Flexible Working Evaluation Project

Ageing Better wishes to commission an evaluation of our 'flexible working for older workers' pilot conducted by Timewise.

The evaluation will run alongside the pilot phase and beyond. The evaluation should generate high quality evidence about whether and how strategies can be deployed to enable flexible working, the experiences and outcomes of these changes for older workers, line managers, teams and organisations, and the process of change - both what had to change in terms of systems and behaviours across the organisations, and how this change was implemented / supported.

Within the broad framing of these questions there are two central hypotheses that we would like to test through the pilot and its evaluation. The first is that enhanced flexible working arrangements can be beneficial to individuals, line managers, teams and organisations. The second is that employers and staff can be actively supported / guided to create opportunities for flexible working.

We recognise that this is 'proof of concept' - it is a very small-scale pilot within two large organisations that are already recognising the importance of adapting their practice in order to retain and attract older workers. The project itself will provide high level guidelines and materials that we anticipate will be applicable to other settings and we anticipate that the evaluation will provide evidence of the relationship between activities and context which may help us when we come to exploring the likely transferability to other contexts.