'The Government's announcement today that new parents will be able to share parental leave and that the right to request flexible working will be open to all look great on paper. However, you only have to look at the slew of outraged responses citing the impact on businesses to see that this kind of flexibility is widely misunderstood in the UK, and that a lot of good research showing the link between flexibility and business success and profitability has gone by unnoticed.
'One of the main benefits of the widening of the right to request to all staff is that flexibility stops being the preserve of the working mother. Linking the right to request flexible working to caring responsibilities put flexibility firmly in the domain of women. People, including employers, may then feel that flexible workers have made a choice to be less committed to their work, and their careers suffer as a consequence. It is not a coincidence that, despite anecdotal evidence that managers value the contribution of their flexible workers, those workers are less likely to get the best grades in performance management in many organisations.
'For this reason, employers need to look at the culture that surrounds flexible working if they really want staff to work in a flexible way that suits their business needs. Chief among those changes is to ensure flexible working is seen as a business tool, and that requests to work flexibly are evaluated against how well they support the business and not against the reason for the request. The Top Employer for Working Families report 2012, produced by Working Families and the Institute for Employment Studies, shows that many employers committed to flexible working still make value judgements about the reason for the request and fail to take adequate account of what pattern of working suits their business need.
'The situation is similar with sharing parental leave. Even in organisations that offer two weeks paternity leave on full pay, fathers do not always take up this benefit. Again fears of seeming uncommitted to your work or employer stand it the way.