Do Workers Benefit from the Use of Flexible Working Practices?
Introduction
Flexibility is no longer a new concept in the modern-day workplace. The management has been seen to embrace flexibility out of the need to increase flexibility and reduce labour costs. In addition, the government has also endeavoured to entrench the concept into practice in a bid to create an efficient, competitive, and flexible labour market. The 21st century has brought with it rapid changes in the context in which we undertake work, and this has presented companies in the UK and the rest of the world with both opportunities and challenges as regards how to deal with the situation (Wilton, 2013). The conventional ways of working appear to be on their deathbed, as new societal values, rapid globalisation, advanced technologies, and changing demographics all combine to redefine the modern-day landscape of work. As a result, a culture of establishing work-life balance has engulfed the workplace, with more and more employees and increasingly, employers preferring flexible working arrangements. For the employer, such an arrangement leads to reduced operational costs, while the employee gets to spend more time with their families or some alone time (Future of Work Institute, 2012). The goal of this essay is to explore the extent to which the implementation of flexible working practices in the workplace benefits workers.
Flexible working practices refer to the working arrangements adopted by an employer to suit an employee's needs, such as being able to work from home or working on certain days of the week and resting on alternative days (Future of Work Institute, 2012). The latter arrangement is best exemplified by the shorter workweek arrangement which entails a reduction in the number of days one works in a week to say, four, instead of five or six. The position of this essay is that flexible working practices are beneficial to workers, even though some critics argue that they serve the interests of employers more than those of employees.
The growing interest in flexible workplaces over the past two decades has been necessitated by a number of factors. First, globalisation has enabled firms to easily and quickly transfer capital across the globe as financial markets have become de-regularised, thus leading to intense international competition in domestic markets that did not have so many competitors (Dundon and Rollinson, 2011). Also, globalisation has enabled multinational companies to create autonomous, multi-divisional units that seek to exert increased control over their labour costs, not to mention the growing contraction of the manufacturing sector thus compelling firms to alter their working practices. The adoption of the Japanese culture that has long entrenched flexible working practices has also been influential in the popularity of a flexible workforce.
Based on Atkinson's flexible firm model, there are five forms of flexibility that a firm could hope to achieve (Atkinson, 1984). Functional flexibility enables a firm to extend the skills of its workforce to enable them to easily move into various lines of production in the company. Numerical flexibility allows firms to administer labour and at the same time, alter the amount of labour dispensed by workers on short notice. Temporal flexibility describes a practice that enables employers to change working hours in such a manner as to suit troughs and peaks within their production lines. On the other hand, distancing refers to the ability of employers to replace their workforce with other workers subcontracted from agencies. Finally, financial flexibility entails associating a firm's labour costs with variations in sales, revenues, and outputs, with the aim of protecting profits. Collectively, these aspects of flexible work practices translate into a reorganisation of the internal labour markets of a firm as well as their division into distinct aspects, resulting in increased differentiation between the employer's expectations and the worker's experience.
Flexible practices in the workplace deal with both the employee and employer's context of work and offer both challenges and benefits to the two parties involved. While the employee context of flexible working practices may have received a lot of attention, the employer context is equally important given its role in providing enhanced competitiveness and economic benefits to firms (Atkinson, 1984). One way in which flexible work practices are beneficial to employees is that they lead to increased employee productivity. Flexible employees tend to be more productive in comparison with non-flexible workers, not to mention that they have also been shown to possess an ability to leverage novel technologies to communicate and collaborate. Moreover, flexible work practices facilitate in the creation of high-performing virtual teams with an ability to deal with increasingly sophisticated workloads.
Flexible work practices afford employees many positive benefits and features at the economic, social, personal, and professional levels. A key contribution of flexible work is the elimination of unemployment because part-time employees do not require the employer to invest in their training and development needs. Moreover, flexible working practices enable employees to achieve a desirable work-life balance, thereby reducing work-related stress, increasing motivation, reducing burnout, and increasing overall performance and productivity (van Wanrooy et al., 2011). For example, workers under a flexible working arrangement spend more time with their families due to such benefits as the ability to work from home or the shorter work-week employment arrangement.
