You called this one right, Vince!

There has been a surge of criticism aimed at the government for shelving plans to extend the 'right to request' flexible working. It's not only come from others campiagning for more flexible working, but also from the Labour party.

The plans to ditch the extension came out at the start of the week, and were reiterated in today's Budget announcement. Labour leader Ed Miliband fiercely denounced it as an attack on working families.

I should be agreeing with him, shouldn't I?

I don't. And here's why.

1) In the process, the government has restated its commitment to extending the right to request to all workers - which we have always argued is the right approach.

The planned extension was just tinkering at the edges anyway, a timid delaying measure intended to avoid more substantial change. Changing eligibility from parents with children under 17 to parents of children under 18 was really going to make very little difference, and it was getting some businesses into a bit of a tizz about bureaucracy.

So why tinker? Just go straight for the real thing!

2) I've always thought the 'right to request' for parents - and not others - was inherently discriminatory. Positive discrimination, perhaps, but still hard to justify. You can end up with situations where people are doing exactly the same job, but only parents (one third of the workforce) are allowed to work flexibly. This can't be right.

3) It's funny how people can become fixated on a process, no matter how odd that process is when you stand back and look at it. I don't really buy into the 'right to request' concept, when it comes down to it.

Apart from being (at the moment) discriminatory, it also invites a reactive, ad hoc, case-by-case approach to implementing flexible working - rather than a proactive and strategic one.

So, rather than carp at ditching a minor adjustment, I think we should them give them 2 cheers for planning to extend the right to all workers.

When good flexible working goes bad ...

With case studies of flexible work, we hear the good news. But I've come across several examples of flexible working programmes that have gone into decline, or reverse. Here are some of the reasons why:

• New Chief Executive, cut from traditional cloth, doesn't like people being out of sight, and sets up a review. Momentum leaves the flexible work programme, as managers all the way down the line don't want to proceed with something that may end up being a waste of time and could reflect badly on them.
• Reorganisation. Faced with pressures on the business, the deck-chair re-arrangers come to the fore. They probably engage one of the big consultancies to draw new organisation charts. Teams successfully working flexibly are broken up and put into departments which work in the old ways. Desk-sharing comes a cropper as the numbers don't work any more, and no one has thought about this as part of the old-fashioned restructuring.
• Downsizing. When flexible working was introduced, so was desk-sharing in the office. 25 desks for 35 people was thought to be quite radical. But now there are only 24 people in the team, and everyone is reverting back to the old 1:1 and sitting at the same desk every day.
• Top team sabotage. After the introduction of smart working, which they have supported, the executive management team decide they don't go for all this togetherness. Our work is confidential. It's different. We're special.
  Meeting rooms are re-colonised as private offices - and it's a downward path from here as staff get the message.

What's the message here? I guess it's that introducing flexible working is a continuing journey. And sometimes the ground is shifting under your feet, and it's not safe to stand - you'll be sliding back or falling down a big hole.

So what's the answer? The organisation culture needs to change so that the principles of smart/flexible work are embedded. Whenever changes are proposed, the impacts on working practices become a central consideration.

And the culture needs to have taken root so that neither the top team or the new broom will find it so easy to sweep out the new and bring in the old.

When the snowman brings the snow ...

Well here in north Cambridgeshire we've had the most snow since 1963 - and I can actually remember 1963, as it happens.

We don't deal with snow well here - friends from Canada, Sweden etc fall around laughing watching our wall-to-wall news coverage of a few centimetres of snow. But some time ago we took the collective if unconscious decision that it wasn't worth it economically to prepare properly for the limited disruption we get every few years.

That's fine - except that in the world of work we tend to have rules that say, whatever the weather you must try to soldier on as normal. Have you had a message from HR or your Chief Executive saying something to the effect of: "We expect staff to make every effort to come in, while taking care in the weather conditions"?

I was half encouraged by seeing a proposed 'bad weather policy' from the TUC which includes the lines:

"If you judge that weather conditions or transport problems make it impossible for you to get to work, you should contact your (insert designated contact head of Department/line manager) as soon as possible to tell them about the problem. Your manager will make a judgement on whether:

- you will be allowed to come in late;

- you will be allowed to work from home; or

- if your job can't be done at home, you will be allowed to stay at home without suffering any loss of pay or annual leave."

While it's good that working from home is seen as potential option, I'm only half encouraged. Because the assumption is that it only applies if it's impossible to get in to work. I'd start by replacing the word 'impossible' with 'inefficient'.

It seems both employers and unions still expect staff to make heroic efforts to get to work. The mindset is "Waste your time, waste our time, risk injury - because if we can't see you, we don't believe you're working"

Only if all else fails does working in the most appropriate place to work effectively come into play.

