For anyone involved in social care, there’s a feeling of relief that the crisis in this sector is currently so high on the agenda. But while much of the conversation has been around how future care will be funded, there has been far less focus on another critical issue: how to attract and keep enough staff to keep the system working in an age of austerity.
And while there isn’t an easy way to fix the wider issues the sector is facing, a new Timewise report, Caring by Design, highlights a solution to this specific problem: compatible flexibility. That is, designing jobs and schedules for care workers that are compatible with the rest of their lives.
As our report notes, there are currently 1.5 million people working in the social care sector in England, of which 82% are women. And the combination of an aging population and the associated increase in the number of people with disabilities means that, by 2025, a further 1 million carers will be needed.
Add to this the fact that, at 27%, staff turnover in the social care sector is more than twice the average for other professions in England, and it’s easy to see the scale of the problem that care providers are facing.
So why are care workers leaving? Well, although the social care industry is billed as being both local and family-friendly, the reality is very different. As our report highlights, unpredictable rotas, unsociable hours, large chunks of downtime in the middle of the day and the need to travel long distances between clients all take their toll.
Here at Timewise, we believe that compatible flexibility is the answer – and we’ve shown that it works. As part of the work that went into our report, we ran a pilot with Rathbone, a London-based community support provider, to test whether a geographical, team-based approach to scheduling could address these issues.
The outcomes were very positive, with the reduction in travel time freeing up time for regular team meetings. This allowed carers to have more input into scheduling, as well as reducing their sense of isolation, improving teamwork and making the system feel altogether fairer. The meetings also allowed team members to share information about clients and their needs, which in turn improved the quality of care.
Our report recommends some key actions that care providers and policy makers need to take if they’re to deliver truly compatible flexibility. Overall, the learnings delivered by this report are a great starting point, with the potential to have a huge impact on care staff recruitment and retention – but much more needs to be done.
So we’re calling on social care providers and policy makers to change the way the sector operates, and make it work for its army of carers. That’s going to require radical thinking, further research and widespread action; but we know it’s possible.
And we’re also calling out to those of you who work in other sectors which could benefit from a flexible strategy injection. As our report shows, we know how to use flexible job design to transform the working lives of a group of employees – and we’d be happy to do the same for yours.
To find out more about our consultancy and training services call 020 7633 4444 or email info@timewise.co.uk
You can read the full report here: Caring by Design
Published June 2017
By Emma Stewart, Co-Founder
It’s been said that Britain is a nation of shopkeepers, and the figures certainly seem to bear this out. The retail industry is the UK’s largest private sector employer, with around 3 million people in its workforce. And given that the majority of them work part time, it’s clear that making flexibility work should be a priority for retail employers.
However, whilst some roles, such as sales assistants, offer the potential for flexibility, there is a real lack of part-time opportunities in retail management. As a result, large numbers of employees feel trapped in their current roles, unable to progress their careers or develop their skills in spite of their abilities, because the flexibility they want or need isn’t on offer at the next level.
Clearly that’s not great for the employees themselves – but it’s bad news for retailers too. No one knows exactly what the post-Brexit jobs market will look like, but it’s not scaremongering to suggest that it may lead to skills shortages in retail; and the industry is already grappling with huge challenges such as the growth of the online market.
So if retailers want to progress and keep hold of their best employees – and attract some brilliant new ones – they’ll need to make sure flexibility is embedded at all levels. That’s where we come in.
We’ve used our years of experience in the flexible sphere to develop a programme for change that specifically suits the retail sector. In the report on our pilot scheme with Pets at Home, we identified that female progression to store management was the core issue, and addressed it by redesigning these roles so they could operate on a part time or job sharing basis. The retailer is now rolling the programme out nationally.
We’ve subsequently used our learnings to develop the Retail Pioneer Programme, offering an equally bespoke consultancy service to our five partners: B&Q, COOK, Dixons Carphone, Tesco and The John Lewis Partnership. We’ve hit the ground running, carrying out focus groups and data analysis to see how flexible working could help deliver their business strategies, and we’re looking forward to seeing it through and delivering radical, sustainable change for these organisations.
