If An Employer Provides Flexible Working For Its Staff How Hard Is it To Accommodate Those Who Need To Work From Home?
The rules covering flexible working were introduced in 2002 and have been successful in their aim of providing increased flexibility to both employers and employees. The occasions when person’s hours are worked and the number of hours worked might fluctuate enormously as employment contracts are drafted to suit the needs of both parties. The use of part-time, term-time and flexitime working has risen gradually over the past few years. Part-time work is the most used kind of flexible working and almost every company now has some part-time workers. The education field uses term-time working extensively and flexitime is now offered by almost 25 per cent of employers in Britain. One of the more controversial options within flexible working is permitting staff to Work From Home.
]Applying the flexible working rules is mainly at the discretion of the special circumstances involving person’s duty to care for children under 16 (under 18, if disabled) or elderly dependents where the company must “seriously consider” offering flexible working options. The person has no statutory right to any of the options and must make an official application to his company to request it. A high percentage of these special circumstances, by their very nature, would appear to require a Work From Home option. While any moral company would be keen to help a worker in these cases there are some crucial things to contemplate before granting the request. This is not an area that has seen any growth in the last decade. Only 3% of staff Work From Home on a permanent basis and this has barely changed since 2002 despite the advent of the modern Internet Business which uses the latest technology to provide Online Jobs for its staff. The number of staff who Work From Home from time to time has increased gradually to about 20% of the workforce.
When a traditional non Internet Business is looking to transfer some roles to Online Jobs it must first of all assess which roles, if any, would be suitable to be performed at home. Generally these would be telephone based jobs in sales, marketing or customer service departments where an electronic client management system can be accessed from home or at the office. Besides these, some administrative, accountancy and personnel tasks could be done at home. Assuming there are some roles suitable for the switch to home working then thought must be given to the cost of equipping staff with the necessary level of technology to actually do so. This cost might also have to include training in the use of the technology.
As well as the cost there are also several operational issues which employers must be comfortable with. The suitability of the person to Work From Home is significant as many people who switch to home working find that they miss the busy office environment or find it a problem to work in isolation away from colleagues and friends. It is important to keep the remote staff involved in the business wherever possible as a feeling of isolation can produce a fall in their performance levels. Management procedures must be adjusted to monitor this closely. Finally, depending on the types of job being transferred and the employer’s line of business there may be problems associated with the removal of confidential information from the office.