Discover how two flexible-focused corporate companies are approaching the principles and design of sustainable, inclusive hybrid working.
If there is one topic that is occupying the headspace of business leaders and their HR teams more than any other right now, it’s hybrid working. Most companies are grappling with how they will transition out of the pandemic, seeking to build on what has worked well and overcome the issues they have encountered.
And while there seems to be a general agreement that hybrid working IS the way forward for most corporate companies, and that it will create a huge number of opportunities for companies and their employees, implementation feels complex. As one of our clients has noted, in some ways having everyone working from home is easier to manage; it’s developing the next step, and making it stick, which will be a real challenge.
With this in mind, I recently co-hosted a roundtable for Timewise Partners, in which we explored the topic, supported by two of our longstanding corporate partners, who shared their hybrid working advice and insights with us. Here, in Part 1 of the highlights, we look at their approach to creating the principles on which to build a successful model.
Our speakers began by noting that while the change we are going through is unprecedented in modern times, many haven’t grasped just how fundamentally it is altering workplace norms. They also spoke of the need for organisations to agree principles for development before looking into implementation.
All agreed on the importance of allowing all members of the organisation to have input into any changes, asking what they have missed during lockdown, and what they want to build into any new ways of working. One cited a survey of 23,000 UK staff which has pointed towards a model of 2-3 days in the main office per week, with the remainder spread across client sites, at home or remotely.
Among the principles discussed were:
Our speakers then explored the best way to develop a model which is in line what teams need to succeed on a day-to-day basis.
One of our partners explained their pre-pandemic approach, which was based on employees having autonomy around how, where and when they worked. Their view was that hybrid working is an extension of this autonomy, but that teams need support and leadership to help them develop an inclusive environment in which they can continue to collaborate.
The speakers then discussed whether it is better to have a company-wide vision for hybrid working, which teams are expected to work to, or to empower individual teams to find their best way forward. Their insights included:
Take a look at Part 2 of the highlights from this session, which will focus on how to equip your employees to succeed within a hybrid model, and to ensure that it is fair and inclusive.
In the meantime, if you need more hybrid working advice, take a look at our hybrid working workshops, or get in touch to find out more about our bespoke consultancy services.
Published April 2021
As 2020 crawls to a close, one thing is certain; the workplace will never be the same again. It’s pretty clear that a degree of remote working is here to stay; a survey by the IOD suggested that 74% of firms are planning to maintain the increase in home working. And at the time of writing, the Prime Minister has told all workers in England to work from home if possible until April 2021.
Clearly, there are many upsides to remote working; from the time gained by skipping the commute and the related positive impact to mental health, to a general perception that it makes it easier to balance work and life. And the growing acceptability of hybrid working set-ups, where you work in the best place for the job in hand and the needs of your team, is a real step forward.
But it’s also important to recognise that the remote working we’re seeing right now isn’t normal; it’s universal, and enforced, without reference to whether it’s the best way to tackle that day’s or week’s workload. So it’s not surprising that, in our conversations with businesses, we’re hearing lots of examples of how it isn’t working as it should.
This doesn’t mean that home and hybrid working arrangements should be phased out once the pandemic is over. Employees want to keep them, and they can be a useful part of any organisation’s flexible toolkit. But simply replicating office-based practices isn’t enough. As with any flexible role, these arrangements need to be designed properly, and managers need to be skilled up to support the people who are using them.
The concept of Zoom fatigue – the exhaustion felt by people as a result of online meeting overload – was much discussed at the beginning of the pandemic. Some employees, particularly younger ones and those living alone, have wrestled with a lack of proper workspace, with some even reporting feeling judged by their home environments. The blurring of boundaries is also a recognised problem. And smart decision-making and creativity have both been noted as being negatively affected when whole teams work permanently from home.
