How are organisations using flexibility?

The way that employers have used flexibility has changed over time. Partly this has been driven by the changes discussed earlier, as attitudes changed about who could and should benefit from flexible working practices. Other developments, such as the rapid expansion of the role of technology, have opened up new ways of working such as remote and home working. It is

Flexible working and quality o f life 69 important to recognise that the business case for flexibility has evolved over time too, shifting the way that organisations seek advantage from utilising flexible working practices.

The business case has been important in encouraging organisations to adopt flexible working practices, emphasising from the early days the advantages it would bring.⁵⁰ It has formed a central part of UK government efforts to encourage the use of flexible working practices,⁵¹ promoting business benefits supplemented by only light touch regulation.⁵² Over time it has adapted to tackle a number of employment issues, recommending adopting flexible working practices to benefit organisations in areas such as recruitment, retention, wellbeing and health, organisational agility, carbon footprint, diversity, and, most recently, gender equality.

Flexible working practices have long been associated with improved retention and recruitment.⁵⁵ Offering flexibility makes employers a more attractive destination as an employer of choice, and more recent developments have seen flexibility in where work is done extend to recruitment, with initiatives such as the Scottish Government’s “location neutral” policy.⁵⁴ Simply put, people no longer have to be geographically near a workplace to be able to do the job. Flexibility is further extending into recruitment through the adoption of schemes such as Happy to Talk Flexible Working,⁵⁵ where employing organisations specifically offer the possibility of flexibility during the recruitment process and in so doing extend the pool of potential recruits who might otherwise rule themselves out of applying for full-time or fixed-location work. The widening of the potential recruitment pool has always been implicit for organisations who offer flexible working. The drive is to make this more explicit, and in 2018 the UK government convened a Flexible Working Taskforce³⁶ to increase the uptake of flexible working and explore making it mandatory for employers to advertise jobs as being able to be done on a flexible basis. Flexible working is also seen as a retention tool, allowing the reconciliation of life and work over the life course without employees having to leave employment in order to fulfil their outside responsibilities. It also acts a retention tool through a wellbeing lens, with flexibility viewed as a way to positively manage issues of work volume and intensity, as well as facilitating issues such as phased return to work after long sickness absence.

That the business case has periodically refocused is both a strength and a limitation. Many organisations are able to find beneficial uses that are relevant to their own operational situation; but there is no one-size-fits-all business case, which for some organisations can be problematic. This is particularly the case for those moving beyond basic legislative compliance and introducing policies and practices for the first time, who find themselves unable to discover a business case that will unequivocally tell them that introducing flexible working will quantifiably enhance the financial bottom line. A business case for specific activities like recruitment and retention is easier to demonstrate, while wider organisation-wide benefits are harder to show, particularly in areas such as productivity and financialperformance.⁵⁷ Many organisations with decades of experience still find it difficult to locate whole organisation benefits, as they are unable to disentangle the effects of flexible working practices from other activities.⁵⁸ There is a tension between these claims for improved effectiveness and organisational support for expanding flexible working programmes suggesting that “belief” in flexible working practices is not universal within organisations and amongst senior decision makers. This may be a result of the relative lack of HR metrics around flexibility, leaving its advocates relying on qualitative rather than quantitative data when trying to make the argument to senior leaders.

Whilst many organisations have developed flexible working polices, take up in practice has not reached the levels that might be expected. In terms of formal flexible working requests men are underrepresented, for example.⁵⁹ This is a result of the workplace culture issue discussed previously, where flexible working is perceived by employees to be an unrealistic option despite organisational policies existing.⁶⁰ Employee surveys⁶¹ show that these beliefs often originate from the way that line managers support flexible working and employees’ own observations of what the culture of the organisation is around working time and career progression. For example, using flexible working arrangements, especially reduced hours, is negatively perceived for men who feel that they will be identified as less committed to work if they do not adhere to traditional gendered norms of full-time breadwinner, with attendant career penalties.⁶²

However, not all informal flexible working is a response to the difficulty of moving flexible working policy into practice. Organisations in the vanguard increasingly talk about “embedded” flexibility, where flexible working is the norm and employees do not need to seek permission, nor make contractual changes to use it. Organisations variously claim that “flexibility is in our DNA” and “our culture is a flexible one” and other similar statements. The intention is to demonstrate that flexibility is part of the culture, with deeply understood values shared by the workforce and management around the positive benefits of flexible working. Such values may encompass: the ability to work flexibly is open to all employees; permission to work flexibly is assumed; workers have autonomy around working time and place; performance is evaluated on the basis of outputs. Such informal flexibility is the preferred “default” mechanism, although it may remain vulnerable to individual managers who do not share the organisational view and manage their teams in ways that discourage flexible working. The aspiration towards embedded flexibility has largely come as result of what may be called the policy/practice gap: in response both to growing employee demands for flexible working and maintaining a position as an employer of choice, organisations developed comprehensive policy offerings. However, policy utilisation did and does not take place at the levels expected. Practice falls short of policy. The process of embedding flexibility can therefore be viewed as a cultural change activity, where organisations endeavour to weave flexible

Flexible working and quality of life 71 working into the everyday way in which the organisation as a whole works, through the use of the policies provided, as well as other informal mechanisms. Embedded flexibility might be viewed as the “gold standard”, allowing all workers to use flexibility in any way they want to achieve the work-life balance they desire, ultimately delivering a better quality of life. However, achieving embedded flexibility is difficult: significant barriers need to be overcome, in particular around line manager capability, workload, and job design, where practical actions and investment are required to underpin culture change.