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Leon Carter, National Secretary of the Finance Sector Union examines sustainable workplace flexibility

The capacity of an organisation to find the sweet spot between business requirements and providing flexibility to employees is becoming more critical as the race for skilled labour intensifies and the expectations of Generation X and Y grow.

Employees are increasingly looking for greater flexibility in their employment, to allow them to juggle the demands of work with other interests and needs, including family responsibilities.

Sustainable workplace flexibility must be a two-way street. It must be a give and take arrangement in which the rights and needs of both parties are respected and genuine efforts are made to meet them.

Some employers take for granted the employment relationship, overlooking the implicit imbalance of power between employer and employee. Such employers seek to maintain and reinforce management prerogative over employees and to exercise flexibility for business needs only.

These practices fail to understand the need to underpin flexibility with security of rights and conditions. They inevitably lead to unsustainable practices that create higher levels of turnover and difficulties in attracting staff.

Fundamental to building confidence from all parties in workplace flexibility is ensuring that rights are properly defined and protected in enforceable, collective workplace agreements. Far from imposing restrictions on workplace flexibility, the confidence created by such undertakings provides a springboard for greater flexibilities and a willingness to participate from employees.

The Finance Sector Union's experience of representing finance workers is that they consistently demonstrate their willingness to provide greater flexibility in their work arrangements where employers are prepared to provide security of their rights and conditions.

Our policies towards family friendly provisions, hours of work, workforce diversity, and pay and performance reflect this position.

For Westpac the opportunity exists to take a leadership position on securing flexibility in the workplace. Currently, some of Westpac's flexibility initiatives, such as job sharing, part-time work (e.g. in lending roles) and working from home, are well intentioned policy commitments that do not necessarily connect with the practical and pressured world of their business and employees.

Part of this problem can be overcome through better communication and education of line management about the two-way benefits of flexibility in the workplace. Much more would likely be achieved by committing the initiatives in enforceable agreements that empower both employees and managers to understand and utilise them.

Flexibility can be sustainable and can be a major advantage to employers and their employees where it is genuinely recognised and secured as a two-way process. The FSU can provide a partnership approach with Westpac to achieve this outcome.

Leon Carter is National Secretary of the FSU, the union representing workers in Australia's financial services industry.

*this Talkback is reproduced from Westpac's 2007 Stakeholder Impact Report