Market research

Nearly 7m people in the UK need Slivers-of-Time Employment and would rather work this way than have a conventional temporary, part-time or full-time job. It's a surprising finding, showing the strength of appetite for fragmented bits of work for multiple employers day to day.

As Slivers-of-Time Working started to become reality, the UK government commissioned three reports about it. The aim was to establish:

How big is the need?
How great is the desire?
What are the policy implications?

The findings were:

1) How big is the need?

Analysts at Accenture set out to scope demand for this new way of working in summer 2005. Using the Labour Force Survey and other sources, they isolated parts of the workforce with a need to work extra hours each week such as:

Incapacity benefit claimants who say they want to work
Students who need to work around their education
Newly retired wanting some work but not a formal job
Those identifying themselves as part-employed (they have some work but want more)

Their finding: 13.7m people in the UK need to work the Slivers-of-Time way at some point each year in the UK.

2) How great is the desire?

middlesex report Next question: if about a quarter of the adult population need to work this way. How many of them want to?

The Office of Deputy Prime Minister commissioned Middlesex University to find out. Slivers-of-Time working was explained face-to-face to 1,000 people, weighted to represent the 13.7m identified by Accenture.

The key findings were:

68% want to give it a go.

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Of those, 75% would rather sell Slivers-of-Time than work conventionally. 60% remained keen even when it was re-iterated that it would involve constantly traveling to new places of work.

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Download the Middlesex University report

3) What is the impact for government policy?

This very fragmented way of working is now technologically viable, and there's a potential explosion of demand on the horizon. What does that mean for government?

slivers of time The Office of Deputy Prime Minister and Jobs Go Public set out to answer this question. They jointly commissioned a report from Oxford Economic Forecasting.

Published in February 2006, their report, "Slivers-of-Time: making the labour market work better", found:

With a mere 5% take up these new markets could save the taxpayer £400m a year
Government has a key role as catalyst in getting these markets off the ground
If Slivers-of-Time markets don't emerge, workforce efficiency will be driven by "asymmetric" Workforce Scheduling Tools which skew new efficiencies towards the employer