International EEO news for February 2007

1 March 2007

Teleworking over-rated solution to work-life balance.

Only four percent of British employees are full-time teleworkers and there is no sign that teleworking is the answer to work life balance for the majority of workers, according to a new report published by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD).

For most people, work life balance solutions were more likely to be found through fairly mundane approaches to managing worktime through reduced hours, flexitime or changes in shift patterns, said report author Dr John Philpott.

There was little evidence that new technology was enabling an “entirely new world of work”, he said. Many studies on teleworking artificially inflated the number of telworkers by including tradesmen and other self-employed people who happen to use a computer or phone for part of their work, he said. Britain’s Office for National Statistics put the figure for teleworkers at only four percent.

Dads prefer e-advice on work life balance.

Men looking for advice on parental leave and work life balance prefer to access it via text and email, according to British work life balance charity Working Families. To accommodate their preference, Working Families is launching a text and email-based advice service for fathers which will allow them to write questions and receive answers.

Working Families noticed that men preferred online sources of information. Research showed that only 14 percent of callers were men, yet large numbers of men were downloading material from their website.

With the new service, men will be able to get information about their rights at work in a format that they prefer.

British police walk a fine line on race issues.  

British police are struggling to strike the right balance when it comes to racial diversity. On the one hand, the Gloucestershire Constabulary’s policy of positive discrimination was punished by a order to pay £2,500 compensation to a white man for “injury to feelings”. The claimant was one of 108 potential recruits who were rejected because they were white. The police force admitted that it had been pursuing a policy to increase the diversity of its officers by recruiting women and ethnic minority candidates, in an attempt to meet the Home Office’s diversity targets. Positive discrimination is unlawful in Britain but there have been calls for this to change.

Meanwhile the Scottish police are tackling racist attitudes in potential recruits. The force will soon be using psychometric tests designed to identify racists among applicants. Applicants will have to answer questions about 24 different policing scenarios designed to uncover racist attitudes.