Despite the challenges the retail industry is currently facing, there’s a lot to celebrate. It employs a large number of flexible workers, and it does support progression to senior level; almost a third of its current crop of CEOs have worked their way up from sales assistant roles. If we can combine the two, and deliver that progression for people who work on a flexible basis, everyone will benefit.
To find out more about taking part in the Retail Pioneers Programme, call 020 7633 4444 or email info@timewise.co.uk
Published May 2017
By Karen Mattison, Co-Founder
The news that the number of self-employed women has risen by 50% in the past decade has rightly been seen as a celebration of female entrepreneurship. But whilst we’re as delighted as anyone to see individuals taking control of their own work-life balance, we’re aware that the lack of flexible roles in the employment market is a key factor in this change – and that’s not quite such good news.
As a joint study by notonthehighstreet.com and Oxford Economics into small creative businesses has found: “The greater flexibility, control and satisfaction of those surveyed is unquestionable: 95% now feel a greater sense of achievement and 90% enjoy life more and feel happier as a result of starting their own business.” And a previous report by the CIPD into flexible working in general painted a similar picture, with 73% of employers saying that it improved staff motivation[1].
But for those individuals who aren’t able to set up on their own, or who haven’t been able to access flexible working, it’s looking a lot less rosy. Our research has indicated that there are more than 8.7 million people who aren’t currently in a flexible role who would like to be. Furthermore, a report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimated there are 1.5 million people trapped in poorly paid part time jobs below their skill level, and over 400,000 people who can’t work unless they can find a part time or flexible job.
While some of these individuals may have the skills and experience to leave the workforce and set up their own business, there are many more, equally talented people who would flourish in employment, as long as it offered sufficient flexibility. But with only 1 in 10 job adverts being advertised as flexible at the point of hire, the jobs they need often just aren’t there.
That’s why we’ve set up Hire Me My Way, a campaign calling on employers to offer flexibility at the point of hire. Our aim is to see 1 million jobs advertised flexibly by 2020, and we’ve signed up some fantastic organisations already. It’s in their interests to come on board: as well as making it easier to attract and retain the best talent, flexibility has been shown to increase productivity, improve diversity and help tackle the gender pay gap.
So for employers, it’s pretty simple. If you want to stem the flood of talented individuals leaving the workforce, and make sure you’re in a position to attract the very best candidates, you need to get on board with flexible working. Start thinking about how to design jobs with built-in flexibility; not just for your existing employees, but for the ones you haven’t hired yet. Create a culture and structure that celebrate flexibility at all levels. And show you mean business, by being part of our campaign.
As the notonthehighstreet.com report notes: “No longer chained to 9 to 5 careers, the entrepreneurs behind the UK’s small creative businesses have set their own rules of the game and are contributing to a significant shift in attitudes to traditional work models as a result.” For those of us in the flexible working sphere, this shift in attitudes can’t come quickly enough.
Published May 2017
[1] CIPD 2012: Flexible working provision and uptake
There’s no question that the gender pay gap is high up on the agenda. From 6th April 2017, all businesses and charities with over 250 employees will be legally required to collect data on the gap between the average hourly pay of the men and women who work there. And they’ll also need to report on their figures by 4th April each year, starting in 2018.
Clearly, asking organisations to report on this issue is a positive step – and a much needed one. A 2016 assessment of the gender pay gap from the Institute of Fiscal Studies put it at just over 18%, and Deloitte have predicted that, at the current rate of change, we won’t hit true pay parity until 2069. To be frank, we can’t afford to wait that long.
But hidden behind these gloomy predictions, there’s a devastatingly simple solution, waiting to be found; and it’s this. According to the 2016 Women and Equalities Committee report: “Flexible working for all lies at the heart of addressing the gender pay gap.”
Can it really be as simple as that? The answer, as we at Timewise know well, is a definite yes. The report also states:
“A large part of the gender pay gap is down to women’s concentration in part-time work which doesn’t make use of their skill…. Old-fashioned approaches to flexibility in the workplace and a lack of support for those wishing to re-enter the labour market are stopping employers from making the most of women’s talent and experience.”
