Our five-step programme took the Trust from understanding their current approach to creating a flexible action plan. Here’s what they learned.
By Claire Campbell, Programme Director, Timewise
Like most NHS trusts, Royal Free London is coping with a perfect storm of pressures. The retention of staff, particularly nurses, is proving challenging all over the country, and is particularly hard in the capital, where living costs are high. Budget constraints are exacerbating the problem, forcing trusts to try and limit the use of costly agency staff. And at a societal level, an ageing workforce and the growing number of people who are juggling or facing caring responsibilities means that filling all the necessary posts is only going to get harder.
So, with the interim NHS People Plan highlighting the need to “significantly increase flexible working through a combination of technology and a change in people practices,” Royal Free London sought an organisation with the credibility and experience to help them develop a more flexible culture. As Michelle Hickson, one of the trust’s HR Business Partners, explains:
“We had been following Timewise’s work with local authorities and were struck by the depth of their knowledge and credibility. We were also keen to benefit from both their nursing-specific experience and their cross-sector expertise. So we felt they were the right partner to help us future-proof our organisation through flexible working.”
The Timewise Accreditation Programme provides a clear framework for change, taking the organisation on a journey from understanding their current approach to identifying their future vision for flexible working to creating their improvement plan in five steps. Originally designed for local authorities, the new version, which Royal Free London piloted with us, is tailored to the specific needs of NHS Trusts.
The team set up a working group which included representatives from across their sites and disciplines, including clinical and non-clinical staff. They met regularly to keep up the momentum as they worked through each step of the process, identifying quick wins and long-term challenges that would lead to meaningful change. And they used their findings and our experience to present a credible case to the leadership team.
According to Michelle, the step-by-step nature of the programme was a definite plus. “The framework Timewise provided allowed us to break down what we needed to do into manageable chunks and tackle each one in a structured way, with the space to explore all the issues and design workable solutions.”
And at every stage, they were supported by the Timewise team. We provided them with an external perspective on their current position, provided models and tools to structure their approach and used examples of best practice to ensure the improvement plan includes actions which will work. By partnering with the HR team throughout, we also ensured that the learning and skills will be embedded in the organisation.
Through our diagnostic work, the team identified that, while there were already some examples of good practice, they tended to be local rather than part of an organisational approach. It also became clear that having a formal policy and responding to requests wasn’t enough; that a more proactive approach, backed up by a clear offer for different staff groups, plus a vision and strategy, was needed.
The work also highlighted the need for robust evidence and examples to ensure leadership buy-in, and for guidance to support line managers in implementing it successfully. It reinforced their view that different teams would need different solutions, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.
The team then pulled all their learning into an improvement plan, with specific objectives including:
Their long term objective is to increase the % of staff who report in the staff survey that they are satisfied with their access to flexible working from 50% in 2019 to 65% by December 2021.
As a result of their clear and actionable improvement plan, and senior level commitment to implementing it, Royal Free London were formally accredited in November 2019. They are keen to be advocates of the value of flexible working, and believe that being the first Timewise Accredited Trust is a clear demonstration of their commitment.
They are also clear about the benefits of working with Timewise. As Michelle explains: “We believe that flexible working should underpin all our people priorities, and will help deliver an empowered workforce and a high trust culture. Working with Timewise has allowed us to create a strong business case and implement a clear action plan, with buy-in from throughout our organisation, which we are confident will deliver real change.”
Published February 2020
By Emma Stewart, Co-Founder
It won’t come as much of a surprise that, when it comes to flexible working, the construction industry is a tough one to crack. However, tackling complex sectors is one of the things we do best. So we’re partnering with four major employers, with the support of Build UK, to research, design and pilot new approaches that will overcome the barriers and bring about sustainable change.
The construction industry is known for a long-hours culture. It also has a dearth of female talent; CIC data suggests that women make up less than 15% of the workforce. What’s more, these women are leaving the industry at a faster rate than men, in part due to the lack of flexible working arrangements.
At the same time, the industry is facing skills shortages and a talent drain. Record employment, a high proportion of over 55s in the workforce and the uncertainties around Brexit (critical in an industry in which around 10% are non-UK nationals) are all colliding, with the result that attracting, retaining and progressing talented workers is an increasing challenge.
It’s also worth noting that the culture of long hours is having a negative impact on both men and women in the industry, affecting their mental health and their ability to balance work with caring and family life.
Overall, then, there is an urgent need to design more flexible roles and career pathways within construction, to deliver better work-life balance and build a more diverse, healthier workforce.
So we have joined forces with Build UK and four employers for a 12-month change project. We’ll be working with BAM Nuttall, BAM Construct, Skanska and Willmott Dixon to gain insights into making flexible working viable within the construction industry, and to design and pilot new approaches.
We’ll start with an initial insight phase, including a deep-dive diagnostic into each of the four partners’ current working practices and perceptions. We’ll use these insights to develop a flexible job design change programme, which we’ll then pilot across a number of construction sites. We’ll end with a thorough evaluation of what worked and what could be improved, and will share our findings with the wider industry.
Throughout the programme, we’ll offer support, coaching and training to HR teams, senior leaders and line managers, so the new approaches are understood and championed at every level. We’ll use these pilots to design industry-wide guidance on operational challenges, large and small, from how to plan and deliver a pilot to the best way to advertise a flexible job.
