New figures show that women’s commuting time tends to fall significantly after the birth of their first child, which in turn may have an impact on female progression and the gender pay gap. The answer? More, better, remote and flexible working.
By Emma Stewart MBE, Co-Founder
By now, we should all be familiar with the gender pay gap; and here at Timewise we are pretty clear about the role that flexible working can play in closing it. But new figures from the ONS have highlighted another work-related discrepancy between men and women: the length of their commutes.
As the figures show, women are more likely than men to commute for 15 minutes or less, and men are more likely than women to commute for more than an hour. In stark terms, the longer the commute, the more likely it is that it will be made by men. And according to the IFS, this ‘gender commuting gap’ really kicks in in the decade after women have their first child.
Does it matter? Shouldn’t women with a shorter commute just be grateful that they don’t have to sit through traffic or squeeze onto a packed train? Well, no. Whilst no one relishes a long journey to work, the implications of these numbers aren’t good for women – and nor are they good for employers.
The fact that the gender commuting gap widens significantly after childbirth suggests that when women become mothers, they feel they need to work closer to home. This isn’t surprising; after all, given the costs and typical opening hours of childcare, not to mention the emotional side of parenthood, every minute counts.
But as a result, these women are likely to be choosing from a smaller pool of jobs, and so may have to settle for one that doesn’t match their skills or offer proper career progression. We know, for example, that proximity to home is the number one reason for working in retail; we also know that part-time progression within this sector is not widely available (though that’s something we are working to change).
By Karen Mattison, Co-Founder, Timewise
The publication of the 10 worst excuses for not appointing women to FTSE company boards, taken from the government-backed Hampton-Alexander Review, made me more amused than annoyed. While clearly it’s not great that people believe things like “All the good women have already been snapped up” or “We have one woman already on the board… it’s someone else’s turn”, I’d rather have views like these out in the open, and up for debate, rather than hidden under the surface.
But these people are increasingly out of touch, and their beliefs far less common. The value of having more senior women in the workplace is now widely accepted; what people struggle with more, is how to achieve it. So rather than spend time challenging out-of-date views, I’d rather focus on the fact that there’s a relatively straightforward solution to this issue: more, better flexible roles.
And as we all love a list, here’s my personal (and less contentious) top 10, setting out how to use flexible working to deliver more senior women:
Be open to exploring flexible and hybrid working. Lead from the top; show that you value people’s lives outside work by leaving loudly whether that’s exiting the office or logging off with a clear out-of-office. And train line managers in how to discuss flexible working with their teams. Instead of asking ‘Why?”, start asking “Why not?”
Don’t wait to be asked. Make it clear to your staff that flexible working is an option for everyone, whatever their personal circumstances. Share stories of people who are working flexibly for a variety of reasons, so others understand that they can, too.
There are many extremely talented, ambitious women out there who need a degree of flexibility in order to thrive in and outside work. By offering flex up front, you’ll widen the pool you have to choose from – and attract some brilliant candidates.
Making a job work on a part-time basis doesn’t mean giving people Fridays off and expecting the same outputs. Instead, think about where, when and how much someone needs to work to deliver a role, then design the flexibility to suit.
Post Covid, we’re all more on board with the benefits of being able to work from home, or leave early and log on later; for employees with other responsibilities or health issues, it can dramatically affect their ability to thrive, and progress. Support this by taking action to avoid proximity bias when designing remote or hybrid roles.
Part-time isn’t the only way to work flexibly, and it’s worth considering whether other patterns could work for your organisation. Options such as compressed hours, annualised contracts or job shares might be a better fit for senior women or those on the way up.
If people can see a flexible route upwards, and get support from others who have been there and done that, they’re more likely to stay. Ask your more senior flexible workers to mentor to those coming up behind them, and create a forum for conversations to happen.
Typically, client, teambuilding or networking events take place after work, which can make it harder for parents or carers to attend. By offering a range of options, alternating days and times, and considering virtual alternatives, you’ll get a more inclusive attendee list.
Supporting women back into the workplace is a sure-fire way to get talented, experienced staff and demonstrate your commitment to female progression. Take a look at these guidelines for setting up a returner programme which we co-created for the Government Equalities Office.