See TUC policy
Read Flexibility advice

Help! I've been digitally disconnected!

Maybe it's punishment for my comments about Digital Britain and the mediocrity of our telecoms infrastructure (see last post below). Maybe it's just bad luck. But BT have decided to put me on the wrong side of the 'digital divide'.

What have I done wrong? I've moved to a new home, in a nice new area. And one that's supposedly all hooked up to BT - the monopoly provider here. I'm locked into a contract with them from my previous address. I've paid my rental, and the £122 connection fee, and had the set-up all booked. Should have been plain sailing.

Then a text from BT postponing it for a week. Then a voicemail postponing it - indefinitely!

What's the problem?

Well, it seems BT failed to put in enough capacity to provide services to the several thousand homes being built in this area. They say the landowner won't let them on their land to upgrade.

The landowner, however, says BT have cocked it up big time and want to dig up all the roads that have just been laid, landscaped and signed off for handing over to the local council.

While all this finger-pointing goes on, new residents moving in are being told there is no immediate prospect of a phone line or broadband. One resident has been told it will be at least 3 months. When I talk to BT, they stonewall and say there are confidential issues involved... too confidential to tell paying customers when they might get a phone.

Maybe a little irony here?

I am aware that there is perhaps a little irony here. Both in BT's position in promoting home-based working - and my own in doing likewise. This is the other side of the story here, for sure, and it shows that not everything in the flexibility garden is always rosy.

But it's a serious problem for home-based businesses if they have no broadband. And expensive too, to have calls routed to my mobile, and the long sessions in cafes to use the wi-fi. Being a journalist I have the flexibility to get round some of the problems. But if I was in a buying-and-selling kind of business, the impact could be disastrous.

Digital Britain? When there's not enough capacity to give new homes even a phone line, Digital Britain seems to be just a distant dream! And universal service? I don't know what this means any more.

The myopic vision of Digital Britain

Britain's much-hyped blueprint for the digital age, Digital Britain, has been taking a pasting in the papers since the publication of the final report this week. And rightly so.

There's been a lot of angry focus on the proposed tax/levy, or in its own words: "small general supplement ... for a Next Generation Fund" (!!) And on the top-slicing of BBC funding to support other content providers. But for me the worst failure is that the report has absolutely no clue about the importance of digital communications to the world of work.

The whole thing is hopelessly muddled. The problem is that Lord Carter has tried to plot a route through the miasma of fudges that make up our broadband and broadcast landscapes. The report has been too receptive to the special pleading of particular interest groups, and proposes some mildly interventionist measures that will do little to make a difference - except inhibit innovation.

The problem is, we don't do infrastructure well in the UK. Go 5 or 6 miles out of any city into a rural area, and your phone signal is likely to drop, and you'll be unable to get broadband. Having targets that are about having coverage for 98% or even 100% of residences will still leave vast tracts of the country that people work in and travel through without coverage. And it will leave many residences with no competition in terms of provider.

And 2 megabits broadband as a standard for universal service is shameful. The kind of consumer and business applications that will come on stream over the next 10 years will be much more bandwidth-hungry - particularly conferencing technologies and 3-D apps.

But the worst aspect of the report, is that it seems to think that telcos, broadcasters and new media companies are the only sectors that have an interest in this field. It's all about delivering content to largely passive consumers, and these are the players.

All businesses need the best available communications infrastructure, and the standard 2 megabit asymmetric connection just isn't it.

People working remotely, small businesses trying to reach new markets, and home-based businesses (41% of all businesses) will benefit from having much faster networks to communicate, to sell across and to deliver digital products. Digital Britain provides a muddled recipe for delaying what is needed for the new world of work.

Skimming the surface of change

At Flexibility.co.uk we focus on modernising working practices. So it's with a fair amount of frustration we see the lamentable spectacle of overexcited Members of Parliament falling over themselves to champion reform - a very superficial reform of their casual expenses sytem they have exploited until now.

We are witnessing a kind of parody of historical moments like the Self-Denying Ordinances of the Civil War period, or the French Revolution's August 4th when nobles competed to give up (or appear to give up) their feudal rights.

In many ways, the appearance of reform is as bad as having no reform at all. Public cynicism will remain, and taint everyone who is in, or seeks, public office.

What is needed is a 'root and branch' revolution in the way MPs work. We set out a prescription for this in the article MPs - String them up or wire them up?

The whole structure of the way MPs work, where they work, the times they work, and what they do, needs to be thoroughly re-examined. Otherwise we'll just be kidding ourselves that anything has changed.