GRAHAM Construction recognised that its workforce’s priorities had changed over the last few years, with personal well-being and a better balance between work and home life being more important than ever. Here’s how we helped to introduce more flexible working practices across the Civil Engineering division.
GRAHAM is a privately owned Construction and Facilities management company with 16 regional offices throughout the UK and Ireland, with 2,500 staff. Its Civil Engineering division specialises in resolving complex engineering challenges, from easing commuter congestion to powering renewable energy.
The challenge and opportunity
GRAHAM’s workforce already had a degree of informal flexible working and, having read our report – Making construction a great place to work – wanted to understand how to extend this further to all teams through engaging the site-based managers. Recognising the shift in expectations for more agile working, and understanding that it would be key to staff retention and recruitment, GRAHAM’s leaders were keen to bring about change as quickly as possible.
In the past, objections to introducing flexible working practices within the construction industry have centred around the need to maintain health and safety standards, being unable to offer any level flex to all roles, meeting commercial targets and managing sub-contractors and suppliers.
“The construction industry is very traditional in its approach to working, but we want to challenge this and demonstrate that flexibility can be integrated without compromising on delivery for clients or financial performance.” Michael Smyth, HR Director GRAHAM Group
Our solution
While there was broad enthusiasm for change across the organisation, there were some initial pockets of reluctance, largely due to a concern that there was already enough to do without having to manage new working patterns. Our position as external experts, and collaborative approach, were considered key to overcoming this barrier.
Working closely with the GRAHAM Human Resources team, we explored two options; running an in-depth pilot program with a small part of the business, or providing training and support for managers more broadly across the Civil Engineering division, so they could initiate their own flexible working pilots.
We concluded that the best route was to implement a top-down approach by engaging the team managers. This would allow them to adapt their learnings to their own teams’ circumstances and overall objectives.
“In order to fast track the benefits of more agile working patterns, we partnered with Timewise. Their consultants took the time to understand our objectives, working with us to develop an adaptable model that fitted with our business needs, but which was also easy to implement for managers on the ground.” Michael Smyth, HR Director GRAHAM Group
The process
We began by designing a series of regional workshops for site-based managers, to share real-life examples of how flexible working can be successfully implemented for construction workers.
As well as sharing our experience and expertise from our work elsewhere in the sector, we also highlighted examples of where flexibility was already taking place informally at GRAHAM. Sharing these examples helped bring the discussions to life, highlighting arrangements that were working well and opening up conversations about how to build on them.
The rate of change in attitudes towards flexible and hybrid working within the industry has outstripped that of many team managers, so hearing relevant success stories from colleagues, as well as our third-party expertise, was key to opening minds to the potential benefits.
Overall, the workshops demonstrated clearly that, despite people’s fears that working flexibly might negatively impact the project, it actually benefitted it, by helping workers become more engaged and productive.
Learnings and outcomes
The workshops really helped overcome negative preconceptions of flexible working, with the majority of attendees immediately seeing the value of offering it to their teams and understanding how even small changes can make a big difference to individuals.
At the end of each workshop, all attendees agreed to commit to doing at least one thing to work towards implementing flexible working in their own teams. To support this, this, we also built guidelines for Civil Engineering managers to use on site as they evolved their ways of working. This was all brought to life with anecdotes from our previous pilot work within the sector.
GRAHAM continues to review their operations, collating their learnings for ongoing review. This will help managers to see the value of flexibility, which has already resulted in lower staff turnover and increased engagement rates.
The client’s view
“We are an innovative employer and recognise that creating a modern working environment leads to personal and business benefits. Timewise’s holistic approach means ongoing support beyond the project with access to their peer community. Creating change won’t happen overnight but with the ongoing support, innovation and advice from Timewise, a modern working culture will emerge.” Michael Smyth, HR Director GRAHAM Group
Published January 2023
