Article by Charles Handy on the importance and benefits of parceling out employee work time to accommodate the different genders and lifestyles of employees. Handy begins the article describing the traditional way that men and women worked in British society and how it is slowly changing today, with businesses introducing longer operating hours and factories and companies working around the clock. As a result of such trends, he notes, people are beginning to re-chunk their time, with some choosing to work harder and longer while young in order to have more leisure time later, and others selling and contracting their work to organizations and customers as part-timers or independents. Handy proceeds to observe that many full-time workers would, at some point, prefer part-time work at some stage in their careers, which indicates that many people would like to have more control over their time. Because of the differing work cycles and responsibilities that men and women maintain throughout their lives, chunking core jobs may unintentionally exclude the most qualified and talented people, since half of all graduates are now women. Handy therefore advocates making core jobs more time-flexible through permitting workers to spend part of the day or week working from home, concentrating on results without regard to where or win work was completed, and providing an easy interchange between core jobs and portfolio work based on demand. He then highlights the popularity of portfolio work in recent years, adding that the majority of people are, perhaps unwittingly, leading portfolio lives, as the full-time worker is now a minority. Handy goes on to share how he rearranged his own life as a portfolio worker but cautions about the drawbacks of the changing workforce, highlighting the dilemma of how workers will be trained in the future, and how a predominantly outsider workforce necessitates a more competitive Britain for future generations.
Handy, Charles B Hewitt, Patricia Tokyo (Japan) New York London (England) Contracts Contracting out Labor Labor contract Labor mobility Labor movement Organization theory Organizational change Organizational effectiveness Employees - Training of Employees Employment (Economic theory) Britain and its people Competition Institute of Directors Bank holiday
Source
Article by Charles Handy on the importance and benefits of parceling out employee work time to accommodate the different genders and lifestyles of employees, 1993; Charles Handy Papers; Box 20, Folder 7; 2 pages
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