It follows, then, that if we can make flexible working work for everyone, we can accelerate the narrowing of the gender pay gap. And that’s going to be more critical than ever once organisations are legally required to publish their figures; your reputation as a fair employer, and your ability to attract and retain the best talent, will depend on it.
At an organisational level, there are some key principles that you need to embed in order to make flexible working work, from creating a supportive culture to thinking about the best way to design flexible jobs. It’s not rocket science, but it certainly won’t happen by accident; our training and consultancy programmes can help.
But at a wider level, it’s actually the job market itself that needs fixing. Our research shows that only 8.7% of quality jobs are advertised as being open to flexibility at the point of hire; so people who need to work flexibly only have 1 in 10 jobs to apply for. It’s no wonder so many of them end up stuck in low-paid roles beneath their skill set; there’s simply nowhere else for them to go.
That’s why, last year, we launched our Hire Me My Way campaign, calling on organisations of all shapes and sizes to promote flexibility at the point of hire. So far, more than 30 major organisations have signed up to our campaign, unlocking thousands of quality jobs to flexible working; we hope you’ll consider joining us, too.
So our call out to employers today is, start as you mean to go on. Be prepared to shout about the fact that you believe in flexible working and that you know how to make it work. Develop a recruitment strategy based on finding the most talented people you possibly can, and be prepared to flex your roles to suit them.
It’s a sure-fire way to improve your gender pay gap figures, and the evidence suggests it will improve your profits and boost your productivity. But, most importantly, it will mean you’re playing your part in a much-needed job market revolution – and that’s great news for all of us.
Published April 2017
Jobshares are an obvious potential solution when a full-time employee asks to work part-time, yet they’ve never really taken off as a form of flexible working. They can be difficult to set up and sometimes short-lived, so perhaps they’ve always been more popular with employees than with employers.
But quietly, over the last few decades, the civil service has been proving that jobshares can work extremely well. There are currently over 60 very senior level job share partnerships in the civil service and, according to performance indicators, they are every bit as successful as single full-time workers – often more so.
Deborah Brooks and Susie Owen share a top role in the Department for Education – Deputy Director, Early Years Providers and Regulation. Their approach is not to split responsibilities in any way – instead they fully share all aspects of the job, have shared objectives and performance targets, and even a shared mailbox.
The pair say that the trick to a successful jobshare is that the two have to become one person, so that colleagues do not distinguish between them. And in their case it has worked – colleagues refer to them as if they’re one person called ‘Brooks-Owen’!
Brooks-Owen say they have different working styles but the same values. They always support each other’s decisions, picking them up and running with them when it’s their turn in the office.
And Brooks-Owen share something else: a keen determination to make the partnership work, for personal reasons. It matters immensely to both of them, as it’s their shared route to a successful career path whilst achieving work-life balance. They therefore feel they must never let their other half down – and that’s one of the factors contributing to their high performance in the role.
Perhaps most extraordinary is the fact that Brooks-Owen were recruited into their role as a jobshare team (they had previously shared the role of Deputy Director for Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion at the Cabinet Office). They discussed their career aims together, decided which jobs they were both interested in, and applied as a pair.
Unsurprisingly, the interview process was eye-opening – perhaps more so for the interviewers than for Brooks-Owen. They were seen together and also separately, which they agreed was right – after all they work separately for 4 days of the week and are in the office together for only one. But when they were asked to give a presentation separately but on the same topic, they felt they had to contact the interviewers and point out that “You do realise you’ll get the same presentation twice? That’s the way we work.”
The Civil Service is in a good place to lead the way on jobshares – they have a vast workforce, large enough to set-up their own internal jobshare register where employees can find suitable partners. They also have an infrastructure that can support the process – Brooks-Owen, for example, had coaching to help them develop their approach to work; and policies are in place to support managers through the recruitment process for jobshares.