Hopefully no one in your organisation holds the views that were given to the Hampton-Alexander Review. But left unchecked, people do have a tendency to recruit others who look and sound like themselves – and right now, that’s likely to deliver more board-level men.
To find out more about how flexible working can deliver improved female progression, contact us via info@timewise.co.uk
Published October 2019
In the 12 years that Timewise has been focusing on the flexible jobs market, we have heard anecdotal evidence of a key barrier facing part-time employees: a sense of not being fully part of the team.
This research survey set out to quantify the problem. It found that many part-time workers do indeed say they miss out on key meetings, on professional development events and training, and on networking opportunities.
Among the part-time workers who responded to our survey:
If part-time workers are missing out in these ways, they are unlikely to progress as well as their full-time colleagues. Not only is this a waste of their potential, it could also have a negative impact on their organisation’s gender pay gap. By failing to take part-time workers’ schedules into account when planning important meetings and events, employers are making it harder for these employees to deliver their role to the highest standards, and creating operational inefficiencies.
Employers who really want to benefit from the skills and talents of their part-time workers, need to start thinking differently about the best way to support them.
In simple terms, employers need to think differently. They need to challenge the assumption that, just because something has always been done in a certain way – such as entertaining clients after work, or having team meetings on the same day and time each week – that’s the only way to do it.
By thinking creatively and innovatively about how things are done, employers can deliver a workplace culture and working week that is as inclusive of part-time workers as their full-time colleagues – and benefit from the results.
Specific suggestions, made by the part-time workers in our survey include:
Published September 2018
An ambitious government programme is underway to raise the quality and quantity of apprenticeships, funded in part by the new Apprenticeship Levy. It has catapulted apprenticeships to the top of the agenda for many businesses. The benefits to apprentices, to businesses and to our wider economy and society are considerable.
However, access to high quality apprenticeships is uneven. Gender segregation is entrenched, mirroring the inequalities in the labour market that see women over-represented in low paid, low skilled jobs.
Timewise holds that one root cause of this gender inequality is the lack of part-time or flexible apprenticeships. Just one in ten apprentices are contracted for less than 30 hours per week, leaving the training out of reach for many who are unable to work full-time – particularly women, people with caring responsibilities, disabled people and young people leaving the care system.
This report investigates the feasibility of part-time and flexible models of apprenticeships. It is based on research conducted by Learning and Work Institute and Timewise, supported by the Young Women’s Trust and Trust for London.
The research suggests that part-time and flexible apprenticeships can increase access to skills and allow businesses to reach a broader, more diverse candidate pool. An effective programme would include the following critical success factors:
Timewise are now developing a part-time and flexible apprenticeship model which we intend to pilot later this year. Our goal is to build an evidence base to support a scalable part-time and flexible apprenticeship offer.
Published February 2018
After spending eight months working with nurses on three wards at Birmingham Women’s and Children’s Hospital (BWCH) to pilot team-based rostering, we’re now able to describe what we’ve learned and, importantly, report on nurses’ satisfaction with the changes. We’re also applying these learnings to two further pilots, at Nottingham University Hospital (NUH) and University Hospital Southampton (UHS).
Here are some key points:
As we have explored previously, flexibility in nursing often means predictability – that is, the ability to work a more regular shift pattern, rather than being subject to the extremes of variability which are common in nursing. In general, such bespoke working arrangements have often been allocated on a request-response basis, usually for parents or people with other caring responsibilities.
One of the aims of our team-based rostering approach is to ensure that everyone, not just the carers in the team, can have a say in their working pattern. However, it’s hard to shift a long-held conviction that going to the gym, singing in a choir or just having a long weekend are less valid reasons for a bespoke working arrangement.
We are therefore incorporating discussion of this shift in mindset very early on in the training for the NUH and UHS pilots, and have already noted that this helps those staff who do not have childcare needs feel like they are as highly valued, and their priorities as important, as their colleagues with children.
Data from our mid-pilot survey at BWCH shows that the proportion of nurses who feel they have an input into the roster is moving gradually upwards, having gone from 60% to 66% in four months, while the proportion who felt they had insufficient input has reduced from 20% to 9%. Furthermore, the proportion who feel that they understand their colleagues’ work-life balance needs has gone from 58% to 70%.
