve various objectives. This is definitely not a one-sided piece of legislation as businesses could gather as much benefit in business terms as the workers do in having more leisure time or helping with their personal arrangements such as child care. In certain circumstances, mainly involving the requirement to provide care for children and the disabled, the regulations ask the company to ‘seriously consider’ requests from employees for flexible working but generally it is employer to establish whether it is relevant to their particular business. Surveys have revealed that those small businesses which have embraced flexible working have done so mostly through the offer of part-time working, the implementation of a flexi-time or job sharing system and the option to Work From Home.
Thorough analysis of a firm’s needs is required prior to the introduction of flexible working practices. It is vital to make sure that all employees are seen to be treated as fairly as possible and are given reasonable access to the choices which are made available to them. For example, while flexi-time could be ideal for parents of schoolchildren it has no benefit to those with pre-school. These parents could opt for job sharing, part-time working or the opportunity to Work From Home to cut or eradicate childcare costs. In an ideal world there should be an option available to match everyone’s circumstances but this could be quite difficult to accomplish. The part-time, job share and flexi-time options are quite broad in their appeal to employees and provide no disruption to the employer as the work and its location will not alter.
However, the opportunity to Work From Home will not be accessible to all employees as not all jobs are suitable to be carried out remotely from the company’s premises. The manufacturing role is obviously a case in point as automation has cut unit costs enormously and to reintroduce manual assembly by homeworkers would be commercial suicide. While this is obviously an extreme example it concentrates attention on which jobs are suitable to be done at home. As an example of the opposite case, a newly-formed, high-tech Internet Business using the latest technology would probably function with almost all of its employees doing Online Jobs working from home. The more traditional businesses need to consider carefully which jobs can be carried out with equal effectiveness from home. The obvious jobs would be the non-customer facing type, mostly telephone-based involving sales or customer service. Depending on the capability of the communication technology to be installed at the worker’s home then every department would have some roles which would be suitable. Although these would possibly be mainly clerical, there could be other roles within the accountancy, personnel or marketing functions which perhaps involve the production of reports or management information which could be carried out equally as well from home.
A British Chamber of Commerce survey highlighted that thirty eight per cent of small firms offer the opportunity of flexible working to their people. They do so because it enables them to retain experienced employees who would otherwise have to stop working due to changes in their domestic circumstances. The company does not become an Internet Business as the majority of its operations carry on as they were before. The only difference is that some employees now have Online Jobs and are at the end of a telephone line instead of at the end of the corridor.