Flexible Working Arrangements and Human Capital Development in Organizations: Key Issues

Abstract

Employees involved in the production of both goods and services are notably any organization’s most valuable assets. Organizations are continually striving to develop their employees’ human capital. Human capital development involves those activities focused on advancing the most par excellent workforce, to ensure that the organization and individual employees achieve their work goals and is concerned with activities related to the experience, skills, training, knowledge, education, competences and technical know-how contributed by humans to an organization. Hence, human capital development could be in the form of general training which enables acquisition of general or specific knowledge, competencies and skills for the improvement of a particular job, improving the health conditions of employees, or improving working conditions by using more efficient and innovative working arrangements. Flexible working arrangements (FWAs) are atypical work patterns which take into account the demands of employees, particularly in terms of balancing work and personal life and allowing an employee to choose when and where to work normally outside the traditional typical pattern of arriving at the workplace by 8am and leaving at 4pm daily. It includes the following: flexible working hours, flexi-time, part -time work, overtime, job sharing, teleworking etc. This paper looks at key issues that arise from embracing flexible working patterns as forms of improving work condition for human capital development. The ecological systems theory with its two guiding propositions which state that individuals develop through prolonged interaction with others and that immediate and distant environments influence this development is applied as the theoretical framework. Library research involving analytical discussion of secondary data is adopted as the methodology. It is recommended the issues encountered from imbibing flexible working arrangements in organizations should be considered and tackled to ensure that the benefits of Flexible work arrangements (FWAs) for human capital development are properly harnessed.