4 Flexible working
It really is a waste of talented people to be
sitting at home or doing unrewarding work for which no qualifications
are required just because companies are short-sighted enough not
to offer professional part-time jobs. [Helen
Hernandez][125]
Current position
79. The term 'flexible working' covers a wide
variety of working practices. It includes: compressed hours, staggered
hours and term-time hours, where full-time work is arranged and
organised around other commitments; job sharing, where two or
more people work the equivalent of a full-time job; and part time
work, where people work fewer hours per week. For the sake of
simplicity, the term 'flexible working' will be used in this chapter
to cover all such variations of working practices.
80. The ability to work flexibly was raised in
oral evidence, by the contributors to Mumsnet and Woman's
Hour, and in our written evidence. During and after the Woman's
Hour phone-in, in November 2012, the majority of tweets referred
to flexible working:
Work for multinational, but all flexibility dependent
on line manager decision locally [...];
I am currently applying for flexible work after maternity
leave and the company has said the minimum is 30 hours [...];
we must fix female talent pipeline at all levels
and ensure women fulfil their potential;
I was recently told I was the best candidate for
a job but couldn't have it because I wanted to work a 4 day week;
Fascinating phone-in this morning. Can't believe
part-time working is still regarded with suspicion by so many
employers.[126]
81. Heather Rabbatts, Non-Executive Director
of the Football Association, told us:
In terms of my own experience, if you look at women's
careers, there is the time leading up to having children, there
is having children, and there is trying to return to work. Women
are impacted by these in a variety of different ways. There are
mechanisms [...] for trying to encourage women back into the work
force, but they are pretty sparse, and not that effective. We
leak huge amounts of talent out of the system.[127]
This view was echoed by the personal experience of
Kay Vincent:
Having graduated from an MSc in computing in 2012
I would have dearly loved to work in the IT sector (and apparently
the IT industry is crying out for graduates with programming skills).
Unfortunately, I could not find anyone who would employ me, because
I can only work part time. To me this seems like a huge and obvious
waste. Not just for me personally, but perhaps for tens of thousands
of women. Why can't employers find ways to use the skills of job-share
and part-time workers?[128]
Opportunities for flexible working are sparse, and
where they are offered, they are often in poorly paid jobs, with
short-term contracts. Written evidence from WEN Wales cited research
that showed that 50% of available part-time work in Wales is low
paid work.[129] Women
Like Us, a social enterprise recruitment firm that helps women
find part-time work, stated:
The part-time recruitment market is skewed strongly
in favour of vacancies with salaries below £20,000 full-time
equivalent earnings. [...] This is in sharp contrast to the full-time
market, where the majority of vacancies pay over £20k".[130]
82. Dr Linda Grant, from Sheffield Hallam University,
and Professor Sue Yeandle, from the University of Leeds, submitted
evidence based on the Gender and Employment in Local Labour
Markets research programme, which undertook research across
12 local labour markets in England. They summarised the constituent
elements of available flexible work:
Typically, job content and employee autonomy are
limited in part-time jobs. Tasks tend to be repetitive, employees
lack opportunities to exercise responsible decision-making over
their jobs, and the amount of flexibility with respect to hours
of work and start and finish times is limited, undermining the
capacity to combine work with family responsibilities.[131]
83. Flexible work is often concentrated in one
area of the organisation, and is not appreciated within the context
of the organisation as a whole, a conclusion based on research
that Dr Grant and Professor Yeandle undertook:
Critically, [part-time jobs] become a self-contained
group of jobs, not integrated into the wider training, progression
and career opportunities within workplaces or organisations. It
is not only hours of work which set them apart from full-time
jobs. They tend to lack progression opportunities and offer only
a narrow range of fairly repetitive tasks.[132]
Furthermore, there is often an inconsistency between
employers having a policy of encouraging flexible working in principle,
and their ability to implement it in practice, as highlighted
by Women Like Us:
Where businesses were resistant to part-time working,
some HR respondents reported a 'disconnect' between what their
department advocated (e.g. flexible working practices) and their
ability to implement this because of a workplace culture operating
on a model of full-time employment.[133]
84. It should also be noted that the long-hours
culture prevalent in certain sectors has an impact not only on
those full-time workers who work beyond their contracted hours,
but also on those wishing to work a percentage of the contracted
full-time hours. The Institute of Physics highlighted this problem:
There is no longer an expectation that full-time
work is solely 35-40 hours per week, and indeed, in many science
occupations the expectation is to work in excess of this, with
a 60-hour week not being untypical. Employers, therefore, may
not see part-time work as a valuable commodity, given that such
employees would be working way less than the expectation. This
needs to be addressed through targeted guidance to all employees
around productivity and work-life balance, as well as highlighting
the benefits of highly-skilled, flexible part-time workers.[134]
85. On the other hand, in contrast to the evidence
we received about the poor quality of much flexible working practices,
we also received evidence that highlighted the positive aspects
of good quality flexible working. For example, Maggy Pigott extolled
both the personal benefits of flexible working in a Senior Civil
Service post, a job that she shared with her partner, and the
