December 4, 2018
Majority of UK employees want Britain to adopt French out-of-hours email ban
Over a third (35 percent) of UK workers continue to work when then get home from the office, claims research from Insurance2go into whether British workers are struggling to stick to working within their designated office hours. The survey found that a third (35 percent) of continue to answer work email or conduct work tasks on their personal mobile phones when they get home from work, a quarter (25 percent) do the same during their lunch break, and just under a quarter (23 percent) have said they work on their personal handsets on their commute. Meanwhile, across the channel, French employees have been given the legal right to ignore work emails outside of working hours, with companies of over 50 workers providing a charter of good conduct, setting out the hours when staff are not supposed to send or answer emails. When asked if the UK should follow-suit, 65 percent of workers were in favour, implying a strain on British staff and an expectation to be ‘always on’ even in non-working hours.
National Work Life Week (1st – 5th October 2018) starts today with the aim of encouraging companies to think about their employees’ wellbeing and happiness. To mark the week new research asked British workers about the things they most want from their work. The YouGov survey of 2,000 adults, commissioned by the Oxford Open Learning Trust, found that while money is predictably the biggest motivator behind career choice (64 percent), over half of the respondents cited working hours and flexible working as an important factor (55 percent). 
December 13, 2018
Flexible working should not mean employers ask people to work all the time
by Oliver Shaw • Comment, Flexible working, Wellbeing
Talking about the role of technology within the flexible working arena is hardly ground-breaking. For decades, technological advancements have been hailed as pivotal to developments within the employment landscape. But this year, conversation appears to have reached another level. In an article for Open Access Government in June 2018, for instance, Richard Morris, UK CEO of International Workplace Group (IWG), explained the extent to which technology-driven shifts have caused significant social change. And in September, HR headlines homed in on a study by Capita and Citrix, which stressed that an inability to quickly introduce new IT services is restricting organisations’ flexibility proposition, and consequently their competitiveness.
(more…)