The Different Forms of Flexibility

The term flexible working means Flexible working' is a phrase that describes any working pattern adapted to suit workers needs. Flexibility is the The ability of an organisation to adapt the size, composition, responsiveness and cost of the people inputs required to achieve organisational objectives (Pilbeam and Corbridge, 2010). There are different forms of flexibility which are numerical flexibility, functional flexibility, financial flexibility, locational flexibility and temporal flexibility. Numerical flexibility is where employers can change the size of their workforce as their labour requirements change. Functional flexibility is the ability of an organization to move employees to other duties or responsibilities within the company. Locational flexibility is that employees can work from home instead of coming to the office. Types of temporal flexibility are Part time working, home working, job Sharing, term time working, annual Hours Zero hours, 9 day fortnight/compressed hours. The table below shows that “Between 2006 and 2011 there was a general increase across all modes of flexible working (Table 2). Teleworking (TN0910050S) saw the greatest rise, being offered by 14% of employers in 2006 and 59% in 2011. This echoes trends in flexible working observed in the UK as well as the rest of Europe (EU1101011D). The popularity of teleworking has been boosted by improvements in information communication technologies (ICT) and its attractiveness to the smallest companies (69% offer this form of flexible working)”.(ewco 2011)
Source: CBI/Harvey Nash (2011)
“The Third Work-Life Balance Employer Survey found that the vast majority (92 per cent) of employers would consider a request to change a working pattern from any employee despite legislation only requiring employers to do so from some employees. Amongst those employers where a request had been made in the previous 12 months, just nine per cent said they had turned down any requests. The survey reported that