Jane Parry and Michalis Veliziotis , Southampton Business School
Jane Parry is an Associate Professor of Work and Employment. Her research interests include changes in how work is organis! and how inequalities and disadvantages operate within labour markets and organisations.
Michalis Veliziotis is an Associate Professor of Human Resource Management. He is an economist who is interest! in how the labour market and workplace institutions shape employees’ work experiences.
The Employment Rights Bill currently moving through parliament is set to extend Britain’s flexible working rights, as describ! in a recent House of Commons Library briefing paper. If the Bill is enact!, employment tribunals will be able to consider whether it was reasonable for an employer to decide to reject a request. This is intend! to encourage careful consideration of requests and enhance access to flexible working.
The Bill seeks to build on the Employment Relations (Flexible Working) Act argentina phone number library pass! in April 2024 by the previous government. This extend! provisions around applying for flexible working arrangements and includ! secondary legislation to make these a ‘day one’ request right for all employees.
Post-pandemic flexible working
Our organisational case studies on flexible working look! at flexible working practices in 5 large organisations in different industries in the post-pandemic environment:
retail
local government
financial services
healthcare
banking
This includ! both statutory and non-statutory flexible working
We found that flexible working has become a key part of organisations’ strategic your travel essentials thinking, with recognis! benefits around recruitment, retention, and workforce well-being. During and since the pandemic, flexible working has been crucial in making hybrid working successful. For example, variation around core hours is often combin! with hybrid working, to offer value to working parents.
Different approaches to managing flexible working
The research found that flexible working operates in various ways in organisations. One of these is via the statutory requests cover! by legislation. This is currently one of the less common approaches to accessing flexible working. Organisations intentionally manage flexible germany cell number working in both formal and informal ways to reflect a spectrum of workforce ne!s. These range from foreseeable working patterns around fix! childcare to ad hoc ne!s to varying working hours to attend non-work appointments.
In most instances, our research found that the big change of recent years, hybrid working, was organis! informally with managers. While there has tend! to be organisational steer on the ratio of site to home presence that staff were expect! to be working, these patterns of working were rarely reflect! in people’s written contracts. This was partly because they were seen to be fluctuating or evolving.
