Project proposal

Project Background:

Flexible working opportunities have become an essential fact for the

modern families where both the partners are working. It is not only

beneficial to the employees but it is beneficial to the employers and the

family members of the employees. Most of the modern organizations knew

the importance of flexible working and ready to provide flexible working

hours to their employees based on certain conditions. Flexible working

hours become a common fact by the introduction of legislation law on

flexible work by the United Kingdom government on April 2003. The law

aim to provide the employees to keep work-life balance and have enough

time to spend with their beloved ones. It is proved that there is relation

between the performance of the employees and their family life. The

achievements and happiness in the personal or career life of the

employees are exclusive to each other. The advantages gained by the

employees by flexible hours are better health and less stress. It also plays

a major role in the quality of life of employees and control in their

activities. It also enables the employee to manage the situations both at

work place and the home. It helps the employees to manage their more

effectively and gives the right to choose their appropriate schedule for the

work. The flexible working pattern helps the employer too. By allowing the

flexible working, the employer can have more committed employees and

can decrease number of absentees.

It helps the employer to reduce the employee turnover and can gain the

status of employee friendly organization. The flexible working hours helps

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the employees to work more when they are much interested to do and it

helps the employer to get good results. The flexibility in the work hours

help the employer to extend the working hours of their office hours and

this is particularly useful for the organizations as they can extend their

services to the customers. It is fact that flexible working increases the

productivity of the employees and nowadays most of the IT companies

allow employees to work from home.

National Health Service was established in July 5 1948, it helped the

government to bring all hospitals and skilled medical staffs under one

umbrella. The organization has succeeded in providing quality services and

treatments to all people. As the population increased NHS has to recruit

staffs from overseas (European Union regions and Asian countries).

Sometimes the organization finds it is difficult to manage the increased

number of patients with the employees. Another important fact about the

employees of NHS is that, the organization has a large number of females.

The female employees have to take care of their children and family

members and they forced either to take long leave or to quit their jobs. In

order to avoid the skilled employees away from the job, NHS has

introduced the child friendly working hours and flexible working hours to

their employees. Flexible working law implemented by the UK government

also forced the organization to introduce the child friendly working and

flexible working hours for their employees. NHS allows flexible working

hours to employees based on certain criteria. The flexible working hours

introduced by the organization helped the employees to keep balance in

their work-life circumstances.

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The flexible working helps employees to find time for their beloved ones

and helps them to reduce the pressure at the work place. It offers the

employees more comfort and reduce their extra costs (child care costs). It

also helps the employees to work without any worries and the employer

can expect value outputs from these employees. In the case of NHS, the

flexible working helps the organization not to lose the skilled employees

on the basis of personal commitments. The organization can process the

request of flexible working, by discussing it with the top management and

by checking the criteria for flexible working. The flexible working is much

suitable for NHS as its service is extended to 24 hours a day and it meets

the need of the business. Another benefit for the organization is that it

helps them to engage their employees, increased morale and retention of

employees. The flexible working hours and employee friendly environment

helped the organization to known as one of the employee friendly

organization and keep diversity in employees.

Aim of the research:

To evaluate the impact of flexible working hours on the performance of

employees of National health services

Objectives:

• To analyze the impact of flexible working hours in an essential

services like national health services.

• To analyze the relation between flexible working hours and

employee morale

• To evaluate the role of flexible working hours in work-life

balance of NHS employees.

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• To find out how the organization manages the flexible working

hours of employees

• To make recommendations to avoid the misuse of flexible

working hours and suggest ways to improve the employee satisfaction.

Scope of the project

Flexible working helps the organization to keep skilled employees with the

organization and become an employee friendly organization. The important

fact about flexible working is that it is not suitable for all businesses and

the employees preferred schedule should match with the business needs

of the organization. In the case of NHS, the flexible working is much

suitable for their environment as its service extended to 24 hours a day.

The limitation of the research is that the output of the research only can

compared with the organizations of similar structure and business

schedule.

The outcomes of this project are

The researcher aims to identify the impact of flexible working on the

performance of NHS employees. The study will also analyze the relation

between the flexible working and morale of the employees.

Procedures: (Details of techniques, data collection, data recording,

etc.)

Techniques used for research

The research will be based on the analytical method of research. The

researcher will follow qualitative method to understand the impacts of

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flexible working in NHS and quantitative methods to identify impacts of

flexible working based on the replies from the participants in the data

collection process. There are a limited studies has been conducted to

identify the relation between the flexible working and performance of

employees. The researcher can rely on the secondary sources as one of

the main source for information. In this case, the secondary data can be

collected from NHS’s monthly journal and websites.

Data Collection

Here the employees of national health services make the entire population

for the research and the researcher will set the sample as employees

working in the NHS east London hospitals. The selected hospitals are

Royal London Hospital, White chapel, Newham University hospital and

Lewis ham University hospital. The researcher will gather information from

the employees of the above mentioned hospitals and the gathered data

will be analyzed based on the quantitative approach. The sampling method

chosen for the research process is simple random sampling. The

researcher needs to prepare the questionnaires and distribute the same to

the employees of NHS.

Data recording

The data can be collected by using the well prepared questionnaires, and

the output of the research can be represented using diagrams (bar charts

and pie charts). The researcher can keep the number of distributed

questionnaires and the number of returned questionnaires as this will help

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the researcher to know the interest of participants in the data collection

process.

Target groups

The output of the research is beneficial to the organizations which has a

similar structure as that of NHS and encourage the organizations to

implement flexible working hours for their employees. The participants of

the data collection are employees of the selected hospitals and it is

beneficial to the employees as the researcher tries to find the (positive)

impacts of flexible working.

Research Analysis

Here the researcher makes use of the quantitative data analysis to find out

the percentage of participant’s responses and to measure the impacts of

flexible working on the performance of employees. The quantitative data

analysis can be done using the “R project web console for statistical

computing and graphics”. This service is freely available on the

cnfolio.com website. The qualitative data analysis can be done using the

Coding Analysis Toolkit (CAT), a free service offered by University of

Pittsburgh.

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Resources used for the research analysis

Here in the researcher rely on the NHS journals and management journals

as the source of secondary data. The literature review will be prepared

based on the above mentioned sources. The researcher need to prepare

the questionnaires and need to analyze the gathered data using the data

analysis tools and techniques.

MBA Dissertation

Key Activities Time-scale Resources

required
(Milestones) (Plan of action)

(Equipment,

software,

personnel etc)

Selection of topic and tentative

proposal
First week

Submit the proposal Second and third week

Set research methodology -data

collection
Forth week

Questionnaire preparation and fix

interviews with managers.
Fifth and sixth week

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Data analysis and interpretation Seventh week

Analyse and comment on research Eighth week

findings

Prepare the draft

Ninth week

Submit the report to the supervisor Ninth week

and get approval

Final submission of report Tenth week

Total

References

1. NHS website,
http://www.nhs.uk/NHSEngland/thenhs/nhshistory/Pages/NHShistory1
948.aspx ,accessed on 28/02/2011

2. NHS Library, http://www.library.nhs.uk/Default.aspx ,accessed on

28/02/2011

3. Weyers J, McMillan K (2009), How to write Dissertations and Project

Reports, Pearson education press, United Kingdom.

4. Management help website,

http://managementhelp.org/research/research.htm , accessed on
28/02/2011.