Barriers to flexible working

Aviva research²¹ across 500 private employers suggested that 65% of businesses think their workforce will work more flexibly in five years’ time. But they also found 34% of businesses not offering flexible working as a standard and that one in five in the workforce ‘dare not ask for flexible working’ presumably because they worry it will be taken negatively and impact their prospects.

The reality is that there are still some significant cultural and other barriers to more widespread use of the many different forms of flexible working.

Mindsets and cultures

For generations who have lived with the long-standing working traditions of full-time work or standard working weeks throughout their careers, it can be hard to understand or accept very different working arrangements.

There is a pervasive ‘work commitment’ bias at work, where managers are biased towards positively evaluating people on what they see as effort and commitment. This may be quite conscious and explicit, and is almost celebrated in many professional services, finance, legal, media and advertising sectors where ‘commitment’ or ‘ambition’ is often read as working long hours. As a result, those working part time or even away from the office and eyes of their managers can find themselves at a disadvantage. In many other working cultures it may be much less explicit, but the reality is that there is a common tendency to bias our evaluations of performance on perceived input versus understanding output and outcomes.

Perception and reality of disadvantage

Given the challenges of many long-established cultures and mindsets about what a ‘proper’job entails, it’s not surprising to see that those who work part-time and flexibly can be disadvantaged in terms of their career progression.

A 2018 survey²² by Deloitte with Timewise of 1,800 UK professionals (78% of whom said ‘their current or most recent employer offered flexible working’) found that 30% of flexible workers felt they were regarded as less important, and 25% said they were given fewer opportunities than colleagues who worked conventional hours. A quarter also believed they had missed out on promotion.

Part-time employees were less likely to think their job made use of their skills and experience or helped them to develop their career. Findings from a 2018 C1PD survey of several thousand workers across the UK²³ showed that whereas 26% of full-time employees thought they were overqualified in their current job, the proportion was 45% for part-time employees. Similarly, 35% of full-time employees and 45% of part-time employees thought they had the skills to cope with more demanding duties. The same survey in 2019 also showed how full- and part-time employees viewed their prospects, with a fairly clear difference in perceptions as shown in Figure 2.6 below.

Whether these are perceptions or realities, the outcome will be the same. If an organisation is perceived to have a bias against part-time working or the nature and the quality of the job is less, it will restrict people from requesting, as the Aviva study highlighted.

Involuntary flexible working and underemployment

Too often the only ‘flexible’ and part-time jobs available are low paid. Some estimates suggest a very large part-time pay penalty of up to 30%, and there may be as many as 1.5 million people in the UK workforce who are trapped in jobs like these, working below their skill level because they can’t find better-paid jobs with the working patterns they need.

Figure 2.6 Skill and career development perceptions.

Source: CIPD UK Working Lives survey 2019.

According to the Eurofound 2017 survey, involuntary part-time work increased from 22.4% of all part-time work to 29.1% between 2007 and 2015 across Europe. They reported this change as correlated with the change in unemployment rates in some EU countries, with strong increases in Cyprus, Greece and Spain. By contrast, Germany showed the sharpest decline in both unemployment and involuntary part-time work.

This group of workers also contribute to the underemployed, where they may be working part-time but want to work longer hours. This affects women more than men. According to Working Families, almost twice the number of mothers than fathers are on a zero-hours contract or take on casual work. Their research showed that more than one in ten (11%) of parents have turned down a new job or promotion in favour of preserving their work-life balance, suggesting that once working parents have managed to obtain the flexibility they need, they feel unable to move on. Nearly two-thirds (65%) of mothers and half of fathers agree or strongly agree with the statement: ‘I will stay in my job because I won’t be able to get the flexibility I have now elsewhere’.

Hours versus wage rate

There has been a long-standing ‘part-time pay penalty’ that applies even when correcting for hours worked (and despite legislation prohibiting pay discrimination against part-time employees since 2000). This is because part-time work is less common in highly paid jobs and management roles.²⁴

However, according to recent CIPD research, part-time employees are more likely to agree they are paid fairly than full-time employees.²⁵ Employees working part-time hours, however, appeared to attach less weight to their pay than full-time employees, instead being more likely to regard convenient hours as important or essential. And it seems part-time employees have found jobs for themselves that mean they are more satisfied than full-time employees with their working hours and with workplace relationships.

Hours worked in relation to overall pay have received little attention by policy makers, but that might be starting to change. Policies like minimum wage are widespread internationally, and the UK’s Living Wage Foundation’s Real Living Wage campaign are now putting more attention on hours worked as well as the hourly rate. The Resolution Foundation noted that whilst hourly pay at the bottom of the distribution has increased (because of the national minimum wage), weekly wages decreased because people were working fewer hours.²⁶

This could be due to changes in the composition of the workforce and the choices workers are making, or it could be because large increases in the national living wage are prompting employers to cut back hours. The Resolution Foundation suggested that ‘it may be that increasing the hours of those already in work offers one of the best options for boosting living standards over the course of 2018’.

Social attitudes and norms

Support for women and those with caring responsibilities actively working varies across countries and societies. As already noted, the Nordic countries have higher proportions of women working and working part time and this is partly due to different social attitudes. Norms or attitudes of this nature tend to change slowly, being transmitted from one generation to another.

However, there does appear to be growing support among employees in the UK for the idea that employers have some degree of responsibility for supporting people with their life outside work. In 2012/2013, 69% of male employees and 73% of female employees agreed, or strongly agreed, that ‘employers should help mothers combine jobs and childcare’.²⁷

Similarly, 60% of employees in workplaces with five or more employees agreed that ‘managers here understand about employees having to meet responsibilities outside work’.²⁸ Just 15% of employees disagreed with this statement. Nevertheless, unsupportive or inflexible managers remain a big barrier, and we need to do more to train and encourage them to think differently.

Issues of remote working

A 2016 study from Lancaster University in the UK found that people valued mobile working (ability to work anywhere), noting how it enabled them to get more done (54%); made them feel trusted (49%); improved work-life balance (46%); made them feel empowered (41%); and reduced their travel time (37%).²⁹

However the report also found that around a quarter of those surveyed claimed that all the work in their organisation was currently carried out on site. Furthermore, almost half of managers (45%) said that mobile working made them work longer hours, and a quarter (24%) said that it made them feel disconnected from their team. Organisational culture is clearly vital in addressing the barriers.

Flexible working office environments

Many places of work are being adapted to provide for different ways and styles of working. However, the trend for hot desking and open plan offices, which may have benefits in space utilisation and cost savings, is not always well supported by evidence that it works well for employees. Many employees dislike these practices, valuing their own workspaces, resenting bland and often inhuman hot desking environments, and will resent being forced to work from home when they can see the real driver is cost of office space. Some research has even shown that open plan offices can reduce levels of collaboration, which they were supposedly promoting.³⁰

In providing for flexible working arrangements, it is very important to provide people with choice and not force them to work in specific ways that can undermine the benefits of providing the flexible working arrangements in the first place.