The Flexible Working (Procedural Requirements) Regulations 2002 introduced details of the ways in which firms and staff can adjust their normal working practices to achieve various objectives. This is definitely not a one-sided piece of legislation as companies could glean as much benefit in business terms as the workers do in having increased leisure time or helping with their personal arrangements such as child care. In specific circumstances, mainly involving the requirement to provide care for children and the disabled, the regulations ask the business to ‘seriously consider’ requests from staff for flexible working but for the most part it is firm to decide whether it is suited to their particular business. Research has demonstrated that those small businesses which have introduced flexible working have done so chiefly through the offer of part-time working, the implementation of a flexi-time or job sharing system and the opportunity to Work From Home.

Thorough analysis of a company’s needs is necessary prior to the introduction of flexible working practices. It is critical to make sure that all staff are seen to be treated as equally as possible and are given reasonable access to the choices which are made available to them. For example, while flexi-time may be useful to parents of children at school it has no benefit to those with pre-school. These parents could opt for job sharing, part-time working or the chance to Work From Home to reduce or eradicate childcare costs. In an ideal world there ought to be an option available to match everyone’s circumstances but this might be hard to do. The part-time, job share and flexi-time options are quite broad in their appeal to staff and involve no disruption to the employer as the work and its location will not vary.

However, the opportunity to Work From Home will not be accessible to all staff as not all jobs are suitable to be performed remotely from the firm’s premises. The manufacturing function is obviously a prime example as automation has cut unit costs greatly and to reintroduce manual assembly by homeworkers would be commercial suicide. While this may be an extreme example it focuses attention on which jobs are suitable to be performed at home. As an example of the opposite case, a newly-formed, high-tech Internet Business making full use of the latest technology would probably function with most of its staff doing Online Jobs working from home. The more traditional businesses need to consider carefully which roles can be performed with equal effectiveness from home. The obvious ones would be the non-customer facing kind, mainly telephone-based involving sales or customer service. Depending on the extent of the communication technology to be used at the worker’s home then almost all departments could have some roles which would be suitable. Although these would possibly be mainly clerical, there may be varying roles within the accountancy, personnel or marketing functions which perhaps involve the creation of reports or management information which could be performed equally as well from home.

A British Chamber of Commerce survey revealed that thirty eight per cent of small firms offer the option of flexible working to their people. They do this because it allows them to hang on to high quality people who would otherwise have to stop working due to changes in their domestic circumstances. The company does not turn into an Internet Business as the majority of its operations carry on as they were before. The only difference is that some people now have Online Jobs and are at the end of a telephone line instead of at the end of the corridor.

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