The term ‘flexible working’ encompasses the range of non-9 to 5 hours including: working from home, part-time work, and job-sharing.
From June 2014, any employee with more than 26 weeks continuous employment has been able to make a request for flexible working. Further, The Labour Party have recently said that they intend to make flexible working a right for all employees.

There is more than one theory to origins of the 9 – 5 working day concept. The one I like is reformer, Robert Owen’s, concept of, “Eight hours labour, Eight hours recreation, Eight hours rest”, as the most productive state for the working man. Hence, in theory, we work from 9 – 5, and sleep and play during the other 16 hours of the day. Now as anyone who has clicked the link will see, Mr Owen wrote this back during the 1800s. At this time we were talking mostly about factory and labour intensive work which also relied upon daylight hours. Now, as the job market continues to develop, and we spend more and more of our working lives online, there is a creeping acceptance that remote working is the future one way or another. Yet, there is still a resistance to the idea of employees not being physically present in the office. Continue reading “Flexible Friendly?”