benefits that it brought to their employer:
Productivity increased. We worked three days each
but believe we produced more than one person working six days
and our job responsibilities tended to grow. We could not have
worked for five days at the pace sustained over three. And our
days off provided time to re-charge batteries, reflect, and restore
balance. You do have to prioritise and time-manage rigorously,
deadlines are often shorter, and 'down-time' is minimal. In two
of our Senior Civil Service posts when we moved on we were replaced
by two full-timers.[135]
86. As well as offering greater flexibility to
employees, Women Like Us highlighted other benefits:
Recruiting skilled part-time staff can help growing
businesses to: acquire experienced talent at an affordable cost;
recruit for hard-to-fill/niche roles; and realise cost efficiencies
by more precisely matching tasks to appropriate skills/salary
levels. All the above is set against a background of incomplete
knowledge. For example, the market tends to be viewed as a homogenous
whole, regardless of salary and skill levels, glossing over the
distinction between the employment and recruitment markets; while
the part-time employment market is well documented, the part-time
recruitment market is not as well understood. The Office for National
Statistics does not collect data on part-time vacancies outside
of Jobcentre Plus.[136]
Data transparency and a voluntary
code of practice
87. The Office of National Statistics (ONS) collects
estimates for total vacancies, from the Vacancy Survey, but those
estimates are not broken down in terms of full-time and part-time
jobs.[137] Furthermore,
there is no data on the number of current flexible workers, although
the ONS publishes estimates for the number of people in part-time
employment as part of the monthly labour market statistics release.[138]
This difficulty in knowing who is and is not working flexibly
was further explained by Sarah Jackson, Chief Executive of Working
Families:
The majority of our employers are large, private
sector organisations. They talk about the difficulty they have
in evidencing their own flexible cultures, because they say, 'We
record the people who make a contractual change to the terms of
their employment. We can tell you who is working contractually
part-time and flexibly. We know anecdotallybecause we are
good employers and we are trying to create a flexible culturethat
we have a lot of people who are working flexibly informally.'
However, it is very hard for them to track them.[139]
88. Jo Swinson, Parliamentary Under-Secretary
of State for Women and Equalities, extolled the value of data:
I am a great believer in the notion that what gets
measured gets done. Transparency and monitoring can play a really
important role, because very often some of the factors holding
women back are not alwaysalthough it does existactual
sexism; often, it is that the issue has not been properly thought
about. In fact, sometimes the problem is not obviously apparent
until you look at plain numbers in black and white.[140]
However, in relation to data transparency on flexible
working, the Government itself has a poor track record. There
is no consistent form of recording part-time working in Government
Departments, and so it is difficult to get comprehensive information.
However, what little available information there is reveals a
wide divergence in flexible and part-time working opportunities
between Departments. For example, 3.1% of staff in the Foreign
and Commonwealth Office, 7.1% of Treasury staff, 11% of staff
in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and 39%
of staff in the Department for Work and Pension work part time
or in a job share.[141]
89. Without reliable, consistent
data on the extent of flexible workingincluding part-time,
job-share, and compressed hoursthe Government, public and
private sector employers, and employees cannot have clear understanding
of who is working in such a way, in what sector, and how well
they are performing. The data needs to be gathered and analysed
by gender, race and disability, and by age and sector. The Government
Equalities Office should oversee the collation of this data by
the Office of National Statistics.
The Government should collect and
publish consistent data on the working practices of staff within
its own Departments. This data should be reviewed on an annual
basis, and those Departments with poor records of offering flexible
working should be set achievable targets for improvement.
FLEXIBLE WORKING PRACTICES AT A
SENIOR LEVEL
90. The opportunities for flexible working in
senior posts remain rare, as research carried out by Dr Hazel
Conley and Dr Tessa Wright, from Queen Mary, University of London,
and Dr Susan Durbin and Professor Moore, from the University of
the West of England, showed:
Part-time working at management levels remains rare
in the UK: 27% of the UK workforce works part-time, of which 74%
are women and just 6.5 % of part-time workers are employed in
the occupational category of managers and senior officials (Labour
Force Survey 2012). Given the large numbers of women who work
part-time, compared with men, and their relative rarity at management
levels, this has important implications for the earnings potential
of these women. [...] There remains an untapped resource of experienced,
qualified women who are under-employed in the UK job market, because
employers are not prepared to consider part-time working as a
serious option for managers.[142]
Sir David Normington, First Civil Service Commissioner
and Commissioner for Public Appointments, added:
You need to create flexible working opportunities
to keep those women in touch and give them the opportunities to
balance their childcare responsibilities, which they often have,
maybe with working part-time on a flexible basis. It is easier
to do that at first-tier senior management than at the most senior
management level, though it is not impossible at that level. That
is where all organisations need to focus their attention. If you
lose touch with your excellent women managers at that point, you
will probably not get them back and they will go off and do something
else. This is very bad for the organisation and also for them.
