Flexible Working

New technology has allowed us to change the way we work, most notably of these being the internet. We work shorter weeks and have longer holidays than ever before, but none of this would be possible if it wasn't for massive and revolutionary changes in the world of work. In this section I will be discussing the glorious vistas of working from home, the new possibilities of flexible working hours, the opportunities of job sharing, and the prospects of career breaks.

The biggest impact that the internet has had on the world of work is that it enables us to work from home there are several benefits and negative points to this which I will list.

First of all what is perhaps the greatest plus for working at home is the ease for employees. If you have to face another gruelling day of toil and strife, you may as well do so in the comfort of your own home. Workers will be less stressed and therefore efficiency will increase, this is also in addition to the fact that commuting time (often very stressful) will be completely eliminated, meaning that people can not only sleep in longer, but end their working day at an earlier hour and have more free time.

Anyone unfortunate to suffer from antisocial work colleagues won't be so exasperated if they don't have to see them face to face. The very same principle of not interacting with other humans will provide more work opportunities for autistic people.

There is, however, a couple of bad points to working at home, the main one being the most obvious. If there is a problem with the network the entire company will suffer an incredible amount, and even if just one person's modem doesn't function properly they won't be able to contribute anything until they sort the problem out, which, with the unhelpfulness and sheer ineptitude of internet companies (found out from bitter experience) this can take quite some time.

Procrastination is a major issue and a personal bane. People will be far more likely to take half an hour off to update their facebook or something similar at home than under the stern inescapable watch of a boss or supervisor (or teacher) people can sometimes spend the entire day doing work that should only take a couple of hours.

People need others to function if workers are confined to their own houses, they might become starved of human interaction, this rings especially true for workaholics.

As you can see, there are a fair few notable arguments both for and against working from home and although the cons outnumber the pros, working from home is, on the whole, more beneficial than not.

Because of the technology revolution, work has also become more flexible as well as easy. People who are self employed (about 12% of the workforce) are freelance which means they can work when and as much as they like. However, this is not the only form of flexible working. Other forms include annualised hours, where the employee has to work a certain amount of hours in a year but the amount they have to do in a week varies.

Perhaps the most common type of flexible working is overtime, where someone stays (usually with little or no notice) an hour or so extra to do work, this form of spontaneous labour is most common with people who don't have any family commitments.

It way seem like all sorts of flexible working are completely beneficial to all those who take part in them, but this is not true as many flexible hour schemes are very unfair. For example, zero-hour contracts. With these employees must always be available for work though none is guaranteed (this goes for pay as well). One particular retailer made a "flexibility clause" which meant that work times could be changed to suit the company, while another manipulated the situation so that they had the right to ask for extra work hours. With these options you wouldn't know when you were going to get work and when you did the hours would often be very long and without any benefits.

Something that is becoming increasingly popular is job sharing, a system with which two (or more) people can do a single job between them, splitting pay, holidays and perks between them in accordance to how many hours the each work every week. There are 3 types of job sharing which are as follows

Shared responsibility: there is no division of duties and the partners are interchangeable. This type of sharing is suited to jobs where work flows continuously but requires the partners to be well matched in competence and that there is a high level of both co-ordination and communication between them.

Divided responsibility: used when work can be split into separate projects or client groups. Each person takes on their own work load and has very little to do with anyone else. This is good when participants don't know each other very well (or alternatively, hate each others guts).

Unrelated responsibility: the partners work in the same department but have (as the name suggests) completely unrelated responsibilities.

The last type of flexible working is career breaks. Originally, the only type of career break was maternity leave, but recently it has expanded, with around 90000 professionals taking one each year.