Management skills
Introducing Flexible working
UK employers operate in an increasingly competitive environment in which flexibility is key to meeting customer demands. At the same time, employees want to be in a position to balance work with their other interests. Research shows that employees are more productive if they are able to balance their work and personal lives effectively, thereby facilitating enhanced delivery of organisational objectives.
Developing a work-life strategy for your organisation is about creating a win-win. This course will show how flexible working methods can deliver real benefits for the people in your organisation and positively impact the bottom line. Adopting a partnership approach, with responsibility on all sides, is the best way to make it work. This programme has been developed to help you manage this partnership.
Introduction and course objectives
- Did you know?
- Facts and figures
- Life cycle and work-life balance
- What we mean by work-life balance
- Individual and organisational work-life balance
- Why introduce flexibility
- Sharing the responsibility
- Key drivers for change
- The benefits of flexible working
- Tracking the success of those that have made it work
- Based on research we examine best practice case studies and examples from large, medium and small organisations across various sectors
- Real stories from real people who talk about the personal and organisational benefits of finding a balance
- Video
- People from a variety of organisations discuss the barriers and opportunities to adopting new ways of working. The video stimulates debate by dramatising some central work-life dilemmas.
- The legal dimension
- Government commitment to work-life balance
- The Work and Parents taskforce
- Working Time Regulation
- Maternity leave
- Paternity leave
- Time off for dependants
- Parental leave
- Part-time working (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment)
- Fixed term employees (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment)
- Disability Discrimination Act 1995
- Types of flexible working
- Home working
- Teleworking
- Overtime
- Flexitime
- Term-time working
- Compressed working week
- Voluntary reduced work time (V-time)
- Job sharing
- Annualised hours
- Employment/career breaks
- Sabbaticals
- How to introduce flexibility
- Building your business case
- Beyond lip service
- Elements of a work-life initiative
- Ways to sell work-life benefits to senior managers
- Your checklist for getting it right
- Strategies for effective change
- Framework for action
- A strategy for introducing a work-life policy
- Stage 1 – Why are we doing this?
- Stage 2 – Where are we now?
- Stage 3 – What are our aims and benchmarks?
- Stage 4 – Who owns this and where is the commitment?
- Stage 5 – What can we put into practice?
- Stage 6 – When and how are we going to do this?
- Stage 7 – How will we monitor and review?
- Conclusion
- Course review/discussion
- Close