Maggy Pigott's personal evidence highlighted the
benefits that employers gain from flexible working:
Job-sharing has the obvious and significant advantage
over part-time working that the whole week is covered; therefore
any full-time role can, in theory, be shared. Working three days
a week (or the time-equivalent) is more difficult in senior positionsoften
the senior part-timer works four days and, in reality, is doing
five days work in four. We always had mainstream posts, previously
held by a full-timer, and were fortunate to be able to undertake
high profile and fulfilling work.[143]
The flexibility for both employee and employer was
also supported by Linda Wells, who described, in a personal capacity,
her experience of job-sharing as a teacher:
Having two people completely up to speed on one job
gives the workforce flexibility to allow for individuals attending
courses, holidaying etc. without loss to clients. In the private
sector (where the criticism of job sharing is break in continuity)
I would say that the lesser likelihood of neither person being
available for clients etc., as one covers for the other, means
better continuity over all.[144]
91. There are examples of where organisations
have implemented part-time or job share arrangements at a senior
level, in an attempt to improve female representation at all levels
within the organisation. For example, since 2006, Clydesdale Bank
has allowed various flexible working practices, including giving
all staff the right to request flexible working practices. Its
maternity leave return rate "was low between 60-70%"
but has been improved and now is maintained at over 80%.[145]
The Discrimination Law Association also highlighted the availability
of flexible working at American Express[146],
while Timewise Jobs is the UK's first jobsite dedicated to professional
part-time roles. It features over 4,000 employers and advertises
more than 3,000 quality part-time vacancies.[147]
92. Jemima Coleman, from the Employment Lawyers
Association, summed up the need to highlight best practice:
There is also quite a lot that can be done generally
in terms of celebrating best practice and drawing attention, as
some organisations have done recently, to power part-timers, people
who are holding very senior roles on a part-time basis, celebrating
those and rolling out best practiceperhaps even having
some kind of guidance to best practice so that it is no longer
seen as a career-limiting move to take a part-time role.[148]
Again, Maggy Pigott described her positive experience
of job-sharing in the Senior Civil Service:
My job-sharing partner and I were able to continue
working after we had children and we gained promotion together
to the SCS. We worked with the Senior Judiciary, Ministers, Permanent
Secretaries, the legal profession, the third sector and others
and we had up to 65 staff. We never encountered any serious difficulties
over our 23 years and were often told the Department gained by
having job-sharers. We were fortunate in the culture that prevailed
and we felt able to apply for any post. Job-sharing was welcomed
in our Department and at one time there were three SCS pairs.
Culture and support from the top were crucial to our longevity
and success.[149]
93. Good-quality flexible work is attractive
to both men and women; it affects all employees with caring responsibilities.
Evidence from Dr Linda Grant and Professor Sue Yeandle, described
the benefits for employees to have fluidity between part-time
and full-time work, as and when their personal circumstances change,
and for employers, of whom they wrote,"Successful employers
worldwide recognise the realities of population ageing, and are
adapting to make greater and better use of part-time workers of
both sexes".[150]
Gingerbread reinforced this point:
While it is often offered as a retention tool for
existing staff, flexible working is most successful when employers
embed it at the heart of an organisationdesigned for everyone,
central to the way that they operate, and with managers leading
the cultural shift needed to make it work. Where this is in place,
employers point to impressive business benefitsa positive
impact to the bottom line, as well as delivering a virtuous circle
of higher employee morale, leading to increased staff engagement,
retention and productivity.[151]
94. We also heard from Debbie Crosbie, Director
of Operations and IT at Clydesdale Bank, who spoke of the bank's
commitment to flexible working, for all staff:
We have a very high percentage of flexible-working
practices. That is not just for women. That is one thing that
is importantto change this culture. It this is just seen
as a women's issue, it sends out the wrong messages. We have a
number of policieswhether the responsibilities are caring
for older parents or any other responsibilityunder which
people can apply for part-time working, key working and flexible
working. We embed and encourage that as part of how we do business
now. It is very important that people like me, who hold very senior
positions, are supportive of that.[152]
95. However, the right to request flexible working
does not go far enough for some. Fair Play South West wrote that
"the 'right to request' flexible work has been only partially
successful; there needs now to be a 'right to work' flexibly so
that employers cannot refuse".[153]
96. We recommend the establishment
of a voluntary Code of Practice by the Government, through the
Government Equalities Office, to highlight best practice in relation
to the provision of quality part-time and flexible working. The
Government should draw attention to those organisations that encourage
flexible workingfor both men and women, at all levels of
the workforce, including at a senior levelin order to dispel
the myth that flexible working is problematic and cannot work.