Additionally, there is a growing sense that, without careful oversight, the move to a hybrid set-up, with some in the office and others at home, may lead to women and ethnic minorities being excluded from key decisions and limiting the diversity of opinions which are heard. Or that the extroverts in a team will choose to go in, and the introverts to stay at home, affecting their visibility and progression path, and encouraging groupthink.
These are tough issues to work around – but if we just roll over and accept them as the price we pay for more flex, we risk rowing back on all the progress that’s been made. Instead, we need to tackle them – and the best way to do so is by making sure line managers and other leaders are properly skilled up.
Well-trained, properly skilled managers know that they need to trust their remote employees, rather than force them to stay logged in to Zoom all day so they can keep an eye on them. They understand that having an 8.30 meeting every day to check that everyone is working can be counterproductive. They appreciate that, when physical interaction isn’t possible, other ways of connecting teams have to be found. And they realise that, in an era of job uncertainty, employees need to be encouraged to switch off, not left to put in ever longer hours for fear of being let go.
To succeed, managers need to know how to design flexible roles – whether part-time, remote, or a combination of the two. They need to understand how to manage flexible employees, and how to ensure that hybrid-working teams are still able to work productively together. But these aren’t skills that people can just pick up. They need to be taught; and that’s where we come in.
Training managers to build and develop successful flexible teams has long been a core part of our work here at Timewise. And now, from our work with clients and other organisations during the pandemic, we have gained a unique set of insights that are specifically relevant to building these skills in the current circumstances.
We can support employers in a range of ways; from workshops and training sessions to participation in our new Flex Positive Programme. So if you, like us, believe that this is a critical time for developing the leadership skills that will make a success of flexible and hybrid working, feel free to get in touch to see how we can help.
Published December 2020
If you were asked to guess the biggest cause of death in the construction industry, what would you say? Most people would assume that the answer is something to do with on-site accidents. But they’d be wrong: in fact, it’s suicide, with male construction workers three times more likely to take their own lives than the average male.
It’s a shocking statistic, and one which is largely due to the long-hours culture that dominates the industry. With 20 hour days commonplace, and only 10 % of roles advertised with any kind of flexibility, it’s no surprise that construction workers suffer from mental health problems, struggle to balance work with their families, and end up burnt out.
Equally unsurprisingly, women don’t want to work in the industry; female participation currently stands at 15%, mainly in office-based roles. And although efforts have been made to try and attract more women, little has been done to address the workload and work-life barriers that are keeping them away.
With such deep-rooted problems to overcome, a deep-dive approach is required; and that’s what we’ve been doing. In 2019, we began a Timewise Innovation Unit project with four construction companies; BAM Nuttall, BAM Construct, Skanska and Willmott Dixon, supported by Build UK and the Construction and Industry Training Board. The project aims to explore the options for making construction more flexible; to identify key barriers, design and pilot solutions, and share what we’ve learned across the industry.
So, what have we learned so far? Well, our initial diagnostic phase put meat on the bones of what we had suspected; that the structure and culture within construction are not just unsupportive of flexible working, but bordering on incompatible:
Having identified and fleshed out these core issues, we then planned to run a series of pilots, starting in Spring 2020. These set out to assess the potential of allowing teams to have some input into their shifts and working patterns, and pilot the best way to deliver it. The work included:
The project was put on hold during the first lockdown – but on the flip side, once companies were allowed back on site, it helped accelerate some of the plans. The need for social distancing, for example, meant that site managers were forced to explore staggered start times and virtual team briefings, with positive results.
For now, the work continues. We’re supporting sites who have fast-tracked their plans, skilling up managers to implement the changes and make sure they’re fair, inclusive and sustainable. For those who were unable to do so, we’ve now started work. And of course, we’re capturing insights from this pilot phase to support a consistent approach to scaling up at a later date.
It’s worth noting that, with inflexibility as entrenched as it is within this industry, it can feel like an impossible challenge. Indeed, it’s no exaggeration to say that, when we started, the response from some was that nothing could or would change. There was a widespread belief that the issues were too deep and that current working practices would always stand in the way of culture change.
