The Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH) has welcomed new regulations that support flexible working, saying it leads to “positive mental health and physical health.”
The world’s largest professional health and safety body says the benefits of flexible work patterns also include “healthier and more sustainable lives” for workers and “lower absenteeism or presenteeism” for companies.
IOSH spoke out after the Employment Relations (Flexible Working) Act 2023 received Royal Assent last month. The Act will enable workers to request flexible working patterns from day one of employment and will require employers to consider and discuss these requests within two months of them being made – down from three. Workers can also now log up to two requests per year.
It follows a consultation held by the UK Government’s Department for Business and Trade last year, which IOSH responded to.
Flexible working can boost inclusivity and productivity
IOSH believes that flexible work patterns should be made available to all employees in all industries from the first day they start a job.
They say this will help to boost inclusivity in the workforce and enable it to grow. They also believe it will improve staff morale and retention rates, as well as boosting productivity.
In IOSH’s consultation response, they said employers should have to provide “clear business reasons” for turning down flexible working requests and that reasonable alternatives should be explored when this happens.
IOSH also wants the legislative changes to incentivise employers to offer more than the minimum legal standard when it comes to flexible working.
The body does, however, acknowledge that there can never be a “one-size-fits-all” approach to implementing flexible work patterns. They say that organisations need to accommodate individual needs where possible and should be aware of, recognise the need for and benefits of, family and worker-friendly workplaces.
Flexible working associated with positive mental and physical health
IOSH’s Head of Policy, Ruth Wilkinson, said that, in order to develop a “flexible organisational culture” firms need to be responsible and adopt an approach “that values and supports people.”
She commented: “Enabling all workers to benefit from flexible working arrangements, where possible and appropriate, shouldn’t remain a pipe dream.”
Speaking of the wide-reaching benefits of flexible working arrangements, she added:
“Improvements in work-life balance, in the quality of working conditions, and increasing levels of independence and flexibility, facilitate workers to lead healthier and more sustainable lives. It can also lead to them experiencing greater job satisfaction and productivity, positive mental health and physical health and lower absenteeism or presenteeism.”
Ms Wilkinson also explained: “Aligning flexibility and protection practices need to be extended to different forms of atypical working time, to cover segments of the workforce working at night, on weekends, on shift work, or in other forms of on-call work including the platform economy and on-demand work.”
Training to boost inclusivity, health and welfare
First Response Training is a leading national training provider. They deliver a wide range of training in health, safety and welfare topics for all industry sectors.
Their portfolio includes training in topics such as Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, Understanding Mental Health, Managing Stress at Work, Managing Health and Safety and many more.
A trainer from FRT says:
“Flexible working patterns and other arrangements that help workers to achieve a better work-life balance can benefit businesses by boosting staff recruitment, retention, satisfaction and productivity. They can also significantly reduce working days lost due to staff absences or the phenomenon of ‘presenteeism’ where staff are physically present at work but not performing at their best due to life pressures or other issues.
“In this way, flexible working can really go hand-in-hand with managing health, safety and welfare at work.
“At FRT we have adopted a number of flexible working arrangements and offer flexible full and part-time contracts for trainers with a variety of hours available. We support employees to fulfil caring duties and other life demands while providing high quality training for our clients.”
For more information on the training that FRT can provide, please call them today on freephone 0800 310 2300 or send an e-mail to info@firstresponsetraining.com.