The future of flexible working. ReWAGE Evidence Paper

This evidence paper focuses on working time and places of work as key aspects of the future of flexible working. It addresses how work organisation, including the time structure, intensity,
and location of work, can be managed and developed in the post pandemic period in ways that meet the needs of both employers and employees across diverse sectors and workplaces.

The need for rethinking the organisation of work both spatially and temporally and seeking new compromises between employer and employee interests has become an urgent issue as
changes in working arrangements induced by lockdowns cannot and will not be fully reversed. In those sectors where homeworking took root during the pandemic, managers and employees
are struggling to find new sustainable models of working. While there is an active debate on the future of flexible working, there is general agreement that remote working – or off-site
working – is here to stay in occupations where it was extensively used in the pandemic. Meanwhile, employees who were located in sectors or occupations that were not able to adopt
homeworking in the pandemic may reasonably be wondering how they can benefit at all from the willingness of some employers to drop resistance to at least one form of flexible working. Indeed there are major risks that the continuing movement towards new and evolving forms of flexible working for a larger share of the labour pool may further widen inequalities in the
experience of work. This widening may be both by social class, as it is mainly those in higher paid professional and managerial jobs (see section 2) that have been able to adopt remote or
hybrid working patterns, and by gender, as it may be women who remain mainly working at home while men return to the office.