Two more hospitals have just started their pilots as part of our FlexAbility in Nursing programme. Here’s a look at what’s gone well with our first pilot hospital, what participants think of the pilot so far, and how we’re applying our learnings.
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
By Emma Stewart, Co-Founder
At Timewise, we don’t believe that flexibility should come at any price; our focus is on delivering good quality flexible roles. But, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies stated in their 2018 report, “not working full time tends to shut down wage progression.” As a result, too many people end up trapped in entry-level roles, which are poorly paid, because they can’t get the flexibility they need higher up the scale.
One sector that illustrates this perfectly is retail. It employs around three million people, and has a higher incidence of low pay than any other sector. According to the British Retail Consortium’s 2020 research, flexibility in working hours is one of the main reasons people choose to work in the sector – but 56% of retail employees believe they are less likely to get promoted if they work part time.
As a first step towards tackling this problem, we partnered with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and five major retailers to run our Retail Pioneers programme, a piece of action research followed by a written report. Launched last May, it set out to help each retailer understand what was getting in the way of flexibility at store management level, and then design and develop management roles with compatible flexibility built in.
As my colleague Amy Butterworth explains elsewhere, the programme has already begun to deliver real change for our pioneer partners, with each of them taking action to design flexible jobs differently. And that’s brilliant – but it’s not the end of the story. Our initial learnings can also be used by the rest of the retail sector and beyond, to tackle the structural barriers that prevent the progression of low-paid part-time workers. For example:
Initially, some of the pioneers were uncertain about working so closely with other retailers. But as the programme progressed, the benefits of the group approach became clear. The pioneers got valuable insights from sharing their experiences, and regularly challenged each other’s assumptions and assertions.
We all know by now (or we should) that the lack of women in senior roles contributes to the gender pay gap. But that doesn’t mean we should focus all our attention on moving women from middle-management upwards.
Helping women progress from entry-level roles to line management – as our retail pioneers are now doing – will also help close the gap. And building more gender-balanced workplaces makes good business sense for employers too.
During the programme, our five pioneers all came to the same conclusion: that building flexibility into management roles could aid progression for retail team members, enabling them to maximise their skills whilst retaining their flexibility.
However, each retailer had different factors to take into account, and so needed to develop their own individual solution, grounded in their own business. When it comes to flexible job design, there is no one-size-fits-all solution; each organisation needs to take a bespoke approach based on its specific data and drivers.
So far, so good. But, as useful as these learnings are, they need to be championed at a macro level if they’re to deliver real, systemic change.
I’m kick-starting this by joining a government taskforce looking at flexible working, in response to the Taylor Review on modern work. However, far more needs to done by government, employers and industry bodies to create better quality part-time and flexible roles.
Many employers are unaware that the lack of part-time and flexible options at management level traps skilled, ambitious employees in low-paid jobs. And even those who agree that flex is the answer may not know how to get started or, in tight margin sectors, have the resources to do so.
If we are going to answer the Taylor Review’s call for better flexible work which benefits both employers and employees, delivered at scale, then we need more involvement and investment from government, civic society, and other industry bodies. Here’s what needs to happen:
Our work has highlighted a real lack of evidence about what works, without which it will be difficult to persuade employers to take – and critically, invest in – action. It has also revealed the importance of having a road map which sets out HOW employers can design better flexible and part-time jobs, at all levels.
If we are serious about building a fairer jobs market, and helping people trapped in low-paid roles to progress their careers and raise their living standards, we need government to commit to investing in it. This will allow us to test a range of approaches and use our findings to incentivise further business action, something which is particularly critical in low-margin sectors where the business case for change is not well established.
At a regional level, LEPs and metro mayors also have a part to play in sharing good practice and stimulating action to create better quality part-time jobs. This will support their inclusive growth strategies and help create fairer workplaces.
Our Retail Pioneers programme has benefitted hugely from our partnership with the BRC. They played a pivotal role in helping us get the programme off the ground, and are continuing to work with us to develop practical flexible working solutions.
Most industries have an equivalent organisation or body; the more of them that invest in championing flexible working, the greater the impact will be.
