Employer Stories:
Social care provider C-Change Scotland allows frontline colleagues to self-manage rotas and is exploring a 4-day work week for leadership and administration teams.
Employer Stories:
Social care provider C-Change Scotland allows frontline colleagues to self-manage rotas and is exploring a 4-day work week for leadership and administration teams.
Key takeaways
- Flexible working is valuable to people who work in a traditionally low-paid sector.
- Self-managing teams deliver a better service for people supported by C-Change.
- Staff understand flexible working looks different in different roles and don’t expect a universal flexible working offer.
- Flexible working has improved recruitment and retention, ensured low sickness rates, reduced office space costs, and improved wellbeing and happiness for staff.
Key takeaways
- Flexible working is valuable to people who work in a traditionally low-paid sector.
- Self-managing teams deliver a better service for people supported by C-Change.
- Staff understand flexible working looks different in different roles and don’t expect a universal flexible working offer.
- Flexible working has improved recruitment and retention, ensured low sickness rates, reduced office space costs, and improved wellbeing and happiness for staff.
What kind of organisation are you?
C-Change works with more than 70 people with learning disabilities, mental health issues, autism and other additional support needs, to help them lead active and fulfilling lives. Of its 250 members of staff, about 200 are in frontline roles directly working with people in their own homes and communities, sometimes with 24-hour support.
What motivated you as an organisation to start your flexible working journey?
We’ve always known that our culture is key to attracting and retaining talent. Our sector is not known for high salaries, so it’s important we think about what else can we offer.
How and when did you start introducing flex/more flex?
We’ve always offered some degree of flexibility, especially around managing rotas and offering part-time roles. As we came out of the pandemic our office-based colleagues continued some work from home and that has bedded in. But we’re always thinking about how else we can improve our offer for our workers.
Flex today – what are you doing right now?
Self-managing teams is standard for our frontline colleagues, who we call Personal Development Workers. Each person we support has a number of Personal Development Workers (usually between two and six) who create a rota between them that delivers the best possible service for the person we work for, and works in a practical sense for the team involved. It means we have 70 different rotas (one for each person we support) which sounds crazy but it really does make our service better for people, and ensures our staff work when and how they can, which also benefits us because they are happier and stay longer.
Many of our colleagues, both frontline and office-based, work part time. And office-based staff are able to work from home and flex their start and finish time.
What challenges have you faced?
Our complex rotas are a logistical nightmare in terms of IT systems. We don’t have a standard contract, so we’ve created our own bespoke IT system that can cope with lots of different working patterns.
Impact of flexible working
Making more of flexible working during recruitment has definitely helped us hire good people. We know the pay in our sector isn’t great, but having more control over when you work is really valuable to people. Recruitment is still challenging but we’ve been able to reduce our use of agency staff, which is better for the continuity of support for the people we work for, and reduces our costs too.
Another cost-saving has come from us moving to a smaller office. The fact people can and do work from home means we don’t need to pay for as much space.
We have a low sickness rate too. We don’t get people calling in sick because actually they need some time off for something in their home life. These things are factored into rotas and people can swap shifts easily too.
But perhaps the biggest benefit comes from our staff feeling happier. You won’t be a good Personal Development Worker if you feel like you’re not in control of your life! Our staff tell us how much they appreciate the flexibility they have, so we hear first-hand how flexible working helps them manage their own lives. They provide better support as a result, and stay longer, which is better for the person they’re working with and for our recruitment costs.
The future of flex in your organisation
We’re looking to move our office staff to a reduced 4-day working week with no reduction in pay. Our frontline workers have benefitted from national increases in the Scottish Living Wage, in recent years. But these don’t apply to our office staff, and often we don’t have the funds to top up their salaries, so we’ve been exploring other ways we can improve their lives. We’ve already held a consultation with staff, especially our frontline teams who won’t be able to work this way, and we were surprised how positive they were. People understand their roles are different, and that their flexibility will look different too.
Top tips for flex
Talk to your teams and find out what makes a difference to them. Lots of people get caught up trying to make things ‘fair’. But fair means different things to different people. If you haven’t asked people what ‘fair’ means to them, you’re unlikely to deliver what they’re after. To illustrate this point, I remember painstakingly creating a giant rota years ago and tried to be ‘fair’ by giving everyone one weekend off in three. The next day, someone told me they’d be happy to work every weekend but what they really needed was Tuesdays and Wednesdays off because that’s when they looked after their grandchildren. Fair to me meant one weekend off in three. Fair to my colleague meant Tuesdays and Wednesdays off.
“Lots of people get caught up trying to make things ‘fair’. But fair means different things to different people. If you haven’t asked people what fair means to them, you’re unlikely to deliver what they’re after.”