Although people have been talking about flexible working in one way or another for decades – the economist John Maynard Keynes declared in 1930 that technological advances would lead to a 15-hour working week – we may now be at the tipping point where work takes on an entirely different character.
That is not to say it hasn’t changed in the recent past. Flexible working in one form or another has already transformed the working lives of many people and in the UK more firms than not offer alternatives to the traditional working day with its fixed time and place.
But they’ve never been the norm. The default has always been the 9 to 5, inherent in laws that offer people the right to request flexible working as an alternative. That polarity may be about to switch, catalysed by a new confluence of social, demographic and technological change.
Making flexible the norm
Workers themselves are inevitably in favour of more flexible working, but this is perhaps the first time that they share a common viewpoint with managers on the issue
The MP Helen Whately has introduced a Flexible Working Bill to Parliament that would oblige employers to make flexible working a characteristic of all job roles in some way or other, unless there was a sound business case for why the role could not be carried out in a flexible way.
Introducing her bill to Parliament, Whately said the traditional 40-hour, five-day working week “made sense in an era of single-earner households and stay-at-home mums”, but it did not accurately reflect the reality of how people want to live and work today. She argued flexible working would help close the gender pay gap, assist parents to share childcare responsibilities and help businesses retain staff who might seek better working arrangements elsewhere.
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“At the moment, too many women are reluctantly dropping out of work or going part-time after having children because their employers won’t allow them flexibility,” Whately said, “It entrenches the assumption that men are the breadwinners and women are the homemakers. As a result, men don’t get to spend as much time as they might like with their children, women miss out on career opportunities, and the country loses out on the contribution they could and would like to make if only they could do slightly different hours or work some days from home.”