Some older posts to consider
11.18.08 It’s Enterprise Week
11.19.08 Female Entrepreneurs Overtake Men In Ambition For Business Growth
11.19.08 Flexible working in a credit crunch?
11.19.08 Contribute to a New Book on Pregnancy
11.20.08 New website for freelancers
Some newer posts to consider
11.21.08 Mums in the News: Training for Design and Management
11.22.08 Mumpreneur Profile: Melissa of Castles and Rainbows
11.22.08 Mums learn to promote their businesses
11.23.08 Review of Special Educational Needs: A Parent’s Guide on Best Bear
Credit crunch: will flexible working opportunities increase or not?
The New York Times Motherlode blog is asking whether the credit crunch spells the demise of family friendly working, with a number of 100 best companies for working mothers
They talk to Sylvia Hewlett, who runs the Center for Work/Life Policy, who sees this moment as “a kind of opportunity and also a big danger,” for the parent-friendly approach that is her own life’s work. The opportunity, she says, is that employers will see flexibility as a way to improve morale and loyalty among employees who remain. A relatively low cost way to make workers happy, if you will.
“In a world where you can not motivate folks with bonuses and enhanced compensation packages, you can offer flexibility and the power of recognition,” she says. “Talent management was never as difficult as it is now. Even in this economy you have to work to keep good people.
“The danger,” she says, “is that leadership is so engaged in putting out fires that it is tempting to see all of those things as just frills and not needed in a crisis.”
Arrangements such as part time working an annualised hours can offer businesses the chance to have staff in when they need, and keep costs down at quiet times of year. Lets hope that big companies see the benefits of flexible working, not just the costs.
This entry was posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 3:52 pm and is filed under flexible work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
One Response to “Credit crunch: will flexible working opportunities increase or not?”
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I think we are seeing a growth in family friendly working, as companies see the opportunity of offering part time working contracts as a way of managing business downturns.
With workers on part time hours they can staff up to meet the peaks of business activity and scale down to manage lulls. Many of the UK’s job boards are reporting that the keywords ‘part time’ are becoming a top two monthly search term. Indeed we’ve recently seen a growth of specialist part time job boards only, such as http://www.myparttimejob.co.uk which are helping employers engage with part time workers