Flexible working is here to stay! And it will soon be widely available to as many as 4.5 million extra parents with teenagers as well as little children, after Gordon Brown recently announced his work-life balance agenda.
Responding to The Chancellor’s announcement, Paula Wynne, Co-Founder and Communications Director of Remote Employment, a website dedicated to connecting Employers with Job Seekers who want to work flexibly, remotely or work from home, said: “This move from the government to support flexible working will be welcomed by millions of parents across the country!”
A staggering ‘one in seven’ mothers work flexible hours with 12 percent of them using a ‘Term Time’ working arrangement. Home working franchises and online businesses have helped many Mums to pursue a career and maintain an income with the opportunity to work from home.
However, Dads are worse off. It is estimated that they see their children one month a year less when compared to time spent with their children by their partner. Some sources estimate that UK workers as a whole spend 47 days a year commuting to and from work, a huge majority of this could be men. Flexible working is a possible cure for both these disadvantages.
Currently only parents of children under six years old have the right to request flexible working as well as carers of the disabled. The new agenda extends the right to all those with children up to the age of 16. Mr Brown said: "The right to request flexible working has been working for lots of people over the last few years. It is working for parents of young children and now it can apply to children under 16 where families need time off to help bring them up.”
Flexible working has moved steadily up the agenda since April 2003 and now Gordon Brown aims to improve the country's work-life balance by encouraging employers to provide flexible working across the workforce.
A Government survey in 2005 found that 14 per cent of British employees had requested a change to their working arrangements since the ‘right to request’ was introduced. Twenty-two per cent of parents of children under 6 have requested to work flexibly, and 81 per cent of these requests have been fully or partly accepted.
The survey also showed that requests are significantly more common from women than men, with 36% of women with dependent children under the age of six making a request to work flexibly between 2003 and 2005, compared with only 12 % of men with dependent children under six.
Flexible working is much more than part-time working. It can mean working compressed hours, flexi-time, term-time-working, working remotely or working from home. It includes job-share arrangements which can bring additional benefits for employers as each partner brings a different set of skills to the job.
Flexible working is highly sought after by parents who want to juggle career aspirations with family life. Employees may choose to work flexibly to meet childcare or caring commitments, as well as allowing them to study or pursue other interests outside their work. More often than not the career ladder takes a back seat as Paula experienced: “When my son was little I wanted to take him to school as well as fetch him, and be there for homework and after school activities.”
This meant Paula’s career aspirations often took a nose dive and she accepted jobs that may not have been ideal, but flexible working gave her the pleasure of watching her son having a swimming lesson or playing football after school.
Over the years Paula dug her heels in and only accepted positions where an employer allowed her to work flexibly. When she couldn’t work this way any longer, she simply side-stepped and freelanced or outsourced her office skills and experience to small companies, giving her son the continued support throughout his secondary years of education.
Asked if she regretted her decision, Paula said: “I have never regretted it. Everybody should have the right to choose how they want to work. I was very fortunate to work flexibly and take work home. I could have been up before dawn to get the train to London and home after my son was in bed, but then what’s the point of having a child if you never see them? I could have done a lot more, learnt a lot more and gained more recognition, but at least I never missed my son’s first goal or his first performance in the school play. That is far more valuable to me!”
“It would have been great to work in my dream job, but they were always out of reach with hours and commuting. This is the reason I started Remote Employment, it was difficult to find flexible jobs and maintain my career. We aim to be the best site for connecting employers and job seekers who want flexible work.”
Paula and her business partner Ken Sheridan, a Dad of two teenage sons, want Remote Employment to fill the gap in the job market by offering a connection to employers and job seekers who want to work flexibly, remotely or work from home. Remote Employment is for everyone who has the need to work this way.
Paula believes that the government’s new flexible working agenda, alongside
home based business opportunities, which is being driven by the huge advances in technology, is the way forward for the majority of parents. It provides them with more control over how they do their work, increases job satisfaction and work production, and an all round improvement in work-life balance.
For more information on Remote Employment's modern recruitment solutions, contact Paula Wynne on 0844 800 8355 or
paula@remoteemployment.com.
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