Flexible Working / Work Life Balance

Working is now a lot more versatile than what it used to be; it's not essential to be in an office working with a team of people. In fact a lot has changed for people working in this modern age:

• The times at which they work are more flexible
• The places at which people work are more flexible
• The contracts they work under are more flexible

Using technology such as laptops, wireless Internet, mobile phones, spreadsheets, etc. have allowed many people to be able to achieve more out of their working hours than they used to. It can give more freedom and self-reliance to staff: people now can carry out work on the train home or take an assignment home and complete it in the comfort of their home on their own hours. Video conferencing allows people to communicate instantly, despite being in different places, even in different parts of the world. It breaks a lot of boundaries that a lack of technology created: advanced software allows a lot of people in jobs to carry out tasks in quicker time and o a better quality. This can be said for graphic designers who now use specified graphic packages, or teacher s who can display their work on interactive whiteboards, or accountants who can work out problems with their computers than than paper, pencils and calculators.

However there are demerits for working in such a way: now as less people are employed to  particular area of work, the responsibility of this work is given to a singular person. This amount of work that they need to do can be quite overwhelming meaning they do not complete it, or finish it to a bad standard, which does not help the company. Work now involves less teamwork, and is now more of an individual job, cut off from other workers so there is now less socialising in the work place. Despite being given the leisure to do work in your own time and in various different places, it can be seen that work now has stopped purely being at the workplace and has invaded our own personal time, away from a person's job where they can live their everyday life. It can be said work slowly is taking over our lives. Another disadvantage to some workers, is that as we live our 24/7, 25 lifestyle relying on shops to do the same, we also rely on the workers to do the same, meaning a lot of workers are forced to work in hours they might feel to be their own time, such as birthdays and Christmas.

I find that flexible working is a high benefit to our jobs. It means that we can now get work done in a more efficient and professional manner, not to mention quicker and easier. I think that the future prospects of flexible working will probably include dding more software for people to use whilst at their jobs, to help make more and more people's job and workload easier to manage, just like a lot of people are finding now. Some jobs may address the issues above of being over-worked and not having a healthy balance of work to personal time, so that workers are not being constantly swamped with work.