| Flexible working hours: what's available?
Get a broad view of what kinds of flexible working options are available. Could it be time for a change? Working hours can be arranged in a number of ways to suit you and your employer. One of the most familiar arrangements is part-time working. At present, about five million women in the UK (roughly half of whom have dependent children) have taken up this option. Part-time is defined as anything less than the regular number of hours worked in a week. It might be a good solution to the problem of managing work and home, but be careful that you are not looked on as a less-than-regular employee just because you are working fewer hours. Another point to remember is that part-time work is often badly paid - female part-time employees earn 60 pence for every hour worked by full-time male employees. However, new regulations in place since July 2000 should improve the lot of part-time workers. The idea of flexitime was developed in Germany and spread to the UK in the early 1970s. You agree to work at certain hours, known as core time (for example, 10am-12pm and 2pm-4pm). Outside of these hours, you can arrange your starting and finishing times and your lunch hour as you please. You agree to work between a minimum and maximum number of hours each month. This means, if you work up to the maximum hours, you can carry them over as time off the following month; but, if you only work the minimum number of hours, you owe your employer for the next month. Another way to arrange working hours is to agree with your employer that you will work for a set number of hours over a year. This is known as the annual hours system. For example, a 37.5-hour week works out at 1,702.5 hours over the year (taking into account 5 weeks' paid holiday and 1.6 weeks of bank holidays). You agree to work this number of hours altogether, but it may be that, in some weeks, you will work for 60 hours and some weeks only for 20. Working annual hours can be a useful way of arranging work that has seasonal variations. Job-sharing schemes were pioneered by many local authorities in early 1980s. All the responsibilities of one job are split between two people; income, including benefits such as holiday pay and pension rights, is also divided between the two. Some parents find term-time working helps them solve the problem of child-care during school holidays. Your employer agrees to give you unpaid leave during school holidays and, if you wish, to spread your payments out over the year to make sure you have a regular income. School-hours working can also be useful for parents because it leaves them free to drop the children off in the morning and pick them up in the afternoon. If you would rather work fewer days but don't want to lose out on pay, compressed hours might suit you - you work more hours in the day in exchange for time off in the week. But, if pay is not such a big issue, then you might want to think about an option called V-time developed in the United States and now available in the UK. V-time (voluntary reduction in hours) means you and your employer agree that you will spend less time at work for a certain period (often a year). Working from home some or all of the time is an ideal flexible option for some people - according to BT figures 2 million people currently work in this way. Working from home cuts out some or all of the commute to work. The national average of time spent travelling to and from work currently stands at an astonishing 7.5 weeks a year. But if you work from home you have to be sure that you do not end up actually working more hours than you would in the workplace. A relatively recent variation on home-working is teleworking. You work from home and are dependent on a phone and a computer to do your job. This is a new and rapidly expanding method of working, with as many as a quarter of a million home-based teleworkers in 1998. Find out more about flexible working. Further information
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