Employer Stories:
The General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) embraced hybrid for good after months of home working during pandemic restrictions.
Employer Stories:
The General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) embraced hybrid for good after months of home working during pandemic restrictions.
Key takeaways
• Employees and their teams decide when they come to the office. There is no organisation-wide mandate on presence in the office unless there is a specific business need.
• Rules around flexitime relaxed, so staff trusted to work when suits them as long as meets service delivery needs
• Happier staff – feedback is overwhelmingly positive so far from everyone
• Attracting more diverse candidates for vacancies
• An opportunity to change up workplace culture and focus more on impact and output
Key takeaways
• Employees and their teams decide when they come to the office. There is no organisation-wide mandate on presence in the office unless there is a specific business need.
• Rules around flexitime relaxed, so staff trusted to work when suits them as long as meets service delivery needs
• Happier staff – feedback is overwhelmingly positive so far from everyone
• Attracting more diverse candidates for vacancies
• An opportunity to change up workplace culture and focus more on impact and output
What kind of organisation are you?
GTCS is an independent professional and regulatory body for teaching standards in Scotland and employs around 70 people.
What motivated you as an organisation to start your flexible working journey?
Our working culture was quite traditional before Covid, so the pandemic has been a brilliant opportunity for us to change.
Almost everyone worked from home during Covid restrictions, and there was no noticeable impact on service delivery. As we came out of lockdown, we knew there was no way we’d be asking everyone to come back to the office full-time, and we started exploring how we could work in a hybrid, flexible first way on a permanent basis.
How and when did you start introducing flex/more flex?
Flexibility Works supported us on our journey to greater flexibility. They worked with our senior leadership team and carried out a listening exercise with our staff to canvas their views and opinions, exploring how they wanted to work going forward. This feedback from staff, and the intel from Flexibility Works on what was working elsewhere, helped us shape a more trusting and flexible hybrid working model at GTCS.
We officially started our hybrid way of working in April 2022. We trust teams to decide their own protocols on when they intend be in the office. There’s no overarching rule on number of days, though we did discuss this. In the end, the feedback from staff, and intel from elsewhere, was that a more trusting and flexible hybrid model would be better.
Flex today – what are you doing right now?
As well as our new hybrid way of working, we relaxed rules around flexitime, allowing staff to work when suits them rather than specifying hours when work could be done, so long as this still meets service requirements.
But the biggest shift is in our culture. Before Covid there was too much focus simply on the hours someone worked. We know that judging someone’s performance on the number of hours they spend in an office is meaningless. What we achieve when we are at work – our output and impact – is what really matters.
What challenges have you faced?
Change is challenging for everyone and communication, particularly listening and responding, was key. We also emphasised that we would need to refine and evaluate our new ways of working, which helped reassure people. We needed to manage expectations that we wouldn’t be introducing something that was perfect – it would need to evolve, and they’d get a say.
Impact of flexible working
One of the main benefits for us as an employer, as well as having happier staff, is that we can recruit from a far wider geographical pool if people don’t need to be in the office very often. That helps with our inclusion and diversity aims too and will help us be more representative of Scotland as a nation, rather than Edinburgh where our office is.
The future of flex in your organisation
We’re currently evaluating how hybrid and more remote working is suiting people. We want to make sure we’re still staying connected as a whole staff team, and that we support staff wellbeing. We will soon be holding our first all-team in-person event and we will be asking for feedback from staff on how we connect, collaborate, share and learn best with our flexible way of working.
Through our evaluation, we’ve noticed that so far, use of our office is quite minimal (desk occupancy between 10 and 15%) so we will need to consider what that means for our office requirements as we move forward, and this might open up some great opportunities.
We’re also working on how we monitor and manage performance effectively when people are working remotely.
Top tips for flex
• Engage and listen to staff early on in developing different ways of working to help identify the solutions that will work best.
• Provide as much information as you can about what is planned. Regular updates from our project team to all staff with FAQs made a big difference in helping people understand planned change and feel assured.
“Changing our culture from one that was about hours worked to one that focuses on impact and output makes our people happier, and means we have a stronger focus on our organisational effectiveness.”