The BWCH pilot has also begun to address the issue of long-standing fixed working arrangements, which can have a negative impact on everyone else. For example, an employee who was given Fridays off for childcare reasons – whether formally or informally – may no longer have the same needs, but may have continued with this arrangement.
Understandably, these employees are loath to lose an arrangement which works well for them, but this can be incompatible with a team-based approach. There needs to be a recognition of the needs of the team as a whole, and a negotiation that is fair to everyone, rather than some nurses acquiring a special ‘accommodation’ by virtue of having asked first, or having a ‘better’ reason. Under our new system, 75% of the BWCH nurses now feel a collective responsibility for producing the roster.
Under the previous system, where nurses could make a small number of shift requests, but otherwise had their rosters imposed on them, there was frequent grumbling when people didn’t get what they had asked for, but also an acceptance that the system was not going to change.
Our new approach involves a ‘lead team’ of nurses (approximately one lead team member for every 6-8 nurses) asking staff about their preferences, then working more collectively to create the roster and fulfil as many of those preferences as possible.
However, some nurses’ expectations were raised to unrealistic levels, and they then tried to override the lead team members’ decisions, thereby undermining both the system and the sense of teamwork. Clearly, there needs to be an acceptance that, in a 24/7 environment, compromise is required, and that preferences are just that, preferences, not guarantees. And the role of the team leader in fostering this acceptance is critical.
The major change we’ve made to tackle this for our two new hospital pilots is to invest more time in identifying lead team members who have the right balance between being assertive and being caring. We’re also spending more time training them in how to deal with dissatisfied colleagues. This includes role-playing tricky conversations, articulating the kinds of problems that may come up, and even providing them with the right language to use – helpful phrases that capture the new approach.
One of the wards at BWCH got to grips with the concept of team-based rostering much more quickly than the other two. Becoming a lead team member means going up a rapid learning curve about how a roster is built, and what the constraints are – and some of them found the roster-building process uncongenial. So the more successful wards changed those lead team members who were not happy in the role at an early stage.
It’s vital that the lead team have the right skills and qualities to produce effective rosters and manage staff demands. So, for NUH and UHS, we have increased the time allocated to training the lead team on how to use the e-roster to manage operational challenges and clinical constraints (such as getting the right skills mix for every shift), so they can hit the ground running. Then, once the lead team is correctly staffed and up to speed, we are monitoring lead team members’ skills and comfort levels in the role, so that we can make changes if needed.
The new process is having a positive impact on nurses’ understanding of how a roster is built: the proportion of nurses at BWCH who say they understand the roster process has gone up from 65% to 85%, while the proportion who felt they did not understand the process has decreased from 35% to 15%.
We have also created an implementation guide, which includes a walk through the rostering process and the lead team members’ role in it, and a series of FAQs gleaned from our experience to date, so the teams have a source of information which they can refer to.
We are now working across seven wards, with a total of over 200 nurses, at our three hospitals. All three will continue to use the new process we’ve developed until the end of the pilot in March 2019. At this point, we will publish our final report and circulate our learnings to the sector as a whole.
In the meantime, while FlexAbility in Nursing has focused on one of the three cornerstones of designing flexible working for a shift based environment (input into scheduling) we are excited to be starting another, similarly ambitious pilot. This time we will be investigating how to tackle the variability of scheduling and its effect on individuals.
The project will explore whether a more predictable schedule will encourage more nurses to stay in the profession – and tackle the operational challenges of making that happen. We’re looking forward to getting started and will keep you informed of our progress.
Published June 2018
By Emma Stewart, Co-Founder
A 2018 report by the CIPD has suggested that presenteeism – that is, people struggling into work when they are ill – has more than tripled since 2010. Should employers be worried? After all, if people want to come in and get the work done, even if they’re feeling under the weather, isn’t that a bonus for business?
Not according to Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology and health at the University of Manchester, who has stated that “workers coming in and doing nothing is more dangerous to the UK economy than absenteeism.” His comments drew on a previous CIPD survey, which revealed that employers who had noticed an increase in presenteeism were nearly twice as likely to report an increase in stress-related absence as those who hadn’t. They were also more than twice as likely to report an increase in mental health issues such as anxiety and depression.
