Flexible and Family-Friendly Working Arrangements in UK-Based SMEs: Business Cases

Interest in researching flexible working arrangements has been growing as such practices have been heralded as the way to reconcile or balance the increased pressures of work and family life. Relatively little attention has been paid to the experiences of flexible working arrangements in small and medium sized enterprises. We report the findings of empirical work on ten small and medium‐sized enterprises and four larger organizations. The reasons for introducing particular flexible working arrangements in SMEs were explored. Our findings show that business case reasons were used when introducing flexible working arrangements in both SMEs and larger organizations, although in different ways.