97. Flexible employment can work,
when it is fully integrated into the workplace structure, with
equal access for training and development opportunities alongside
full-time workers. The voluntary Code of Practice should also
highlight the 'return-to-work' experiences and opportunities for
those many women who are qualified and experienced in their chosen
work, and who wish to return to work after looking after young
children.
98. Currently, employees do
not have the right to ask for flexible or part-time working within
six months of starting a job. Staff should be entitled to ask
for flexible working from the outset, unless there are justifiable
reasons to the contrary. This should be led from the top management
level, with the default position being the right to ask for flexible
working, unless justified.
Small and medium businesses (SMEs)
99. The success of the SME sector, in particular
micro-businesses, is crucial to ensure the economic recovery of
the country.
There are constraints under
which some SMEs operate, which make flexible or part-time working
harder to accommodate. However, there are also opportunities for
SMEs to employ flexible workers. The Federation of Small Businesses
(FSB) told us that many SMEs already consider flexible workers
to be integral to the success of their businesses. Mike Cherry,
Policy Chairman of the FSB, told us that:
I think [SMEs] are far better suited and better able
to recognise the requirement of their employees. From the FSB's
point of view, our surveys repeatedly show that small and micro
businesses are better people to employ females, disadvantaged
groups and the long-term unemployed. We take the risk and we give
them the opportunities. So long as we feel that we can train them,
their gender or any other orientation does not matter. They are
people who want to do the job, and if it requires us to be more
flexible in our approach because of child care or any other issues,
we tend to do that almost automatically, because that is the way
small businesses tend to behave towards each other.[154]
100. Tim Ward, Chief Executive Officer of Quoted
Companies Alliance, told us that flexible working, especially
as a senior level, can work in small organisations, depending
on the context:
It depends on the culture and the values the organisation
holds. An interesting study was carried out earlier in the year
by the CIPD, which was a survey of 1,000 employers and 2,000 employees.
The general feeling was that employees working for micro and small
businesses are much more likely to be working flexibly than those
working in medium or large businesses. Also, the smaller the organisation
you work for, the less likely employees are to have obstacles
to working flexibly. There is something there about the size of
the organisationand perhaps the fact that there are crossovers
of jobs and rolesthat means people can share or cover each
other's roles much more easily than if you are in a much more
ordered, risk-based environment where there are processes and
procedures that introduce operational obstacles to working flexibly.[155]
101. The issue of whether flexible working can
be incorporated into the working arrangements of SMEs depends
on each business, sector by sector. While some small businesses
can work with a highly flexible workforce, others would find it
difficult. It can also depend on the type of job within an organisation.
Debbie Crosbie, from Clydesdale Bank, told us of the different
arrangements within the bank, which has the potential to be a
framework for any organisation, large or small:
We have a lot of different arrangements. Nearly all
the requests for flexibility are granted, but there are occasions
where individuals ask for arrangements or to go into part-time
roles where we have to come back and say, 'Look, we do not think
that is right for you and we do not think it is the best thing
for the organisation'. We do a lot to find suitable alternatives,
but I think that just allowing people to assume that everything
must be flexible is a naive attitude to business. It is very important
that the culture in an organisation is supportive, but it must
be realistic about helping people set achievable goals for themselves
and for the organisation at the same time.[156]
102. The Equalities and Human
Rights Commission needs to take a more active role in supporting
and advising SMEs, in relation to the issue of flexible working.
Many SMEs are exemplars of flexible working, which benefits both
the business and the staff, but others lack the knowledge to utilise
flexible working successfully. The Government should invest resources
in advising small and medium businesses, of the benefits of recruiting
and retaining flexible workers, and it should highlight the work
that organisations such as the Federation of Small Businesses
do to promote the positive benefits of flexible working.
125 Ev w39 Back
126
@womanshour, 14 November 2012, 1.50pm Back
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Q235 Back
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Ev w115 Back
129
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Ev w37 Back
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133
Ev w111 Back
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Ev w45 Back
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Email from the Labour Market, Office of National Statistics, 29
April 2013 Back
138
Email from the Labour Market, Office of National Statistics, 29
April 2013. The estimates are available at www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/april-2013/index-of-data-tables.html#tab-Employment-tables Back
139
Q 92 Back
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Q 449 Back
141
Information received as a result of parliamentary questions raised
by Ann McKechin MP, in the spring of 2013. Back
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Q 114 Back
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