As the CIPD’s Rachel Suff recently argued, “Increasingly, the threats to well-being in the modern workplace are psychological rather than physical, and yet too few organisations are discouraging unhealthy workplace practices and tackling stress, which is strongly linked to health conditions such as anxiety and depression.”
Here at Timewise, we believe that flexible working is the foundation for the healthy workplace practices Rachel is championing. It may sound obvious but it bears repeating; if people are able to improve their work-life balance by working flexibly, they will be less likely to feel they have to struggle in when they shouldn’t, or to suffer from stress and anxiety.
That might mean working from home to cut down the commute. Or it could mean flexing start and finish times to manage school pick-ups, or working part-time to create space to look after an aging relative. Our experience has shown that most roles can work on a flexible basis, even client facing ones. The critical success factor is that the roles need to be designed with flexibility built in.
Of course, supporting employee wellbeing isn’t just good for employees; healthy minds are likely to be more productive ones, so it benefits employers too. But with only a quarter of the organisations noted as having a presenteeism problem having taken steps to challenge it, there’s a great deal of work to be done. Employers need to take action now to build the flexible cultures, and design the flexible roles, that will deliver healthier workplaces.
To find out more about flexible job design and our other consultancy and training services, please email info@timewise.co.uk or call 020 7633 4444
Published June 2018
Returner programmes are becoming increasingly popular with employers who want to recruit talented, experienced people, growing from just three in 2014 to over 40 last year.
For employees, the benefits of these programmes are obvious. They usually include training and mentoring to boost the returner’s confidence, and to help fill any skills and knowledge gaps. And they often lead to a permanent role, either straight away or at the end of the programme, if both sides are agreeable.
How returner programmes deliver for business
But what’s perhaps less well-known is the advantages they can deliver to an organisation. As well as being a cost-effective way to recruit experienced hires, returner programmes can help employers:
To help employers make the most of these advantages, we have created a set of Best Practice Guidelines for Returner Programmes, in collaboration with Women Returners and the Government Equalities Office. They offer a step-by-step guide to what returner programmes are, how to set them up, how to incorporate flexible working and how to deliver them successfully.
Download pdf Guidelines for Returner ProgrammesI hope you find the guidelines useful, and if Timewise can be of any further help, do please get in touch.
Please call 020 7633 4444 or email info@annie-hacketttimewise-co-uk
Published June 2018
The gender pay gap continues to be a regular staple of the news agenda. And many companies, when publishing their data, attempt to put a context around the fact that they have one. In some cases, they even try to explain the gap away, suggesting that it isn’t so much a problem as a fact of life.
However, research has shown that there are four key reasons why the gender pay gap exists. And for three out of the four, there is a relatively straightforward solution: get better at flexible and part-time working.
Here we explore what the research is telling us – and what employers who are keen to narrow their gap can do about it.
It is certainly true that there are more senior men than women in the workplace as a whole, and as senior people tend to be paid more than junior people, this has a negative effect on the gender pay gap. However, that doesn’t mean that the disparity cannot be tackled.
At the heart of the problem is an assumption that senior jobs ‘naturally’ require long hours and constant availability, and so cannot be done flexibly or part-time. This is largely due to the 1950s pattern of men going out to work and women being at home to support them – enabling men to focus on work to the exclusion of everything else in life. And it has been exacerbated in many sectors by globalisation and always-on technology, which have extended the working day to 10 or 12 hours.
Indeed, employers operating a long-hours culture for senior roles are likely to be the worst offenders. Long hours have been shown to be inherently gendered and to exacerbate the gender pay gap. And research has shown that, for the highest-educated women (those most likely to be in senior roles), the gender pay gap has not fallen at all in the last 25 years.
In the 21st century, this pattern of working is no longer fit for purpose. Instead of assuming that senior roles can only be carried out by someone with no non-work calls on their time, or that senior women need ‘accommodating’ to succeed, the roles need to be designed for the workforce we have now.
That’s a workforce in which 90% of workers either already have, or say they want, flexible and part-time working. A workforce that includes men and women, parents and carers, all of whom want or need to work, but few of whom can do so to the exclusion of everything else.