We don’t doubt that changing this industry is a complex job – but we also firmly believe that it’s a critical one. People are leaving and there’s little incentive for others to replace them; the rest of the world is becoming more flexible, and construction mustn’t get left behind. Additionally, given the pivotal role that construction plays in our country’s infrastructure, there’s a real opportunity to reskill and redeploy workers who have been adversely hit by Covid-19 as we build back up.
The pandemic has opened the door a crack and our project aims to wedge it open; we’ll keep you posted.
Published November 2020
By Emma Stewart, Co-Founder, Timewise
It’s no secret that the teaching profession, is struggling to recruit and retain the teachers it needs. Pre-Covid-19 data indicated that targets for the required number of secondary school trainees had been missed for the last seven years, and that 33% of state school NQTs leave within five years. And although the pandemic appears to have triggered a spike in graduate teacher training applications, it’s not yet clear whether this will last – or be enough to bridge the gap.
While it isn’t the only factor behind the teaching brain drain, the lack of flexible teaching roles compared to other sectors is likely to play a part. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that some teachers leave the profession because they can’t access flexible working; and that many secondary school teachers who do leave reduce their hours when they do so.
In fairness, it’s true that teaching roles are not easy to make flexible; there are a range of barriers, such as timetabling, budget constraints and the student-facing nature of the role, which are all complex to overcome. However, we believe that no sector is un-flexable; we specifically set up our Innovation Unit to tackle these hard-to-fix sectors, and show what can be done.
So, on that basis, and following on from our 2019 report on building flexibility into schools, we are launching a new action research project for the teaching sector. Working in partnership with three large multi-academy Trusts (MATs) and supported by education specialists Talent Architects, we’ll start by exploring the barriers in more depth, as well as building on the insights that these schools gained during Covid-19, and seeing what positive experiences can be taken forward. We’ll then use our learnings to design flexible roles that work around or overcome these barriers, and pilot them within schools.
The project, which is being supported by Barclays Life Skills and Browne Jacobson LLP, will last a year; we’ll post updates about what we’re learning along the way, as well as a full final report. In the meantime, if you’d like some initial inspiration, take a look at our case study of a school with a hugely successful track record in this area, Huntington School in York, where more than half of teachers work part-time.
Right now, though, schools like Huntington are in the minority, and they are having to work it out for themselves. It’s our hope that this project will deliver a clear roadmap for schools for designing and delivering flexible teaching roles, so that wherever they are, whatever their size, they can attract and keep teachers by offering the flexibility they need and want.
Published September 2020
The statistics around teaching staff shortages are well known, but they bear repeating. Data from the NFER has indicated that targets for the required number of secondary school trainees have been missed for seven years in a row, and 33% of state school NQTs leave within five years. And while the Covid-19 crisis appears to have triggered a spike in graduate teacher training applications, it’s too early to say whether this will deliver sustainable growth.
Yet it is possible to buck these trends. There are a number of schools who are managing to hold on to their experienced staff at far higher rates than others. Step forward Huntington School, a community secondary in York, which has a miniscule staff turnover rate of 7%. Around half of teachers work part-time – including members of SLT – on contracts ranging from 0.2 to 0.8 FTE, and there are several job shares.
So, what’s the secret? According to Headteacher John Tomsett, it’s all about the culture. John’s philosophy is that good schools don’t just pop up overnight; they grow over time out of a supportive culture, led by the leadership, that guides the school’s vision in the right direction.
In practice, at Huntington School, this means busting the myth that part-time teachers have a negative impact on students, and that the timetable can only accommodate a few part-time jobs. It means understanding that happy teachers stay, and that supporting the other aspects of their lives allows a school to get the best out of them. And it means taking a positive, proactive approach to flexible working, with a process built on the presumption that “We will make it work.”
