Should we have more family-friendly policies?

This paper considers the extent of flexible working practices often called family-friendly working practices and evidence from published literature to address the question of whether we need more of these arrangements. A review is carried out to see whether problems exist for the workforce which such policies could help to resolve, whether employers perceive problems in offering such arrangements and whether such problems could be overcome. The conclusions are that more family-friendly arrangements would be welcomed by employees, that employers do perceive problems in designing flexible working arrangements but that there are also ways of overcoming many of these problems to work towards new relationships of trust and commitment between workers and employers.