Employers come up with a range of reasons why flexible and part-time working are impossible in senior roles. “The clients might need you on your day off”; “Your team can’t manage without you”; “You’re the only one with the expert knowledge”; “You’d miss out on too much information if you worked part-time”. The fact is, none of these have to be a barrier. All jobs can be designed differently, with a little imagination and a lot of collaboration.
Here, the argument is that women ‘choose’ to care for children, so they naturally end up in part-time jobs, below their skill levels, and with fewer progression opportunities.
It’s true that the gender pay gap increases after childbirth, and that, by the time their first child is 20, women’s hourly wages are about a third below men’s. And it has been estimated that gender differences in rates of part-time and full-time paid work account for more than half of that gap, especially among the highly-educated.
However, this is based on a similar assumption to the first reason: that is, that part-time jobs are ‘naturally’ less senior, and so are automatically downgraded. And positioning part-time work as women’s ‘choice’ not only suggests that women are responsible for their lower earnings, but also takes the pressure off employers to do anything about it.
It’s also true that there are societal expectations at play here, with men in the UK finding it harder to ask for part-time work. In the Nordic countries, where government initiatives have actively tackled expectations of gender roles, change is much faster. Yet, we know that men in the UK do want to work part-time; research has shown that over half of younger fathers would take a pay cut to work less and spend more time with their family.
In the absence of Nordic-style government intervention, employers who want to close their gender pay gap need to overcome the cultural biases which make it hard for men to opt for part-time or flexible working. And part of the solution here is to make part-time roles more attractive to career-driven people.
Firstly, employers need to redesign jobs so that part-time work doesn’t just mean delivering a full-time job for part-time pay. That kind of set-up isn’t good for anyone. And secondly, they need to redesign jobs at all levels, to ensure that career progression on a part-time basis is not only acceptable, but aspirational.
We know that many of the more poorly-paid occupations are those traditionally done by women, requiring skills traditionally regarded as ‘feminine’, such as people skills and caring skills. So women ‘choose’ to work as nurses, teachers, or shop assistants, while men ‘choose’ to be surgeons, construction workers or engineers. The issue here is that we undervalue traditionally female skills – and that will take a while to change.
But there is also a perceived wisdom that women choose low-paid occupations because they offer more flexibility, or are more family-friendly. Again, the perception that it is a choice to prioritise children over paid work, rather than being due to a lack of viable alternatives, positions the gender pay gap as a fact of life, and releases employers from responsibility for changing it.
As we have found with the other issues cited above, flexible working holds the solution.
Opening up traditionally male sectors and occupations to flexible working would encourage more women to work in them, and more men to switch to working part-time. And building flexible progression into these roles would allow part-timers to develop their careers in a more equitable way.
There is real confusion about the difference between the equal pay issue and the gender pay gap. As we have explained previously, the gender pay gap is based on the difference between the average hourly pay rate for men and the average hourly pay rate for women, largely due to the reasons cited above.
In contrast, the equal pay issue is one of discrimination: paying men and women different amounts for doing the same job. So while this does feed into the gender pay gap, it isn’t the same thing.
We don’t need a flexible working solution here; the law has been clear that men and women should be paid equally since the Equal Pay Act of 1970. However, it is worth pointing out that discrimination sometimes arises from the same assumptions about women’s roles that are identified above.
It’s clear, then, that cultural bias, societal assumptions and a lack of progress in workplace design all contribute to the gender pay gap. And we at Timewise know better than most that flexible job design is the key to bringing about change.
To find out about our training and consultancy services that could help you tackle your gender pay gap, please call 020 7633 4444 or email info@timewise.co.uk
Published April 2018
The introduction of the Apprenticeship Levy in April 2017 made developing apprenticeship schemes a priority for businesses. But although the number of people taking part in these schemes has increased, there are many groups – particularly women, people with caring responsibilities, people with disabilities and young people leaving the care system – who remain shut out. Why? Because most apprenticeships are full-time.
So if, as a society, we want to make these opportunities available to all – and if businesses want to increase their chances of hitting their government quotas – developing part-time and flexible apprenticeships is the obvious solution.
That’s why we’ve been working with the Young Women’s Trust, Trust for London and the Learning and Work Institute to investigate how to make apprenticeships an option for people who can’t work full time. We’ve been talking to employers to find out what the barriers and opportunities are, and how we can work together to design roles which are achievable on a part-time basis. And our project partners have had similar conversations with training providers and learners.
