What kind of organisation are you?

What motivated you as an organisation to start your flexible working journey?

During Covid we had to change how we operated and despite that, everything continued pretty much as normal. As a result, I wanted to offer our frontline ‘floor’ staff the same level of flexibility that I can enjoy by working from home but through other types of flexibility to give them a better work life balance.

How and when did you start introducing flex/more flex?

As restrictions eased, I sat down with people in groups of eight to ten to discuss our motivations and why we were considering changing things. Speaking to people in small groups was practical and made the conversation feel more informal. I think that encouraged people to ask questions because they felt more comfortable.

Flex today – what are you doing right now?

We’ve implemented a four-day working week for production staff. Previously, on the factory floor we worked 4.5 days, finishing at lunchtime on Fridays. Now we’ve allocated the extra half-day’s hours to the previous four.

We’ve also changed our holiday hours. Before, everyone got 33 days, but there were several times in the year when everyone had to take a holiday and the factory shut down. Now we have a short shut down over Christmas but otherwise people can use the rest of their holidays across the year.

We are also open to discussing other forms of flexibility across the organisation on a case-by-case basis. Office staff work a mixture of 4.5 or 5 days a week and they can work from home, and we’ve worked with both office and frontline staff to allow different start and finish times, whether that’s because they’re caring for elderly parents or have children at school. Keeping good staff is important to the business.

What challenges have you faced?

We had to work out where we’d move the four hours from Friday to. Some of our staff would rather come in one hour earlier each day, some would rather stay an hour later, and others wanted to go in half an hour earlier and leave half an hour later. We resolved this by asking our employees to answer an anonymous poll, as a result we now start half an hour earlier and finish half an hour later. At first some people weren’t happy about getting up earlier to go to work, but that quickly went away as time went on.

Impact of flexible working

Greater flexible working has helped us catch up with our backlog of work, and I can see that many of our employees and colleagues are much happier now because they’ve got an extra day to do what they want. It’s also had a really positive impact on our recruitment, and our customers are just as happy.

We’re now getting more staff working a full day of overtime (on Fridays). Previously, the main options for overtime were on a weekend when lots of people had family commitments and didn’t want to work. Offering the chance to work overtime on a Friday has allowed us to get more production done in the week which has been really fundamental to the business.

Changing our holidays has also had a positive impact on the business. There was no benefit to the business shutting down for two weeks in the summer. In fact, it was detrimental because we had customers trying to contact us, and the phone wasn’t being answered because no one was there.

The future of flex in your organisation

We are monitoring and evaluating the four-day week, and if there are any major issues, we’ll go back to the 4.5-day week. I don’t see any problems coming forward though. It seems to work well for us and it’s something we’d like to explore with non-frontline teams.

I’d also like to explore what I call a ‘school shift’ that starts and finishes inside school hours, giving people time to drop off children before work and have time to get to school afterwards.  I think it could help us recruit people who are not working because they can’t find or afford childcare. I’ve got a 10-year-old boy myself, and sometimes I need to work from home if my wife is away and no one else can look after him, so I understand the challenges of working parents.

Top tips for flex

• Talk to your employees and find out how they feel about flexible working and what they want to see change.
• Help your managers understand how changes can help the business as well as workers.
• Businesses only survive because of the great people working for them. If you can do something, however little it is, to help make people’s work life balance better, then why wouldn’t you?