What is flexible working?

The term ‘flexible working’ is now used in many ways to describe a range of variants of the traditional office-based, ‘nine-till-five’ work model.

From an employer’s perspective, flexibility can mean the ability to ask staff to work at times which suit the organisation’s demand for labour. From the employee’s point of view, flexibility usually means the freedom to organise work around family and caring commitments and leisure pursuits. Fortunately, these two different views of flexibility can usually be reconciled allowing both employee and employer to benefit from flexible working.

The main barrier to adopting flexible working practices is our preoccupation with daily commuting to a fixed place of work. 20 years ago, employees had little choice—it was essential to travel to a factory or office to make use of the equipment which was located there. However, today, some 80% of UK employees are information workers, i.e. people who work predominantly with data, usually relying on the use of a PC and a telephone. With the aid of the appropriate technology, it is no longer necessary for personnel to commute to work every day. Increasingly, companies and their staff are appreciating the benefits of being able to undertake some of their work from home.

For the majority of information workers, full time home working is not a realistic proposition as it is still necessary to meet with colleagues, both professionally and socially, and to arrange face-to-face meetings with customers, suppliers and partners. However, for most organisations employing information workers, it is feasible for personnel to work at home for part of the working week (typically 2–3 days/week) and to enjoy a degree of flexibility in their working hours.

This type of working arrangement, with a distributed workforce, brings its own potential problems that can include:

• It can be difficult to appear to clients and the rest of the ‘outside world’ as a cohesive organisation;
• Internal communication can be difficult and expensive (if telecommunications charges are incurred for traffic between personnel working in different locations);
• Team working can be disrupted;
• Employees may lose a sense of ‘belonging’ to the organisation;
• Many of the technologies used to support a distributed workforce are complex and difficult to use;
• Traditionally, remote workers have required a high degree of technical support.

Cygnet’s answer to these problems is OfficeVenue, a business solution incorporating advanced technologies which simplify the whole process of operating with a distributed workforce. OfficeVenue eases the task of introducing and running flexible working practices within an organisation. C