Flexible Hours Archives

A new poll from YouGov has found that just 6 percent of employees in the UK are working traditional 9-to-5 hours, while only 14 percent said they would prefer to work those hours, Personnel Today reported on Tuesday:

The survey, commissioned by Blue Rubicon and McDonald’s, asked more than 4,000 adults for their views on working hours and found that most full-time workers preferred to start earlier and leave earlier: 8am to 4pm were the most popular hours for 37% of respondents while 21% chose 7am to 3pm.

Just under four in 10 respondents (42%) were already working according to shift patterns, compressed hours and job shares and many of these people told researchers that they felt more motivated than when in fixed-time work and being able to work flexible hours led them to stay in the job longer.

The desire to work more flexibly in future was expressed by 70% of respondents, with 65% adding it would improve their wellbeing and satisfaction at work. However, a third of people said they didn’t think their employer would allow them to work more flexibly. Just under half (48%) said they would prefer to work a longer day in return for a shorter working week.

Evidence that traditional work schedules are becoming obsolete has been accumulating for a few years now, and not only in the UK: A CareerBuilder survey in the US in 2016, for example, found 59 percent of US workers saying they believed the typical 9-to-5 workday was a thing of the past. Work-life balance is also an increasingly important driver of talent attraction and retention around the world, as our research at Gartner has found.

At People Management, HR experts at the CIPD underscored that the survey’s findings reflect a need for organizations to be more attentive to employees’ needs in managing schedules and designing the workweek:

After a series of strikes last week, the influential German union IG Metall sealed a deal with employers in which its members gained both an increase in pay and the right to a substantially shorter workweek, the Local reported on Tuesday:

Both the union and employers said in overnight statements they had reached a “tolerable compromise” with some “painful elements” covering 900,000 workers in key industrial state Baden-Wuerttemberg, which could be extended to the 3.9 million workers in the sector across the country. The key concession is the right for more senior employees to cut their working week to 28 hours for a limited period of six to 24 months.

The union had pushed for staff to have a right to more flexible working conditions around key life moments such as the birth of a child, looking after a relative or ill health — with the right to return to full-time hours afterwards. But bosses rejected unions’ demand that they continue paying full-time salaries to some of those who choose a limited period of reduced working hours. Meanwhile, employers also gained more flexibility, to increase willing workers’ weeks to 40 hours from the standard 35.

The agreement will also see the metalworkers’ pay increase by 4.3 percent, in addition to some one-off payments, in a compromise from their original demand of a 6 percent raise. Stefan Wolf, head of regional employers’ federation Südwestmetall, said that the compromise was “reasonably balanced” but said the deal would be “difficult to bear” for some firms.

Management • News • Rewards // Europe • Flexibility • Flexible Hours • Germany • IG Metall • Manufacturing • Unions • Work-Life Balance • Workweek

Flexible Hours

Survey: Most UK Workers Aren’t Working 9-to-5, and Most Don’t Want to

German Metalworkers Win Right to 28-Hour Workweek in Union Deal

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