This month Evoke Telecom are pleased to welcome back Natalie Thomson as our guest blogger. Natalie specialises in employment law and works at Halborns in Nottingham.
As a working mother herself, Natalie is more than familiar with the challenges of balancing both working commitments alongside the pressures and responsibilities of family life.
Recent changes in legislation, massive strides forward in technology and fast changes views around work being ‘ a thing that you do as opposed to a place that you go’ is changing the face of the workplace in the UK.
Below are Natalie’s thoughts on home working
Do we really need to be office based?
Traditionally, employees worked 9-5 in the office five days a week. Now with the provisions of flexible working and a more modern IT and communications world we find ourselves liaising with other people in all areas of business who may be sitting at home on the sofa in their onesie.
In our experience, employers used to be quite reluctant to agree to part time working, flexible working or working from home because they thought that it meant that employees would not do as much work and that the element of control would be lost.
Now employees who work at home can be monitored in almost the same way as employees in the office. Providing there is a monitoring of communications policy, then employers can monitor their internet usage, productivity, email input and output and even phone logs. Meetings can take place via FaceTime or Skype and this in our opinion makes working more effective.
Many parents are restricted by the need to drop their children off at school and undertake other various childcare duties. There are other employees who may have dependants that they need to care for. Permitting employees to work flexibly gives them a sense of reward and often increases productivity.
Many employees work in the evenings from remote access through access to the Company server. If in reward for doing this they are able to take their children to school a few times a week or undertake some other activity that is important to them they are likely to appreciate the Company that they work for.
The society that we live in today is one that demonstrates a high percentage of both parents working, a lot of females in senior roles and many men that want a more flexible working approach. This is all supported by the new Shared Parental provisions that came into effect for babies whose expected week of confinement was on or after 5th April 2015. These new provisions allow parents to share 50 weeks of the leave rather than the father just having his 2 weeks paternity leave. This is a huge step forward in parental rights and it remains to be seen how many fathers take up the opportunity of addition leave when their wife or partner returns to work.
Since April 2015 unpaid parental leave has applied to parents of children up to age 18 rather than age 5.
The modern way of working seems to be catching up with the modern world.
If you would like any more advice or guidance on working from home or the new Shared Parental leave provisions, please get in touch with Natalie Thomson at [email protected]
Did you know that:
It is now possible to work from home as an extension of your company’s systems and infrastructure with complete flexibility?
For example you can have a work telephone at home that is connected directly back into your main office switchboard.
Or perhaps you might wish to have your business mobile telephone directly paired / twinned to your deskphone so that you never miss a call?
You can even have a cloud solution that enables you to use your home phone as a separate business number and system, paid for by your employer and totally controllable by yourself via your own personal internet portal.
The new solutions available are almost endless – why not contact the friendly team at Evoke Telecom to find out more on 01509 278278