The high level of agility that flexible working arrangements provide firms with, which is another effect of globalisation, allows workers to demonstrate increased engagement in their work. In this case, employees portray an ability to shape their working styles in such a manner as to suit their circumstances (Atkinson, 1984). Flexible working arrangements allow workers to demonstrate enhanced levels of loyalty and flexibility. This in turn leads to increased employee retention since the change in working habits that a firm achieves by embracing flexible working arrangements minimises the stresses brought about by a shifting lifestyle, thus allowing employees to consider options for leaving the firm (Ogbonnaya, Daniels, and Nielsen, 2017). Besides, functional flexibility bestows on workers high status at the workplace, such as increased access to employment benefits like bonuses. They are also likely to improve their skills through training and development programmes funded by the employer. Consequently, they become multi-skilled. This also enhances the workers' long-term employment security, leading to increased commitment to their work and by extension, increased productivity.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the British government adopted a policy that embraced functional flexibility based on the argument that institutions had become increasingly rigid in the labour market, and this was seen as having played a key role in the economic decline of the country. This paved the way for the adoption of the neo-liberal agenda by the Labour Government and with it, the numerical flexibility concept (Lewis and Roper, 2008). Consequently, the Coalition Government reversed the qualifying period needed to protect workers from unfair dismissal by their employers from two years to one year.
However, an article by Elsayed, de Grip and Fouarge (2016) is opposed to the idea that flexible working practices are beneficial to employees. The authors, using data retrieved from UK Skills Surveys, report that part-time workers possess lower levels of specific and general skills, and also experience limited opportunities for poor career prospects and improvement. Moreover, the earnings per hour of part-time workers is less than that of full-time workers. Furthermore, while functional flexibility has been shown to be of benefit to workers, it acts as a means for employers to improve productivity in the workplace, meaning that they are more concerned with improving their bottom line than improving the well-being of their employees.
Functional flexibility enables firms to benefit from the skills possessed by a limited number of core workers but when it comes to less-skilled activities, employers can cheaply get these from the open market (Lewis and Roper, 2008). Functional flexibility has also been lauded by various scholars who view it as an aid to teamwork. In this case, teamwork is seen to result in a productive workforce seeing as it upgrades the skills of employees, not to mention its role in empowering them. On the other hand, teamwork has also come under criticism on the grounds that it plays no role in functional flexibility. Critics argue that the retention of conventional managerial supervision in functional flexibility takes away the self-managing and autonomous aspects of team-working. Also, functional flexibility is seen as leading to multi-tasking, as opposed to multi-skilling, while the elimination of buffer stock exposes workers to the increased pace of work.
Numerical flexibility also allows workers who do not wish to work on a full-time basis to seize the opportunity and find a balance between work and the various aspects of their lives. Also, numerical flexibility has enabled more firms to create more jobs in recent years when the UK and other global economies were faced with a recession.
Part-time workers are seen by many employers as a buffer stock that can be discharged in the event of a dire economic environment. The firm acknowledges that such workers are more likely to be laid off, and hence there is limited investment in their training (Future of Work Institute, 2012). This reduced the part-time workers' number of outside opportunities, resulting in lower wages compared to permanent workers. Providing employment security, opportunities for promotions, training and development, and involving them in the firm's decision-making are all central to human resource management (HRM) practice. However, flexible working arrangements result in nonstandard workers who do not benefit from most of these privileges while their full-time counterparts benefit from them.
Conclusion
In sum, the concept of flexible working arrangements has taken root in various economies of the world, as firms are forced to grapple with increasing changes in work practices occasioned by globalisation, changing demographics in the workplace, and government policies intent on entrenching flexibility in the workplace. Flexible working practices in their various forms are both beneficial to the employer and employees. Employers benefit from reduced labour costs and reduced employee training and development costs, as well as increased productivity from their core workers owing to improved commitment. On the other hand, flexible work practices reduce employer's incentive to invest in part-time workers out of fear that they could lose them. Consequently, this affects their employability and skill set, not to mention that they earn less benefits and hourly competition relative to permanent workers. However, flexible work practices afford workers a desirable work-life balance meaning that they can spend more time with their families, thus reducing work-related stress and by extension, increasing productivity.
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