Many businesses are moving towards offering employees flexible working hours, ostensibly for greater work-life balance.

But new research from the University of Melbourne indicates such arrangements may not always be beneficial to either employees or employers.

Edward Hyatt, a PhD candidate at the university's Faculty of Business and Economics, said one common flexible work arrangement was the compressed work week (CWW).

It involves employees working 10-hour days for four days per week.

"Quite a lot of people have opted ... to work longer hours for fewer days in the week because it works best for them," he told ABC Radio Melbourne's Jacinta Parsons and Sami Shah.

Mr Hyatt's study has focused on a US workplace which forced a CWW onto a third of its staff.

"What we were looking at, in particular, was a workplace where the employer had decided: 'You know what, this is what's going to work best for the business, and we think people are going to like it because we've heard that it's a flexible option and people should love it'," he said.

However, a significant proportion of employees did not love it, with 35 per cent reporting low satisfaction levels.

"The only people that were really happy with it were those that didn't mind that it had been made mandatory," Mr Hyatt said.

As for the rest, "it didn't really work very well for them".

Savings marginal at best

The company at the centre of the study made the changes to working hours so it could close some of its buildings on a Friday.

"What they were trying to do was save money, especially on utilities," Mr Hyatt said.

"We found out that they did save money but it was very marginal compared to what they were hoping for."

An analysis of the company's sick leave data suggested those employees working a CWW were more likely to experience fatigue.

Additionally, the mix of employees working different hours presented challenges when it came to things like scheduling meetings.

"Some folks were working only eight hours a day and others were working 10 hours a day and taking off the Friday," Mr Hyatt said.

"There was a whole bunch of workplace scheduling issues that started cropping up that I don't think had really been considered before implementing the program."

Research finds businesses need 'core hours'

Mr Hyatt said his research showed that implementing flexible work arrangements had "to be done very carefully".

It's up to managers to ensure flexible hours don't hinder employees' ability to do their jobs, Mr Hyatt says. ( Pexels, CC0 )

"It would probably be up to the managers to make sure that the coordination issues don't arise," he said.

"If it's really impossible to work around, then maybe that flexible work option isn't really the best way to go in the first place."

He said one suggestion that had come out of the research was for businesses to identify "critical hours" when it needed to operate at full capacity.

"So maybe having a set of standard core hours that everybody has to be available for on a regular basis and it's understood those are the normal working hours," he said.

"But then having a bit of wiggle room around the remainder of the hours of the week, so maybe 10 to 15 hours that they could remain flexible for people to leave early to miss rush hour or to go handle parent duties."