But perhaps, even without these luxuries, other businesses can follow. The only real pre-requisites are that the organisation must believe in jobshares as a way to retain and grow talent; and they must believe in the extra value that a successful jobshare will deliver (higher energy levels through to the end of the week, two brains, continuity through periods of absence etc etc).
Finding potential jobshare partners is much easier than many employers would think. Next time a valued employee asks to work part-time, just try advertising half the role as a part-time job – you’re likely to receive many very high quality applications. It’s a well-kept secret from many employers who only ever advertise full-time jobs: the demand for part-time is immense (27% of the UK workforce works part-time, and they have to compete for only a handful of vacancies).
When interviewing, pay heed to the Brooks-Owen experience: invest extra time in selecting the right candidate. That’s not necessarily the same person as the most skilled candidate – the match with your existing employee needs to be right, exploring shared work values and the ability to adopt a collaborative approach.
Jobshares do require extra effort, but the business rewards can be immense and they are certainly a progressive strategy for developing a skilled workforce. Business interest in jobshares seems to be bubbling up again, so at least remember this: if a jobshare team applies for one of your full-time roles, keep an open mind!
Timewise Jobs has an excellent record for finding high calibre candidates for jobshare roles. Our products and services can be viewed at our recruiter site.
Published November 2016
By Stephen Smith, HR Director at Lloyds Banking Group
I’ve been with Lloyds Banking Group in all its evolving shapes and forms for 43 years. I started when I was 18 years old when people had a job for life and climbed the career ladder with one organisation. Things have certainly changed at Lloyds Banking Group over the years. We’ve moved from a largely clerical environment to become a multi-faceted organisation, where around a third of our colleagues work in an agile way today.
Leaders still have work to do though. The world is changing. Society is changing and importantly technology is creating new opportunities for us to work in different ways. All these changes impact how we engage with both our customers and colleagues and we are facing a huge shift in the regular 9 to 5. We need to be ahead of the curve and be open and adaptable to our changing society. We need to look at what is possible when a candidate or employee requests reduced or flexible hours, otherwise we face a real risk of losing good people.
At Lloyds Banking Group, we call it Agile Working. We need to be agile in our approach to hiring and staff retention, whilst, increasingly, good candidates want a more agile and flexible way of working. For women, it was once a case of giving up your career to start a family, but now it’s about making both work so that the individual, and the organisation, are getting the best situation for their needs.
We’re all different and we all have different needs. Agile working reflects and responds to the diverse needs of our customers and colleagues better and that is why I always try to think beyond the formal process for flexibility. In response to this, I recently made an appointment for Group Operations HR Director, but instead of looking at a traditional, full time role, I brought in Charlotte Cherry and Alix Ainsley as a job share. To really mix things up, both Charlotte and Alix are based in Bristol, whilst we are based in Central London. They were strong candidates for the role, so I approached this hire – as I do with all hires – with a mindset of how we can make the situation work and not how it can fail.
Charlotte and Alix worked together as a job share in their previous organisation and have become very symbiotic in their approach. So much so, colleagues and the senior management team don’t even notice they’re working with two different people.
With that in mind, I would argue that if we can make a senior level job share work, then why not the same approach with our customer-facing staff? We have some good examples of branch managers job sharing too. With the right communication, I think we can leverage job sharing further across every part of the business
At Lloyds Banking Group we are taking the future very seriously. We are increasingly seeing a younger generation of millennials who do not want a full time job, opting instead for a portfolio career. This is something we are looking to address, which makes our Agile Working policy even more important than ever. HR Directors really need to look at what can be achieved with every hire.
It is not always easy to embrace change but think about the benefits an agile approach can bring. With a job share, for example, you have two heads and two opinions. By offering flexible hours you are retaining talent that might otherwise leave the job market. I only wish I’d had this insight 10 years ago. At Lloyds Banking Group we are committed to building a culture that encourages innovative agile working policies and practices. We recognise that embedding these are essential if we are to truly benefit from the business advantages and employee benefits that different ways of working can bring. We owe it to our colleagues to give them the best opportunities possible.