The current crisis has been described as ‘full-time work meeting full-time life’; a remote working experiment that we’re all having to work through. So how are employers supporting their employees during Covid-19 – and what should they do next?
We recently co-hosted a session for Timewise Partners, in which we explored how different companies are managing the status quo, and provided a mixture of short-term practical guidance and long-term issues to consider. Here are the highlights.
Among the insights we shared with our partners were these snapshots of workplace life during Covid-19:
Our attendees shared a number of examples of good practice from their organisations. These included:
Leadership and management
Changes to processes
Information and resources
Mental health and wellbeing
Planning ahead
We also shared four core principles to help employers take the right next steps to support their employees:
(1) Think about WHAT people are doing
Assess what work needs doing, right now. Set priorities, new objectives and expectations for what needs to be done, before working out how to do it differently. Recognise the backdrop to people’s current working lives and consider the balance between the business’ needs and individuals’ needs.
(2) Think about WHERE people are working and how to support them
Consider providing enhanced broadband or a proper office chair. Create space for collaboration and engagement such as virtual team meetings and remote cafes, and check in on anyone who goes under the radar. Note what’s working and what isn’t to ensure you take the best examples with you into the long term.
(3) Think about WHEN work needs to be done and how that matches with people’s needs
Some people may be splitting childcare with a partner and so may need to have blocks of time off. Others may need to get ahead at the weekend to allow more breaks in the week. Build a framework that looks at your organisation’s needs and each individual’s needs to identify working patterns that will suit both parties.
(4) Think about HOW MUCH work needs doing and can be managed at the current time
Some employers need staff to reduce their hours to save costs; some employees need to work less to juggle their other commitments. In order to make this work, leaders need to either reduce the workload or find alternative resource. Expecting people to do the same work in less time isn’t a sustainable option.
We also shared our thoughts on the opportunities and risks coming out of Covid-19 and what employers need to do to mitigate the negatives and make the most of the positives.
As the situation continues, we’re keen to gather and share more stories about what’s working and what’s not, so more businesses are able to come out of Covid-19 into a more flexible future. If you have any insights to share, or need support from the Timewise team, do please get in touch.
Published April 2020
As part-time work becomes more widespread, it’s increasingly important that the roles are designed properly. But research published in the journal of Human Relations has indicated that, in many cases, there isn’t a process in place.
One in five professionals and managers in the UK works part-time already, with more than two in five working part-time in the Netherlands. Moreover, there is huge unfulfilled demand for part-time working: a Timewise study shows that a quarter of full-timers in the UK would actually prefer to work less, and earn less.
However when it comes to designing these part-time roles, the employees themselves are often left to get on with it, without input from their employers. Even those who are sympathetic to flexible working in principle rarely take any responsibility for reducing their employees’ outputs to match their reduction in hours.
This failure to think through the requirements of the job means that the part-time professional often ends up delivering 100% of the outputs in 60 or 80% of the hours – and for 60 or 80% of the salary. The result is usually high pressure of work for the part-timer, as well as insufficient time for development, networking or career-building.
And there’s a knock-on effect for other employees too. Seeing the lack of effort to address workload on transition to part-time hours can lead to others being reluctant to request part-time working. They see the stress and unfairness of part-timers having to deliver disproportionately heavy workloads, as well as the negative impacts on their career, and it puts them off following a similar path.
But there is another way: redesign the job collaboratively. Some of the part-time professionals featured in the research negotiated with colleagues, manager and clients to distribute workload more fairly across the team, and to arrange cover during their absence. This ‘crafting’ of the job, in collaboration with colleagues, enabled a more appropriate workload, and predictable time off for part-time professionals, although most only managed to craft their workload and schedule after they had secured a part-time job.
So, employers who want to attract and retain the best talent need to recognise that part-time job design often cannot be done by the individual alone. Job redesign is best done by the team as a whole, with committed support from the wider organisation. If that doesn’t happen, it’s not surprising that part-time professionals often feel stigmatised and see their careers stagnate.
