14 DAY TRIAL // In a new review, experts at Cochrane Researchers determined that people who can set up their working hours according to their personal preferences tend to fare better than others in terms of health. The paper shows that blood pressure, sleep habits, as well as mental health improve considerably. All that is required for this to turn into a reality is for employees to have a saying in the way their work patterns are set up. In Europe, and especially in the UK, there is currently a growing trend towards designing work schedules that are more flexible, so as to better accommodate employees and increase productivity. This approach is already widespread in Scandinavian nations. In Norway, Finland and Sweden, employees that have families can benefit from flexible working arrangements. The same now holds true in the UK, where recently a piece of legislation has been modified to allow parents with children younger than 16 to ask for flexible work hours as well. Scientists know that these types of policies are beneficial to the employees, but they underline the fact that the exact mechanisms through which this allows people to have a better health status need to be understood in more details.
“Flexible working seems to be more beneficial for health and wellbeing where the individuals control their own work patterns, rather than where employers are in control,” Durham University Wolfson Research Institute expert Dr Clare Bambra says. She was also the lead researcher of the study The investigation – the Cochrane Systematic Review – which looked at ten studies that covered more than 16,600 people. Participants could each select their working hours to a certain extent.
“We need to know more about how the health effects of flexible working are experienced by different types of workers, for instance, comparing women to men, old to young and skilled to unskilled. This is important as some forms of flexible working might only be available to employees with higher status occupations and this may serve to increase existing differences in health between social groups,” says Institute scientist Kerry Joyce, who is also a coauthor of the research.
“These findings certainly give employers and employees something to think about. Being in control of how and when we work is good for us and has clear health benefits. Employees who are able to adapt their work schedules to fit in with their wider lives feel better,” Bambra adds. Details of the work appear in a paper entitled “Flexible working conditions and their effects on employee health and wellbeing,” in Issue 2 of the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2010.