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Making workplaces better

Solutions to a better working environment

The increasing diversity of the workforce, together with the economic upturn in the late 1990s and 2000s, led to debate on how to improve the quality of the work experience. Building on the diversity agenda, employers, employees and trade unionists continued to discuss what a modern diverse workplace would look like.[65] This led to a series of initiatives around quality of work, including efforts to make the workplace more suitable for those with caring responsibilities, tackling workplace tensions in the form of bullying and harassment, and a push for a better work-life balance.

Flexible Working 

As employers adjusted to the increasing diversity of the workplace, particularly the rising number of women in the workforce, good employers started to adapt the way they allowed their employees to work in order to help them deal with additional responsibilities, such as caring for family members. Different kinds of flexible working have been introduced such as:

  • part time: working less than the normal hours, such as working fewer days per week
  • flexi time: choosing when to work often around a core period when employees have to work
  • annualised hours: hours are worked out over a year
  • compressed hours: working agreed hours over fewer days
  • staggered hours: different starting, break and finishing times for employees in the same workplace
  • job sharing: sharing a job designed for one person with someone else
  • home-working: working from home[66]

Although part time working has increased in the last 20 years, from 24% of the workforce in 1994 to 27% in 2009[67], some employers have been resistant to allowing employees to work flexibly. In the 2006 Work and Families act the Government introduced the right for employees, who met specific conditions, to request flexible working and the duty for employers to consider the request. The legislation applies to workers who:

  • Have parental responsibility of a child aged 16 or under or a disabled child under 18
  • Are carers who care for an adult who is a relative or who lives at the same address

Under the law an employer must seriously consider any application made, and only reject it if there are good business reasons for doing so:

There is also a concern that offering flexible working, or more specifically working from home, can lessen the interaction that commonly takes place within the workplace and therefore minimising cohesion. "The virtual workplace threatens to transform co-worker relations into something far thinner, less personal and more one dimensional". [68]

 

65. See for example Advancing Opportunity: The Futures of Good Work, ed. David Coats, Smith Institute 2009, http://www.smith-institute.org.uk/pdfs/good_work.pdf