Published May 2016
Small businesses lead the way in flexible working in the UK – often out of necessity. After all, if your staff roll is still in the 10s, do you really need (and can you afford) a full-time Finance Director or a full-time HR Director? And smaller businesses often need to be more adept at ducking and diving the highs and lows of customer demand.
To celebrate the successes of small businesses when it comes to flexible working, Timewise set out to find the ‘UKs most flexible small business’. We were looking for a small organisation that allowed all staff to work flexibly if it suited them. We also wanted to see the successful use of a wide variety of types of flexible working. And we wanted to showcase an employer where flexible working made a huge contribution to the smooth running of the business.
We found a worthy winner in Broad Lane Vets of Coventry.
More than half of the 40 employees at this vets’ practice work flexibly in some way. Company Director Elly Pittaway says that flexible working helps to cover the long shifts at the practice’s three different sites. It also helps to attract and retain staff in what is an increasingly feminised sector.
Published March 2015
The high prevalence of flexible working amongst Britain’s SMEs seems to have grown, in the first instance, out of necessity. Workload is often volatile and finances precarious, so a permanent staff working 5 days a week just isn’t helpful. It works better to keep staff time closely pegged to output.
Jenny Vadevalloo of Timewise Jobs, reports that her clients from smaller businesses frequently look to hire quality part-time staff: “Let’s face it, when a new business reaches the point where it needs a Marketing Director for the first time, it rarely needs that level of seniority for more than a few days a week. And it certainly can’t afford the full-time salary the role would demand.”
Jenny adds, “SMEs can do very well through part-time and flexible recruitment. They can access top skills for the pro rata salary that’s within their budget.”
Adam Marshall, Executive Director of Policy and External Affairs at the British Chambers of Commerce, agrees. He adds that by hiring people into part-time or flexible roles, a small business can also expect to reach a larger talent pool and attract experienced candidates, including those with a ‘portfolio career’ or family commitments. “You can often get skills and talents that you might not otherwise be able to get in your workforce, and you also have the potential to attract individuals to your business you might not be able to take on for full-time, nine to five work,” he says.
To a large extent, flexible working grew out of small business, as a way for entrepreneurs to balance other commitments during the startup phase. Linda Aitchison, Managing Director at the Marketing Room, resists the ‘mumpreneur’ label, but says it seemed natural to work flexibly when she was juggling bringing up a family with launching the West Midlands-based creative marketing agency 10 years ago.
“All but two of our team are mums of children now aged from seven to 16, so we have worked hard to create opportunities for flexible working,” Aitchison says. “Being widowed means that I have more responsibilities within my family on a practical level than before, so I finish early on certain days to be at home with my children after school, but I make these hours up at the weekend.”
Flexible working can take many forms, including part-time, job-sharing or splitting, home and teleworking, or freelance work. Some people work staggered hours, enabling them to work full-time, but with different start and finish times; others work compressed hours, fitting in the standard contractual hours over fewer days.
“Not everyone will undertake a revolutionary redesign of the way they fill vacancies and the way they approach work, for some it’s as basic as allowing individuals to work at home as and when they need to,” says Marshall. “The majority of small businesses that operate flexible working do so because it makes good sense for their business and enables them to get the best out of their workforce.”
As small businesses grow, it can be easy for them to retain a strong culture of flexible working, as they’ve grown up with it and understand its benefits.
Simon La Fosse’s technology search firm, La Fosse Associates, has a staff of 70 and has been fourth in the Sunday Times Best 100 Companies to Work For for the past two years.
Allowing staff to do things in the way they want to do, that fits around their work schedule and family commitments inevitably reaps results, he argues. “Nobody came to work to do a bad job and you have got to remember that, so it’s easier to just give as an employer, and you find it comes back in spades,” he says. “The person who knows they are being trusted by you to do the right thing, invariably will do the right thing.”
