Work Wise Week 2008 and National Work from Home Day
By Sue Mennell (12-05-2008)
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Work Wise Week, which runs from 15th to 21st May, and is promoted by the UK Work Wise campaign, features themed days throughout the week, all of which demonstrate the benefits of smarter working practices.
Smarter working practices include working from home, flexible working, condensed hours, nine-day fortnights, mobile and remote working.
Reducing the need for workers to commute brings a host of benefits. For the organisation these include increased productivity and competitiveness. Work Wise figures show that BT, which has widely implemented working from home, has improved its productivity by 20 per cent.
Other benefits include improved work-life balance and reduced employee stress, reduced carbon emissions and less congestion which frees up the transport infrastructure.
“The benefits of working from home, even occasionally, are now widely accepted,” said Phil Flaxton, chief executive of Work Wise UK, the not-for-profit organisation behind the initiative. “Not only does it reduce the amount of commuting people have to do, enhancing their work-life balance, but many are actually more productive.
“Although many organisations practise the age-old philosophy of ‘presenteeism’, they should open their eyes to the new work ethic spreading across the UK and try out home working: they may well be surprised.”
According to the Office for National Statistics based on figures from the latest TUC Labourforce Survey, around 12 per cent of the UK population works from home – that’s around 3.5 million people, up from 600,000 in 1997.
The highest proportion of home workers are based in the south west (15.7 per cent) and the lowest in the north east (9.3 per cent).
The same figures show the growth in employed people (excluding self-employed) working from home over the past decade to be highest in Northern Ireland (83 per cent), London (55 per cent) and Eastern England (45 per cent).
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