Flexible Work

Designing our Healthier Future Lives

Sarah H. Norgate, Cary L. Cooper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000042696
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Small Business
• Index: Business

Flexible Work: Designing Our Healthier Future Lives examines flexible working through the lens of social science, in particular using psychological perspective to address not only what forms of flexible working there are and how they are evolving but also their prospect in the future of work. Bringing together views from thought-leaders and underpinned by research evidence, this book addresses two of the most fundamental business challenges for large and medium organisations – mental health and productivity – calling for the bridging of science and policy to design flexible working for our future healthier lives.

Growing from these foundations, this book explains the latest landscape in flexible working, looking at employee psychological health and productivity, including showing up for work sick. Perspectives are provided from around the world on leadership, line management, 'over attachment' with technology, commuting, skill-based inequality and control over working time. Readers are offered insights into the relevance of flexible working for a diverse workforce – invisible disabilities, disabilities, older workers and blended families. Throughout, the book offers suggestions for shaping future policy, practice and research.

Each chapter concludes with recommendations, making this essential reading for students, academics, human resource practitioners, policy-influencers, policymakers and professionals interested in flexible work.

Part I

Introduction

1 Designing our healthier future lives: Bridging science and policy for flexible work

The pervasion of ‘cog in the wheel’ workplaces across time

Sarah H. Norgate and Cary L. Cooper

Most of us, at one time or another, in our working lives have experienced disillusionment at the feeling of being a cog in our organizational wheel, enslaved by the pressing number of demands, low control, the sense of being unrecognized and readily disposable. Alongside our own subjective reflections, social scientists have also grappled to increase understanding of the nature of workers’ negative perceptions of their relationship between themselves and their organizations. For instance, ‘All they lack is a chain’ was originally a remark made by Braverman (as cited in Carter et al. 2011) while observing keypunch operators at work at an insurance company in the 1970s. Yet four decades later, similar observations persist in the twenty first century. The example of work conditions in call centres (e.g. Kim & Choo, 2017) and Amazon warehouses (Briken & Taylor, 2018) are already well publicized in the media. In addition, researchers have identified problematic cases like working in the hospitality industry services (Walker, 2017), doing public sector office clerical work (Carter et al., 2011), or working in a large hierarchy per se (Searle, 2019).

As we move into the fourth industrial revolution, the advent of automation and robots push into the foreground the need to redefine relationships between workers and employers. Yet within the context of manufacturing industries, where growth would be expected to be fastest, the greatest uptake of industrial robot workers only hovers around 710 and 658 robots per 10,000 employees in South Korea and Singapore, respectively (Statista, 2019). In the event of any future reports showing a slow use of robots by key adopters, then there seems a case to prioritize the design of jobs and work environments with and for humans in ways that prevent work related stress and add healthy value to our lives. And in the event of the converse scenario, where robot workers turn out to be more diffuse within and across sectors, then the challenge will shift toward the creation of new occupations.

As this brief historical take has shown, ‘cog in the wheel’ workplaces in industrialized societies are readily identified by researchers. The next step is to chart the health, psychological, and economic consequences of stressful workplaces, which in turn will enable us to focus on the purpose of this book, the quest to design our future healthier working lives.

The health, psychological, and economic costs of work-related stress

Whilst some degree of stress in our lives enhances performance (e.g. Kirby et al., 2013), psychological stress has a detrimental impact on health (Blanc-Lapierre et al., 2017). At a day-to-day level, indicators of working in stressful workplaces include those where workers lack a sense of control over work (Liu, McGonagle & Fisher, 2018), demands are high (Maslach & Leiter, 2017), workers are not involved in setting the pace or volume, and do not participate in decision making about when to take a break or how, and where and when their work is undertaken (for review, see Cooper & Quick, 2017). Psychologically, there is agreement that work characteristics (e.g. job control) and worker attributes (e.g. locus of control) both contribute negatively to workers’ mental health and work performance (Bond & Bunce, 2003) with research associating work stressors to poor mental health (cardiovascular disease (Schnall, Dobson & Landsbergid, 2017), cancer (Blanc-Lapierre et al., 2017) and life-style – for instance, alcohol consumption (Kouvonen et al., 2008).

