The debate around flexible working is nothing new but still deliberation continues. At a roundtable event Growing Business attended last week Caroline Waters from BT argued that the ‘right to request’ should be extended to all employees and should not be limited to just parents and carers.

The right to request flexible working was introduced in 2003 and the regulation has been tweaked several times since. As the legislation now stands, some employees – parents of children under 6 (or 18 if disabled) and carers of certain adults – have a legal right to request flexible working, and their employers have a duty to consider their requests seriously. 

But what Waters says is that all employees should be able to feel they can ask their employer for a more flexible working model, whether that means working from home, working different hours and so on. Of course there are some industries or positions where such requests will not be able to be accommodated, various roles in manufacturing for example. But in a large number of cases, where the staff member is located in an office for example, there is little reason why they could not work at least some of the time from home. It is time that flexible working was seen as an option for all and not a privilege for some, Waters added.

A lack of trust is commonly cited as one of the biggest barriers to implementation of flexible working regimes. But as Waters points out, there is a myth that if employees are where you can see them then that means they are being productive.

But Dr John Grundy, director of Knowledge Ability, suggested the real barrier to flexible working may be coming from middle management. “The manager of remote workers has to be better than other managers,” he said. One of the participants really hit the nail on the head when he claimed the real reason middle managers are resisting the cultural change to flexible working is because they are scared of losing status, control or even their job.

Philip Flaxton, chief executive of Work Wise UK pointed out that perhaps managers were worried they didn’t possess the skills to be able to deal with a distributed workforce. “Interpersonal skills are more important in a remote working environment than in geographically co-located teams,” he claimed.

Flexible working is an inevitability. It is estimated that 95% of small and medium sized enterprises already allow a degree of flexible working within their organisation even if it is not recognised as such. It is time that managers stop asking themselves ‘how long will it be before I am not needed anymore’ and instead ask themselves what skills they could improve or better harness in order to make sure that they can manage a geographically distributed workforce.