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The business case for introducing WLB  includes:

Improve recruitment and retention

• There is a wider talent pool: WLB policies are often an essential ingredient of successful recruitment and retention strategies.
• The company becomes an employer of choice: flexible working is a 'powerful tool to support the motivation and commitment of its people that really contributes to its goal of becoming 'employer of choice'. This is particularly because the scheme is open to all employees who can make a business case, regardless of their reason for wanting to work flexibly.
• There is improved retention: women who leave for maternity leave often return to work, saving large amounts of recruitment and induction costs alone. Staff turnover is often considerably reduced.

Productivity and reward through

• Improved performance: long hours do not necessarily equate to commitment or productivity. Staff and managers often feel that flexible working improves their performance.
• Increased output focus: the association of reward with output rather than with attendance often results in the people working fewer hours while being more productive and earning more money.

Product development and marketing

• Product development: WLB allows new flexible working products to be developed, such as technology facilitating working from home. It often means that technology-based companies can demonstrate the capabilities of their own products, showing the 'business’ and ‘societal’ benefits of harnessing technology to deliver greater flexibility'.

Reduced overheads

• Lower accommodation and travel costs because people can work from home and do not need to travel to the place of work.

Flexible workforce

• Reduced absenteeism: absenteeism in companies that operate flexible working is often reduced 33% or more
• Flexibility: it's easier to deploy people to cover absence when shifts are flexible.

Customer benefits

Continuity: better staff retention means greater continuity of service and, often, better customer retention.

The issues to do with effective WLB include:

• Management issues
  • Employing a number of part-time staff can be more difficult to manage
  • Providing supervision for employees operating flexibly may be difficult
  • It is important to ensure there are systems in place to monitor performance
  • Employing part-time staff may lead to higher induction, training, administrative and recruitment costs
  • There may be some problems in ensuring that  skills are kept up-to-date
  • It may be difficult to find a replacement if an employee leaves
  • Flexibility often places added responsibility on managers who must allocate work fairly and ensure that employees communicate effectively
  • A different management style may be needed to manage flexible working and  thu management training may be required
  • The system needs to be monitored closely to ensure fairness amongst all employees; less confident employees may end up with shifts that nobody else wants to do
  • It is important to ensure that robust health and safety checks are in place

• Service provision issues
  • Providing a continuous level of service may be difficult
  • It may difficult in smaller organisations to provide cover during non-core hours

• Personnel issues
  • Varying working hours may lead to a cut in wages that could impact on employee pension contributions
  • Working from home can leave some employees feeling socially isolated
  • Some employees who work from home put in more hours without lunch breaks and find it hard to ‘switch off’ at the end of the day