Significantly, burnout is now recognized as an occupational phenomenon arising from chronic workplace stress and characterized by exhaustion, increased mental distance from job and reduced professional efficacy (International Classification Disease (ICD), 2019). Further, the World Health Organization (WHO, 2019) estimate that depression and anxiety cost the global economy US$ 1 trillion in lost productivity. Estimates of the costs pan-Europe uncovered the financial burden estimated between US$221 to$187 million (Hassard, Teoh, Visockaite et al., 2018). Nationally, estimates of mental health problems at work cost the UK economy £34.9 billion (Centre for Mental Health, 2018), with the largest proportion of the business cost attributed to reduced productivity in the form of presenteeism, where people turn up at work but are unwell. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development’s (CIPD, 2018) report showed that more than 1,000 people responded to the survey and 86% of them said they had observed presenteeism over the course of 12 months. On the ground, one in six people experience mental health issues in the workplace and 12% of all sickness absence in the UK is attributed to mental health conditions (Centre for Mental Health, 2018).

Given these twin challenges of health and productivity, the next step is to bridge science and policy to enable scope to design future healthier lives at work.

Bridging science and policy to design healthier future lives at work: A flexible working future

The purpose of the book is to harness research evidence from social science, together with views from thought leaders to inform policy creation around the big challenges in productivity and mental health to impact positively on the future of healthy work, and specifically to make flexible working work. Although legislation (e.g. The Australian Fair Work Act, 2009; the US Telework Enhancement Act, 2010; the UK Flexible Working Regulations, 2014; Netherlands Flexible Working Act, 2016; Finnish Government Working Hours Act, 2019 etc.) has been passed in a number of countries to enable organizations to offer flexible work arrangements (FWAs) – either temporally based (e.g. reduced hours, compressed hours, part-time) or spatial (e.g. remote-working) to enable employees to balance their competing life responsibilities – on the ground, as we shall see, there have been barriers to implementation.

After introducing the key concepts in flexible working, this book’s focus is initially on the twin challenges of psychological health and productivity, before considering what makes flexible working work and the considerations needed for different types of workers. Each chapter closes with a set of recommendations for use in policy, research, or practice. Taking together the relevant evidence, together with insights from thought-leaders, there is scope to drive policy-making forwards. While the Finnish Parliament is already trailblazing change in the workplace and gender equality having introduced the Working Hours Act 2020, which will mean working hours do not need to be tied to a specific place of work, and therefore is expected to smooth the navigation of agreements around work done from home.

Collectively, the contributors to this book have made a number of suggestions to inform future policy, practice, and research. To offer a flavour, highlights are offered below under each respective book section, with more detail found within each chapter.

Book structure

Part I – Introduction

• To implement legislation and grow workplace cultures that are pro-flexible working (in particular, remote/virtual), to enhance mental health, productivity, and economies.
• Make the case for flexible working with evidence of how it is working today, where the barriers are, and the difference it can make to individual and organizational outcomes in your own organizational context.
• To really embed flexible working effectively, take a holistic approach looking at culture, management, job design, workspace design, and people management and HR practices.

Part II – The impact of flexible working on health and productivity

• Organization-wide education to promote pro-flexible working cultures and to reduce the flexibility stigma.
• To reduce presenteeism, encourage time off from work when needed.
• Develop public policy which supports the equalization of caring.

Part III – What makes flexible working work?

• Encourage HR trainers to engage leaders in developing relevant behaviours (e.g. to see that leaders personally make use of flexible work opportunities).
• Build a positive and supportive culture, which will help to mitigate challenges associated with flexible working.
• For future research, consider the concept of productivity in the digital workplace, and how it could be redefined.
• To be ambitious about enabling remote or virtual working to enhance mental and physical health, and in tandem, reduce the need for commuting.
• To take account of commute duration in relevant level policies.
• To unlink the provision of FWA from employee skill level.
• To encourage the commitment of flexible workers to develop greater awareness of their own connectivity behaviours and to identify strategies to reduce work intensification.
• To enable workers to have more control over when they work, get rid of zero-hour contracts.
• To create shorter working weeks as a way of sharing time wealth generated by technological innovation.

Part IV – Flexible working for particular groups of workers

• To identify the barriers to implementing FWAs.
• To enable those with invisible disabilities to benefit from access to a range of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Contributors
• Part I Introduction
• Part II The impact of flexible working on health and productivity
• Part III What makes flexible working work?
• Part IV Flexible working for particular groups of workers
• Index