Employers also need to address two common working practices which can stand in the way of successful part-time work. The first is the expectation that the individual, as opposed to the team, will be constantly available to deal with unpredictable client demands. The second is the failure to plan and share the team’s workload collaboratively, so that work is distributed fairly across the team.
It’s clear from the research that the way forward is for employers to redesign the working practices of the whole team, rather than leaving individuals to work out their part-time solutions in isolation. With mounting evidence that more people want to work part-time – not just parents and carers, but also older workers, millennials and those with health issues – employers need to address part-time job design, and adapt working practices to the changing shape of the workforce.
The research was conducted by Dr Charlotte Gascoigne as part of her PhD, and is published with Professor Clare Kelliher from the Cranfield School of Management. The findings were based on in-depth interviews with part-time professionals and managers in both the UK and the Netherlands.
To find out more about the innovative research opportunities we offer, contact info@timewise.co.uk or call 020 7633 4444
Published December 2017
By Emma Stewart, Co-Founder
Like many of the contributors to the Taylor Review, I shared my views on the day the report was published. The core of my response was that making permanent jobs more flexible – rather than just improving conditions for those who currently work flexibly – is critical to unlocking quality jobs for individuals for whom full time isn’t an option.
And whilst there’s broad agreement that this is a sensible approach which could help move the Taylor Review recommendations forward, there’s a much less widespread understanding of how flexible job design can be used in practice and what’s required to make it a success.
The theory behind job design sounds straightforward: it’s about looking at the current parameters of a role and designing it afresh to fulfil a specific need. In the case of Timewise, that need is to build in flexibility that delivers the right work-life balance for an employee, whether through part-time roles, job shares, variable start and finish times or other flexible options.
However, in too many cases, employers simply look at the hours or patterns that an individual is working, and focus all their attention on how they can continue to deliver as before, but in fewer hours or from a different location. In doing so, they’re setting the individual up to fail, and potentially creating resentment amongst other employees who end up having to pick up the slack.
In practice, then, so-called flexible jobs are often not designed flexibly but have flexibility thrust upon them, without proper thought and with limited success. Clearly, that’s not right – but what should employers do instead? While specific solutions will be different for each sector or organisation, there are some core areas that always need to be addressed within proper job design:
In our consultancy work, we explore these core areas and other related issues, using detailed research and analysis, to provide innovative solutions which fit with our clients’ needs and objectives. The outcome we are aiming for is what we call compatible flexibility; a way of working which is equally beneficial for employers and employees alike, and so delivers affordable, lasting change.
Our recent pilot scheme in the social care sector demonstrates this perfectly. Through close consultation with policy makers, social care providers and front-line carers, we were able to develop a mutually beneficial solution: a geographical, team-based approach to scheduling which reduced travel time, allowed carers to have input into their rotas and improved the overall quality of care.
And right now, we’re working with five national retailers to investigate how job design could help them deliver career progression to senior level for flexible workers; critical for a sector in which the majority of the workforce is part time. Among the routes we are exploring are training managers in how to define and describe jobs based on outputs not inputs, and tackling decision makers about nurturing a mindset in which flexibility is approached as an opportunity, not a threat.
In addition to specific projects such as these, we are also getting ready to take job design to the next level through the creation of the Timewise Innovation Unit. This specialist ‘think tank do tank’ will bring together and share the best thinking, innovative practice and learning on how to redesign work, in order to develop cross-cutting business-led solutions to reimagine the modern workplace. It will be run using a social consultancy model and developed in collaboration with a number of strategic partners; do get in touch if you’re interested in getting involved.
In the meantime, the Taylor Review has underlined the fact that flexible working is here to stay, one way or another. The challenge for employers is to ensure that the way it works in your organisation benefits your business and your employees alike – and clever, creative job design has to be part of that process.
To find out more about our consultancy and training services, call 020 7633 4444 or email info@timewise.co.uk
Published August 2017
