ArticleAugust 10, 2022by included

The flexible working revolution

What are the benefits for employers, candidates, and inclusion?

Flexible working includes arrangements such as flexitime, compressed hours, and job sharing. From an inclusion lens, there are benefits to organisations taking a range of flexible working approaches.

These include opening up your talent pool to a wider, more diverse range of candidates beyond geographical limitations, and to those with caring responsibilities. Flexible working has also shown an increase in employee satisfaction and wellbeing, alongside work-life balance.

Different demographics have shown a positive response to flexible working, which can benefit:

The flexibility that comes with remote work has been beneficial for inclusion of groups such as women, or individuals with disabilities. The future of remote work must be carefully considered to ensure there is equal inclusion of those both in the office or working from home.

Priya Radia in The Key to Inclusion

Manage the risks

An important risk to mitigate with increased levels of flexible working is promotion inequity. It’s crucial to review your promotion process with an inclusion lens to identify and gaps and ensure it meets best practice requirements. Ensure all managers have completed unconscious bias training, and flag to them that there may be a higher risk of proximity bias in a post-pandemic world. Review any competency frameworks or tools that employees are assessed by to remove or update criteria which could be hindered by flexible working.

Be transparent about your flexible working

Included is pleased to share that WorkYourWay, the UK’s leading flexible jobs marketplace has re-launched! WorkYourWay is the only platform that allows candidates to search for roles by 20+ different types of flexible working. WorkYourWay also allows companies to outwardly publicise their approach to flexible working, helps reduce their cost of recruiting and increases the diversity of their workforce. If you’re a company, and interested in using the platform, register your interest.

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