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Plans to increase paid holiday will improve work/life balance, 2006

The TUC’s submission to the government's consultation on increasing the statutory minimum annual leave in the UK says that it will bring huge benefits to employees and employers alike.

Labour Market Review, 2006

This review, published by the Office for National Statistics, shows that people are increasingly choosing to work fewer hours and the level of part time working has grown. As a result the average hours worked by an individual has had a downwards trend since a peak at the end of 1994. It seems to Pasfield Curran that organisations must adapt to this trend by increasing the productivity of their current workforce or accept the on-costs of additional employees.

This view is backed up by Managing Change: Practical ways to reduce long hours and reform working practices, 2005

This is a practical guide to tackling long hours culture, published jointly by DTI,
TUC and CBI. It states that working smarter is key to improving employee satisfaction and productivity. It explores how firms can manage change to improve working patterns and address long hours culture in the workplace. Initiatives include part-time working, flexi-time, job-sharing and annualised hours. The authors claim that these initiatives can maintain or even improve productivity.

Overtime 'increases risk of illness', 2005

Long working hours increase your chances of illness and injury, irrespective of what job you do, an American study reported in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Routinely working at least 12 hours a day posed a 37% extra risk over those working fewer hours, while a 60-hour week was associated with a 23% increased risk, according to its authors.

Employees more aware of flexible working, 2005

More employees are aware of their right to request flexible working hours according to the DTI’s Second Flexible Working Employee Survey. This found that 65% of the UK workforce were aware of their right to request flexible working, compared with 41% in 2003.

Making flexibility work, 2005

The publication of a new CIPD guide, Flexible Working :The Implementation Challenge follows more than 2 years of research work. The research involved hundreds of CIPD members and resulted in the publication of Flexible Working : Impact and Implementation – An Employer Survey. Participants stated that the most popular reasons for introducing flexible working were to increase staff retention and meeting employee needs.

Trades Union Congress - 5 million work a day a week unpaid, says TUC, 2005

Nearly five million employees (4,759,000) worked on average an extra day a week in unpaid overtime in 2005 (7 hours 24 minutes) according to a TUC analysis of official figures published.

Flexible working takes off, 2004

According to the Workplace Employment Relations Survey sponsored by ACAS and the DTI, the incidence of flexible working has significantly increased. Workplaces offering staff the opportunity to work flexibly has almost doubled in the last six years. The authors state that the understanding of responsibilities for balancing work and family life is changing, around two-thirds (65 per cent) of managers believed that it was the responsibility of individual employees, compared to 84 per cent of managers in 1998.

Calling time on working time, 2004

Research carried out by the CIPD shows that of those people that work more than 48 hours per week, a clear majority do so largely as a result of their own choice. Abuse of the opt out clause was found to be limited with more than three quarters of those that had signed it feeling that no pressure had been applied for them to do so. Only a small minority had to sign the opt out at the same time as signing their employment contract, a practice which is roundly discredited.

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