Our research has shown, as we suspected, that there are currently very few part-time apprenticeships available; less than one in 10 are contracted for less than 30 hours per week. But it has also shown that it is possible to make them work. So, as is the Timewise way, having worked out what the problem is, we’re now setting out to fix it.
We’re therefore going to be running a new pilot to develop and test models for part-time and flexible apprenticeships. It will be designed and delivered through our Innovation Unit, in partnership with a group of public and private employers, and will start later this year.
Our aim is to deliver innovative solutions that will open up access to skills, better pay and career progression for the millions who need to fit both earning and learning with other life needs. By doing so, we’ll able to help businesses use part-time and flexible apprenticeship models to create more diverse workplaces, reduce gender inequalities and tackle skills shortages.
If you’d like to find out more, or talk to us about how we can be similarly innovative in your own sector, please contact me on info@timewise.co.uk
Published March 2018
Karen Mattison, Co-Founder
Following the government’s requirement that employers publish details of their gender pay gap by April 2018, some employers are already on the front foot. Step forward Diageo, the global beverage company and Timewise Partner, who published their report in November 2017. It’s a detailed report, which makes interesting reading for anyone who believes in the drive for better workplace equality.
Firstly, we’re delighted that Diageo have acknowledged that flexible working is central to closing the gender pay gap. Indeed, they have noted that designing jobs to be more flexible is a key part of their solution going forwards, confirming that they “…will continue to partner with Timewise, with whom we run flexible job design workshops… to ensure roles can be delivered flexibly.”
Interestingly, the work we are doing with Diageo isn’t specifically gender focused; as our recent research has revealed, in today’s workplace, flexibility is for everyone. But experience has shown us that if you get flexible working right, you can’t help but narrow your gender pay gap. As the 2016 Women and Equalities Committee Report into the issue stated:
“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.”
Secondly, as Diageo know, tackling the gender pay gap through flexible working requires a hands-on approach. As they say in their report “We are proactively identifying roles across the business that are particularly suitable for part-time, job share and flexible job design, to help break down barriers for applicants who do not wish to work full-time.”
So if, like Diageo, you’re looking to close your gender pay gap, and agree that flexibility is part of the solution, here are some suggestions:
Our research has shown that almost 9 in 10 of the UK workforce either work flexibly already or wish they could. However, fewer than 1 in 10 jobs are advertised as being flexible, which means these candidates have a limited pool of jobs to apply for.
Diageo have stated up front that they are open to a conversation about how they can make their roles work flexibly, but this is still all too rare. There’s a big opportunity here for progressive employers like them to scoop up talented flex-enthusiasts.
If the people in your organisation don’t approach flexible working positively, it’s doomed to failure. In particular, senior leaders and line managers need to understand the benefits flexibility can bring to the business, and be trained in how to support their flexible employees.
This is something that Diageo is rightly proud of. As Louise Jones, their part-time Head of HR, explains:
“The environment that Diageo fosters and my commitment to the company makes my part-time role achievable. The level of trust is exceptional and it is also normal for employees to flex where they work as and when it makes sense to do so. What matters at Diageo is what you deliver, not where you sit.”
Flexible working is far more likely to succeed when a role is designed flexibly, rather than just having elements of flexibility shoehorned in. However, some organisations still try and take shortcuts, such as expecting a part-time employee to squeeze a full-time job into fewer days.
As Diageo have stated, they take a more proactive approach, working with us to deliver workshops on flexible job design through our training and consultancy service. One of the initiatives they are hoping to implement is an internal job share portal, which will help their employees find a job share partner.
With these kind of well-planned processes in place, organisations will be able to reduce their gender pay gap, not to mention improving career progression for flexible employees and creating a fairer, more inclusive workplace. And with April 2018 looming, there’s no time to waste.
Diageo deliberately invite flexible talent into their organisation, saying: “If you’re looking for a flexible role, come and join us.” We’d like to issue a similar invitation to employers: if you’re looking to tackle your gender pay gap through flexible working, come and talk to us.
To find out more about our consultancy and training services, please call 020 7633 4444 or email info@timewise.co.uk
This article has been written in association with Diageo, one of our Timewise partners. Published February 2018.
