A better way to work

In spring 2003, 17.7% of men and 26.7% of women were employed with flexible working arrangements in the United Kingdom, (Office for National Statistics 2003).

In 2003 the UK Government introduced legislation that gave parents of children under 6 or the parents of disabled children under 18, the right in law to request a flexible working arrangement from their employer. A survey in 2005 by the National Office of Statistics showed that 71% of female workers and 60% of male workers were aware of the rights created under the 2003 legislation. Between 2003 and 2005 more than 14% of all workers had requested a change to flexible working. From 6 April 2007 the law will extend the right to request flexible working to careers of adults.

For employers, flexible working can aid the recruitment and retention of staff. It can also help provide staff cover outside normal working hours and reduce the need for overtime. Additionally flexible working can also improve the provision of equal opportunities to staff unable to work standard hours.

Flexible working can give employees greater freedom to organize their working lives to suit personal needs. In addition, travelling can be cheaper and easier if it is out of peak time.

MINX Flexible Working

We support flexible working for a number of reasons:

• Improves the morale of our people and improves the quality of life for their families by providing them with greater control over travelling and work-life balance
• Removes excessive hours working culture driven by overtime, hence our people are less at risk from stress and accidents through fatigue
• Allows us to fully leverage and demonstrate to our clients that we ‘walk the talk’ by using collaborative and mobile worker technologies
• Reduces our overall carbon footprint by doing away with travel where not necessary. Where travel is required it can in many cases take place outside of peak hours which is a much nicer time to take a train!

Changing to flexible working means taking a very different approach to the way we measure productivity. Coming into the office at 9am and leaving at 5pm is a pretty poor way to control the amount of work we do. At MINX we look at the amount of time we can spend productively across a month and break it out into billable and non-billable activities. Our time management systems are web based hence people can log on and update their task information throughout the day and their managers can keep on top of work assignments, progress and ensure our people are not working excessive hours or are under-utilized.

It’s a much more effective way to get the most out of your work force and more closely reflects the way people want to work!