Flexible Working for Older Workers

New research has been conducted evaluating a programme to explore how over 50s can access the benefits of flexible working.

This has found that the conditions for success appeared to be reliant on three core interconnected elements – job holders, teams and organisations – with the characteristics of each needing to be in place at the outset. The emergent picture was complex and the evaluation findings suggest that there are many factors, from individual wishes through to ensuring teams can dovetail their activities to meet the requirements of the organisation. The learning here also suggests that there are essential elements that can enable the promotion of flexible working – now more than ever on many organisations’ agendas.

For flexible working to be sustainable and for organisations to plan for the future, the findings from the evaluation suggest a range of key lessons for employers.  There were also some key considerations that emerged in light of the pandemic:

• Home working policies need to be reviewed because they may no longer be fit for purpose. The expectation is that many people will work remotely or from home some if not all the time, which needs to be explicit in organisational policies.
• Organisations can take the opportunity to focus on how jobs are designed that recognises that not every job needs to be full-time.
• People did not want to go back to ‘how things were’ and the way forward is to capitalise on the learning and transformation brought about by COVID-19.

Read the report here.