EUROPEAN REVIEW

ISSUE 35 - Page 4

A LARGE SURVEY CARRIED OUT by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions has found that some form of flexible working is offered in 48% of companies with more than 10 employees. Interviews were conducted in more than 16,000 workplaces and the findings show a wide variation both between EU Member States and in the types of flexi-time arrangements. Latvia, Sweden, Finland and the UK are the countries where flexible working is most common whereas Cyprus, Portugal, Greece and Hungary have the lowest proportion of companies prepared to support it.
The survey identifies four main types of flexible working time: schemes which allow the worker to start earlier or later on a specific day as long as the finish time is adjusted accordingly on the same day, schemes where credit or debit hours can be built up over a limited period, often a month, as long as no whole days are taken in lieu, a more advanced version in which whole days can be taken and firms which set a much longer period, sometimes a year, for the ‘hours account’ to be settled including several days as  compensation for credit.

When a flexi-time scheme is introduced both managers and workers tend to say that job satisfaction increases and both groups agree that it is easier to fit the workload to hours in such a system. Sometimes, however, reduction in paid overtime hours is a motivation for management which may not be shared by the workforce. The bigger the company the more likely it is to offer flexible hours though this advantage is not that great: 47% of firms with between 10 and 49 employees have some kind of scheme compared to 62% of larger establishments. Although flexitime is often associated with the public sector, the survey shows up only a small lead (4%) in the proportion of establishments offering it compared to private companies. This varies between Member States with the private sector in France, Denmark, Greece, and Hungary more likely to play ball. In general firms with regular variations in workload were most likely too use flexitime as were foreign-owned companies.