and finish times if they have ‘a lot’ or ‘some’ influence over when they start and finish work. Employees were asked whether they would, if needed, be able
to use a telephone at work for family reasons. The question contains the option ‘not relevant to me’, which means that it is possible to restrict the analysis to
employees for whom access to a telephone for family reasons is relevant. Only 8.5 per cent of employees responded that having access to a telephone for
family reasons was “not relevant to me”. The question about whether the employee, if needed, could get permanent part-time employment similarly
included the option “not relevant to me”. A somewhat higher 24 per cent of employees responded that permanent part-time work at their current workplace
was not relevant to them.
4
A detailed description of all of the variables used in this paper can be found in Appendix I.
S
ECTION
4: D
IFFERENCES WITHIN AND BETWEEN WORKPLACES
This section presents an analysis of the extent to which differences in access to family-friendly work practices is attributable to differences between workplaces
termed between workplace variation and the extent to which it is due to differ- ences between employees working in the same workplace termed within work-
place variation. If all employees in the same workplace have equal access to family-friendly work practices, the within workplace variation will be zero. The
degree of variation in access to family-friendly work practices can be summarised using the standard deviation.
As discussed above, an important question is whether the employees surveyed are representative of the workplaces in which they work. In order to avoid
unreliable estimates due to small numbers of employees being interviewed, we restrict our analysis to workplaces in which 10 or more employees were
interviewed.
5
Because the number of employees interviewed in each workplace increased relative to the size of the workplace, the exclusion of workplaces with less than
10 employee interviews resulted in the exclusion of smaller workplaces. This is illustrated by the fact that the average workplace size in the AWIRS95 is 187 as
compared to 290 among firms that had 10 or more employee interviews.
Table 1 presents an analysis of the variances in access to each of the family- friendly work practices broken down into the overall, between and within
workplace components.
6
As an example to the interpretation of Table 1, consider control over start and finish times. The proportion of employees
who report having control over start and finish times is 52 per cent. The overall standard deviation is 0.500. The breakdown of the variation into the
between and within workplace components reveals that the standard deviation of the variation between workplace is 0.230 as compared to 0.445 for within
workplace. This can be interpreted to mean that the variation in employees who have control over their start and finish times is greater within workplaces
than between workplaces.
Table 1 also provides evidence that a high proportion of employees have access a telephone for family reasons 74.8 per cent. The further breakdown
of this finding into within and between workplace components reveals that
the between variation is again less than the within workplace variation. A much smaller percentage of employees report having access to permanent part-time
employment in their current workplace if needed 42.5 per cent. The breakdown into the within and between workplace variation indicates that,
again, the within workplace variation is larger than the between workplace variation.
S
ECTION
5: M
