Flexible working Nowadays, many people are trying to balance their working life with a busy home life. Our hours extend beyond nine-five and with so much traffic on the road, the daily commute is also taking longer – in the UK, the average worker spends two hours a day or more travelling to and from work. As a result, modern life is more stressful than ever. However, technology is changing the way we work and we do more and more work from home or while we travel; for example, we can reply to emails on our phone on the train, or read a report at home on our tablet in the evening. Technology makes working more flexible and so we can work at different time of day, or maybe we don’t have to go to the office at all because we can work from home. More and more business are offering flexible working hours to staff. Some companies have a flexitime system so an employee can work, for example, anytime between 8 in the morning and 8 in the evening. And on certain days, they can work from home. Obviously, flexitime works well with some types of business such as financial services or technology-based industries which are screen-based. For companies which need staff taking face-to-face with customers, it doesn’t work so well. Flexible working can also include job-sharing when two people divide one job between them so they can both be at home more often. For flexible working, you need a quiet place at home. You also need a good Internet connection and a phone. Some employees discover that flexible working isn’t right for them because they can’t concentrate at home or separate their work responsibilities from their home life. But for others, flexible working is the perfect answer.