Next Monday (30 June) Liberal
Democrat MP Jo Swinson returns to her job as minister for employment relations
in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) following a period
of maternity leave. The timing is either fortuitous or an example of neat
political calculation because Ms Swinson will be back on the very day one of the
Lib Dem policy cause celebres, extension of the right of employees to request
flexible working, which employers have a duty to consider in a ‘reasonable
manner’, comes into effect .
From next week the right covers all
employees after 26 weeks in their job, rather than only those with children
under the age of 17 (18 if the child is disabled) and certain carers, albeit a
qualifying employee cannot make more than one request in a year. The right to request regulation as limited to
employees with young children was initially introduced in 2003 by the then
Labour Government and is generally considered to have been a success because
employers have in most cases responded positively to requests. The extension to
more employees is thus seen as fair and likely to further encourage employers
to operate flexible work practices, which the government believes has the
positive effect of both improving workplace well-being and business
performance.
Supporters of this kind of soft ‘nudge’
legislation reckon that employers who wouldn’t otherwise offer flexible work
options to the majority of staff will see the light and decide to do so if
requests cause them to review their ways of working. It’s thus assumed that although requests, once
reasonably considered, can be refused on one or more of eight business grounds
(including additional cost and any detrimental impact on the quality or
performance of the business) they will in most cases be accepted. However, especially with regard to the
extended right, this may prove to be a mistaken assumption.
Other than a plethora of individual
case studies of how individual organisations have benefited from their own use
of flexible working detailed research evidence is far more equivocal about the
business case for flexible working than advocates of such working arrangements
generally suggest. The most comprehensive published review concludes that
available evidence ‘fails to demonstrate a business case for flexible working’ (de
Menezes and Kelliher 2011). Similarly, analysis of the 2011 Workplace
Industrial Relations Survey (WERS) finds that after allowing for the effect of
organisational size and sector the number of flexible working arrangements
available in an organisation is not significantly related to either better or
worse than average financial performance. In other words there isn’t a business
case for, or for that matter against, flexible working (Chanfreau, 2013).
The reason for this is that the
benefits from flexible working accrue mainly to employees in the form of improved
work life balance, job satisfaction, increased commitment and reduced
absenteeism but there is no guarantee that this ultimately improves the
business bottom line. The key factor appears to be the specific organisational
situations in which flexible working practices operate and the fact that ‘flexible
working’ is a catch-all term for a variety of practices - encompassing
part-time working (the most common form), flexi-time, temporary reduced hours,
regular working from home, compressed working week, annualised hours, job
sharing and term-time working etc. – not all of which will be suitable for
every business.
This explains why most employers’
bodies, while in general lauding flexible working as a means of helping
organisations to recruit and retain staff and to increase staff satisfaction, believe
that the decision to offer employees flexible work, and precisely which
contractual arrangements to use, should be determined solely by organisations
themselves without any regulatory push or nudge. The reluctance of some employers to
voluntarily introduce flexible working, especially among small and medium sized
enterprises, revolves around organisational difficulties, inability to cover
for or substitute some employee skills, and managerial complexity. Given this
the business lobby argues that the right to request could prove costly in terms
of time and money if employees challenge refusals, and might also disrupt otherwise
harmonious workplace relations if some requests are accepted while others are
refused.
Advocates of flexible working nonetheless
argue that success of the right to request law in the past decade – the
introduction and gradual extension of which raised similar fears – suggests
that most employers will respond positively, and next Monday will doubtless see
many high profile bosses sitting alongside Miss Swinson to support the change. As
someone who generally supports any move to improve the quality of working life
I hope they are proved correct in this expectation. But we need to recognise
that a right that was targeted at a particular segment of the workforce may not
operate in the same way when applied more widely. The initial policy of giving
parents and carers the right to request flexible working proved successful because
it was pushing on an open door, with ever more employers seeking to attract
mothers in particular into flexible work roles in fast expanding service
sectors. There is no guarantee that the same business imperative will apply to
employees across the board, raising the prospect that the extended law could indeed
prove costly to business and disrupt workplace relations. The wisdom of this
particular cause celebre is about to be put to the test.
De Menezes, L and Kelliher, C (2011) Flexible working and performance: a
systematic review of the evidence for a business case, International
Journal of Management Relations. Vol 13, issue 4, December 2011.
Chanfreau, J (2013) Is there a business case for flexible working? National Centre for
Social Research (NatCen), July
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