A more flexible approach and even different skills are needed to manage teams who work flexibly, with a focus on employee effectiveness and output rather than simply clocking in and out. But La Fosse believes that this is a vital part of a successful business, anyway. “Any company that hasn’t got systems in place to measure output is a company that’s totally out of control,” he says. “Just making sure everyone turns up at the right time and stays late is lazy, rubbish management, really. It encourages presenteeism, which I think is appalling.”
It’s precisely this kind of culture change that small business owners and their employees are best placed to lead, Marshall insists. “Where we see it being a business and employer-led proposition, flexibility works fantastically,” he says. “Employers and employees are perfectly capable of coming together to develop different ways of working that allow both to get maximum benefit.”
Published June 2014
The business world has come a long way in its journey to embracing flexibility. “There is now buy-in to the benefits at a strategic business level. Ten years ago there wasn’t that acceptance,” says Timewise Co-Founder, Karen Mattison.
Despite this willingness to consider flexibility, businesses struggle to justify it at the operational level. Faced with a tough economic environment, KPIs to meet and demands on their budgets, leaders find it impossible to commit to the major expense and upheaval they believe might be needed.
It doesn’t need to be that way. “The Holy Grail that everyone is searching for is the generic business case for flexible working, but it doesn’t exist,” says Karen. “Rather than being a big change management piece, companies should look at flexibility on a project by project basis. It is a tool they can add into the mix.”
Karen adds that it is far less onerous for businesses to consider flexible working as one of a number of tools available to them, and to ask themselves what they will lose by ignoring it in a particular scenario. “There’s a danger that if you can’t do everything you end up doing nothing,” she cautions.
CBI Director for Employment and Skills Neil Carberry agrees it is important that companies take flexible steps if they are to compete. “As a business, you need to access the widest pool of skills and talent to maintain competitiveness,” he says. “It makes sense to take that wherever you can find it.”
Those who successfully adopt remote working techniques can employ them during transport strikes, snow storms and office moves. Flexibility also feeds into a positive brand for a business and creates an engaged and effective workforce. “Staff who are engaged will go the extra mile.”
Neil identifies strong leadership and line manager understanding of flexibility as being crucial to success. He also sees customer service businesses increasingly matching demand with flexible shifts. “If you’re running a 12 hour customer service operation it makes sense to slot people in at times they want to work.”
David Dunbar, General Manager of BT Flexible Working Services, agrees that cultural strength and staff engagement are extremely valuable for business and flexible working is the way to achieve it. “Flexible workers can respond to changing demands, can get products to market more quickly and adapt to change easily,” he says.
Dunbar points out that when it comes to the business case for flexible working, companies often seize on the most tangible savings of property and infrastructure. An agile approach usually means 30-40% of the desks and space can be lost. “In very simple terms, you can save on space and reduce churn. However the business case is much more complex and much bigger than that.”
The benefits range from recruitment, engagement, productivity and culture, to disaster recovery and a firm’s carbon footprint. “If you have a workforce that is more agile, flexible and clear on their objectives, they can work more productively. It is a difficult thing to build into the business case but is probably the single biggest benefit. If you can get 20% more productivity from your workforce that puts any property savings in the shade.”
For financial services business Northern Trust, the promotion of flexible working is a major differentiator in an industry that is famed for long hours and male dominated environments.
The company last year initiated a remote working pilot programme to enhance employee engagement, one of its top three global priorities. Four business departments took part in the trial and the concept is now being rolled out to other areas.
Pamela Hutchinson is Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer EMEA & APAC. “At the start of the pilot there was 82% positive engagement for the initiative. By the end it was 92%,” she says. “Even the employees who were not taking part supported it and managers did not see any adverse impact on team performance.”
“Flexibility is something we have always been hugely proud of,” she says. “We want our employees to feel engaged.”
In the last year, the business approved 90% of flexible working requests. A third of those working flexibly are men, and 10% are senior. Hutchinson says a pro-flexible approach increases engagement, loyalty and staff retention. “We also have more women working here,” she adds.
Technology has played its part. “Younger people coming into the company want to work differently. You have to move with the times if you want to recruit talent.”
Published June 2014
Heather Greig-Smith is a journalist writing about flexible working issues.
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