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>• Encourage employees who have caring responsibilities
• Integrate HR into the company instead of separating it from other departments
• Concerning company culture senior management has to over-think its management style and encourage a more intimate culture
Organisational Background, Flexible Working and Culture Problem
New College Durham is a college located in Durham City providing general, further education in 13 different educational areas such as business administration, tourism health and social care. New College Durham was established in 1977 and has recently moved to a single campus with all school joined together in 2005. The catchment area of the college is whole County Durham. New College Durham currently employs an average of 581 staff and has one Principal and Chief Executive and two Directors one of Finance and Corporate Services and one for Quality and Curriculum. Most employees are over 45 and retention rates are quite good. Even though the college’s last inspection report states that principal and senior management provide a strong leadership including clear communication and effective use of staff development days as well as regular meetings, the research detected a few outstanding weaknesses. The discrepancy between theory and the attempts to put the advices to inform staff into praxis is enormous.
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Literature Review
For attracting and retaining a motivated and committed workforce companies and HR managers in particular face a wide range of issues they have to deal with. One of them is having family-friendly policies for balancing working and private life. According to Lewis as well as Sheridan and Convey, (both 2001) especially during the last years the term of flexible working was mostly used to paraphrase aspects of work-life balance trying to move away from seeing family issues and flexible working issues as specific for only women.
Flexible Working describes any working pattern which is adapted to suite the needs of employees (www.directgov.uk). These needs of employees can change due to private circumstances. The most common flexible working types are part-time working such as working less hours or only on certain days per week, flexi-time, thus having the choice when to work. Furthermore there are annualised hours meaning that the working hours are worked out for over one year and compressed hours where employees work an agreed amount of hours over fewer days. Additionally there is a staggered working hours agreement described by different starting, break and finishing times for employees at the same workplace. Job sharing, thus sharing one position with another person and home working are two more possibilities to frame flexible working. In any case any of these arrangements can also be combined to make them more suitable to private circumstances.
Since the UK government encouraged flexible working and family-friendly workplaces, policies and work-life balance issues have had a boom during the last years. As the CIPD survey of 2004 states are flexible working practices widely available in Britain with 80% of participants saying that their employers offer flexible working (www.cipd.co.uk/surveys). During the last decades the female role has changed enormously and therefore also the familiar norm of full-time, male, paid employment first world industries.
statistics over the period from March 1992 to August 2006 have shown that the part time employment increased abou