Our pioneers found that taking a deep dive into their workforce data threw up some surprises; in the words of Lesley Ballantyne from The John Lewis Partnership, “the programme has brought issues to the surface that we previously only had an inkling of.” Our consultancy team offer a flexible audit which can help support this process.
Underpinning all this, we need a space in which innovative practice can be designed and developed. We invest in innovation for R&D and technology; it’s time we started investing in innovation for designing good quality work. So this autumn, we’re launching the Timewise Innovation Unit, to create a forum in which this can happen.
By doing so, we will be able to help more employers design the flexible jobs that will progress their workers, maximise their skills and ultimately create more productive workplaces. I’m really looking forward to driving this change through the Innovation Unit, and I hope you’ll get involved; watch this space.
To find out more or get involved with the Timewise Innovation Unit, please contact Emma on 020 7633 4444 or email info@timewise.co.uk
Published May 2018
By Karen Mattison, Co-Founder, Timewise
Over the past five years, the Timewise Power List has told the stories of 250 individuals who are working flexibly at a senior level. And, while we have been delighted to shine a light on these flexible successes, we have also been aware of the part played by the best flexible employers in making them possible.
Moreover, as a social enterprise, we want to do more than just highlight individual examples of good practice. Underpinning everything we do is our desire to bring about widespread, systemic change, which will help grow the flexible jobs market and unlock more roles to part-time and flexible working. For this to happen, businesses across the board will need to change their approach to both the way they hire, and the way their roles are designed.
So with this in mind, as part of the 2018 Timewise Power 50 awards, we decided to celebrate employers who are taking the lead in making flexible working the new normal. We asked for nominations in the two critical areas of flexible hiring and flexible job design. And our expert judging panel chose two fantastic trailblazers as our winners: Lloyds Banking Group and the Ministry of Defence.
At Lloyds Banking Group (LBG), flexibility isn’t just considered; it’s expected. Following the introduction of their ‘agile hiring initiative’, LBG has moved from the assumption that most jobs are full-time to the assertion that part-time and flexible work can be possible and, in some cases, can even be preferable.
Critically, hiring managers are now expected to include an option for agile working in any roles they advertise, and explain their rationale for any that don’t. As a result, around 90% of LBG vacancies are promoted as agile (against a national average of 12%) and around 43% of employees work in an agile way.
And as LBG’s Fiona Cannon explains, this isn’t just good news for the Group, or even for their employees; the benefits of having flexible hiring as the default position are wider-reaching than that. “This initiative is helping us build a fairer, more representative workforce where employees are able to thrive, which sits at the heart of our ambition to help Britain prosper.”
A similarly innovative approach is being taken by the Ministry of Defence (MoD). The Regular Armed Forces are contracted to be available 365 days a year, which makes developing a part-time working policy a huge challenge. However, the MoD are keen to keep pace with the increased demand for part-time and flexible working, and so have launched a two year Flexible Duties Trial.
The trial will investigate how flexible job design could allow serving personnel to ‘dial down’ their level of commitment for a limited period, within a longer service career. Their aim is to keep hold of talented, experienced personnel and support recruitment of the next generation.
By looking at a seemingly insurmountable problem in a creative way, the MOD stand a good chance of making this traditional workplace future fit. As Group Captain Clive Montellier explains: “This trial is challenging the entrenched expectations of the workforce, and so getting the job design right is absolutely critical.”
Our winning employers are setting examples which, if others follow, could radically change the flexible jobs market.
If flexible working becomes the default hiring position across the board, more people who want or need it will be able to keep working, and progress their careers. And if all jobs are creatively designed to incorporate flexibility, in a way that suits both employers and employees, it won’t take long to become ‘just the way it’s done’.
We’re proud to be showcasing two of the best flexible employers as part of this year’s Power 50, and it’s just the start; we’re hoping to expand our focus in the years ahead. Watch this space.
To find out more about flexible hiring and flexible job design, and the training and consultancy we offer to support their development, please call 020 7633 4444 or email info@timewise.co.uk
Published March 2018
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
