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Badly organised flexible working could hit businesses bottom line

Poorly planned flexible working policies are in danger of jeopardising companies' bottom line if they are not properly thought through.

Despite new research revealing that flexible working is a popular practice almost half (46%) of businesses surveyed revealed they had not adopted an effective time and attendance system to monitor their employees working day.

Flexible working policies are so popular that over a third of companies offered five or more flexible working policies to employees. But the research revealed that just 2% of employers who use such polices have sufficient software in place which integrates with the payroll department and other business functions and monitors employees’ attendance.

Almost half, (46%) of respondents said they have no formal monitoring system in place at all, while 18% depend on paper based systems to monitor attendance, according to research by the time and attendance company Amano.

Amano UK managing director, Chris O’ Riordon, told Payroll World that monitoring flexible working isn’t just beneficial to the employer but the employee will feel more in control too. ‘It supports an empowering mechanism for the employee, if someone wants to work from 5.00am and then take his or her child to a piano exam, for example, and then work again until 2.00am they can and it’s all accounted for . It gives employees arsenal,’ he said.’

However, despite not having fully developed formal systems to monitor flexible working practices, UK businesses have embraced the idea of flexible and mobile working with more fervour than its European neighbours.

Almost half of UK businesses have seen an increase in workforce mobility over the last five years, compared with just 31% in France and 27% in Germany, research by software company Citrix found when it surveyed 3000 public and private sector organisations.

01/07/2010