Flexible Work Practices and Firm Characteristics

Introduction Many companies are implementing flexible labor practices because more American households have twice the income, longer working hours, and higher participation rate of labor (Winder, 2009 ). With flexible working practices, responsible workers can perform their duties at the highest level of abilities without following standard work schedules that prevent successful efforts (Glass, 2004). If so, the productivity of workers will be improved by flexible business practices and should correlate positively with wage growth over time.

This literature review attempts to evaluate and analyze past work on flexible work practices and work-life balance, and its impact on employees. We support this document using theories such as Atkinson's Flexible Corporate Model (1984), Handy's Clover Organization Concept (1985), Psychological Contract, Boundary Theory. The origin of flexible working practices can be traced back to the 1970s when European organizations faced problems such as globalization, product market growth, advanced technology, and labor cost reduction (Sarantinos 2007). For this purpose, policy makers recommend using two different approaches ("lowway" and "highway") to manage this situation (EPOC, 1999). "Slow road" includes price competition, reduced revenue, and other benefits for employees.

Atkson has developed a model that enables change (Davenport, 1993). He called it a flexible enterprise model with three different but interrelated features, (i) flexibility of function, (ii) digital flexibility, (iii) financial flexibility. Functional flexibility means how an enterprise assigns (skilled) employees to various roles, activities, and tasks to meet changing market needs and customer needs . Digital flexibility is defined as how businesses adapt to variations in production and market demand using employment agencies (such as human resources) or "non-part-time jobs, short-term and fixed non-employment practices" Can you adjust the number of members? Employment Contracts The flexibility of finance is defined as how firms adjust wages, how to make free savings purchases from a unified and standardized compensation structure, or performance-linked fees to achieve functional and numerical flexibility It refers to introduction.

Practices and policies on workplace flexibility vary from company to company. Two types of companies, one for SMEs and one for manufacturing, are struggling to achieve workplace flexibility. In the manufacturing company, if employees retire and their employees are not receiving vocational training, the work of other employees will be affected, so the entire production process will be suspended or slowed down, ultimately leading to cost of the company It affects. SMEs have controversy on workplace flexibility, and it is said that most large companies provide workplace flexibility over SMEs. For SMEs, teamwork is important, and everyone in the team is present. Another difficulty in achieving workplace flexibility is to ensure that employees are productive at home. In small and medium enterprises, administrators and employees need to gather quietly in order to ensure efficiency.