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The employees get to spend quality time with their children
and keep in touch with their careers.
3.8 Home working / Teleworking
a decrease in the “warm up costs”. Longer workdays may
result in fatigue and as a result a decrease in job performance.
Furthermore there is the challenge of providing cover on the
days when the employee is off.
Home working and teleworking often go together and describe
a situation where a person works from a home base. Rather
than commuting to an office, the person uses information
technology to communicate and conduct their work.
The employer has the benefit of accessing skills from
anywhere or from applicants with a mobility problem. Facility
costs are less, as there is less expenditure on rent, heat, light
etc. Managing home and teleworking poses a new challenge
for performance monitoring. There may be some additional
costs providing the technology to enable teleworking.
Where both parents are working and have compressed hours,
they can be available for their children on a number of days
mid-week.
3.11 Career Breaks
This entails a period of unpaid leave for a specific duration.
This can be for a short period to allow employees to travel
abroad, undertake voluntary work of complete further
education. Sabbaticals can be for longer periods of between 1
and 5 years.
The employees have flexibility in meeting their childcare
needs by being second-line management of their childcare at
home and adapting their working times to blend in with their
children's timetables and being able to cater for various short
notice events such as in-service teacher training.
3.9 Term-time or school hours working
The employer benefits by retaining experienced staff that
gains experience and or new qualifications. The change can
be disruptive, imposing extra work on the remaining staff and
there are costs of training the temporary staff and the staff
member on return.
3.11.1 Flexible Working and the Law
A term-time working policy allows employees to take leave of
absence without pay for 4 to 12 weeks during the summer
months, when school children are on holidays. This leave is in
addition to normal annual leave. Typically, nine months pay is
spread over 12 months.
The challenge for employers is to replace those participating
in term-time working.
3.10 Compressed Hours
This allows full-time employees to work longer days for part of
the week in exchange for shorter days or a day off each week.
For example, an employee may opt to work 9 or 10 hours per
day for 4 days in a week and take the fifth day off. There are
many variants of this, such as taking two days off every two
weeks etc.
Employers can benefit from increased opening hours of
business as a result of longer working weeks and there is also
The Protection of Employees (Part-time Work) Act 2001 and
Fixed-Term Work Act 2003) prohibits less favourable treatment
of a part-time and/or fixed-term employee with regard to
conditions of employment.
Employees on part-time or fixed-term contracts can only be
treated differently if such treatment can be justified on
objective grounds. Objective grounds are considerations other
than the status of the employee and the less favourable
treatment is for the purposes of achieving a legitimate
objective of the employer and such treatment is necessary for
that purpose.
3.12 Setting Up Flexible Working
1. Define the Policy
Consider the various flexible work options that are available
and which of them is most suitable for you. Then write down
the policy so that employees know where they stand.
Employees will see this as fair and be reassured that everyone
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