And when the programme is complete? Well, that won’t be the end of the story, for our partners or for the industry as a whole. Our hope is that it will be the beginning; the beginning of a change within construction towards a better work-life balance for all.
Published October 2019
Getting and keeping staff is now the number one challenge for the NHS. And the NHS Long Term Plan recognises that poor work-life balance is a key underlying reason.
From our work across many sectors, Timewise knows that work-life balance is a key element of any ‘great place to work’. But how can hard-pressed ward managers, trying to provide 24-hour patient care with limited resources and at the same time satisfy clinical requirements for particular skills on particular shifts, also facilitate work-life balance for nurses?
Timewise set up a pilot to explore one way of addressing this problem. We worked with 240 nurses in seven wards in three hospitals, to test whether a team-based rostering system could improve nurses’ work-life balance. The aim was to increase nurses’ input into their own working patterns.
Nursing has been highlighted as ‘the most urgent challenge’ in the Interim NHS People Plan. Our year-long pilot has focused on improving nurses’ work-life balance by addressing their working patterns. And it’s delivered three key recommendations to tackle the nursing shortage head-on.
It’s well-known that the NHS is struggling to find and keep enough staff, but the numbers relating to nursing shortages are no less shocking for their familiarity. Nurse resignations for poor work-life balance have increased by a staggering 169% between 2011-12 and 2017-18, according to analysis for the Labour party. And the Interim NHS People Plan notes that the organisation will need to recruit 40,000 extra nurses in the next five years just to stand still.
As we know from our work in other sectors, offering flexible working is a sure-fire way to improve work-life balance. But in a shift-based, skills-driven, 24-hour environment like an NHS ward, it’s complex to introduce. As a result, most wards operate on a two-tier system in which a few, fortunate individuals have an agreed flexible working arrangement (FWA), usually for childcare reasons. Everyone else then has to fit around them, with minimal input and even less predictability.
Over the last year, we have been supported by the Burdett Trust for Nursing to explore potential solutions for making work-life balance available for all, and not just those with a FWA.
Our belief was that by increasing the fit between nurses’ working pattern preferences and their actual working patterns, more of them would stay. At the same time, we were mindful that any solution would need to work within the KPIs and mix of skills that ward managers needed to deliver.
So, building on academic research, and following a series of focus groups with participating hospitals, we piloted a team-based approach to rostering , with the aim of increasing the amount of input that nurses have into their working patterns, whilst taking into account the operational constraints of life on the ward.
A sizeable piece of action research, this two-stage project involved 240 nurses in seven wards across three NHS trusts. We ran the first, six-month stage at Birmingham Women and Children’s Hospital (BWCH), and used our findings to inform the second stage at Nottingham University Hospitals (NUH) and University Hospital Southampton (UHS).
We began at BWCH by creating and training a lead team for each ward who were responsible for creating the roster (previously undertaken by the ward manager). Each lead team were allocated a subgroup of nurses and tasked with finding out their long-term preferences.
The lead team members then worked together to create the roster based on their colleagues’ input, making sure that unpopular shifts were spread fairly and that each shift had the right number of nurses with particular skills.
Following the completion of the first pilot at BWCH, we fed our learnings into the second six-month stage, across all three hospitals, and finished with a formal evaluation.
Our evaluation indicated that there were three main benefits to team-based rostering. A comparison of pre- and post-pilot data showed:
Other important findings include: the critical role played by the ward manager in making the new approach work; the need to choose the lead team members carefully, to ensure the right balance of skills; and the extra time (and so budget) required to train the teams and deliver the roster.
Overall, then, we are cautiously positive about the potential of team-based rostering; indeed, the teams who worked with us are continuing to create their rosters in this way. However, there’s no question that more work is needed so that other teams and NHS Trusts can benefit from what we have learned. And, given that most of the guidelines on flexible working in the NHS are not adapted for shift-based roles, it’s also clear that bespoke definitions need to be developed.
We are therefore making the following recommendations to bring about widespread change:
It won’t be a quick fix; these kind of changes take time, money and serious collaboration. But by taking action, we stand to gain a happier, healthier workforce who will stay within the NHS for longer. And given that nursing shortages are already at critical levels, there’s no time to waste.
Published September 2019
It’s the Timewise view that no profession is un-flex-able. Yes, it’s much more complex in shift-based environments, or those offering a 24 hour service. That’s why we created our Innovation Unit, through which we tackle these hard-to-fix sectors. But impossible? No.
Yet when it comes to teaching, there is a commonly held view that it is just too complicated, particularly because of timetabling. There’s also a concern around the potential cost; Laura McInerney’s much-read 2018 piece suggested that making more part-time teaching jobs available is unaffordable, because of the extra teachers it would require. And, as in many professions, there is inevitably some resistance from leaders and colleagues.
Certainly, there are constraints within teaching that make introducing part-time and flexible roles less straightforward. But my response to the comment that we can’t afford to offer more part-time and flexible teaching roles is this: we can’t afford not to. Our new report, published in association with Now Teach , explains why, and offers some first steps to help secondary schools create viable solutions.
Flexible working can help schools find and keep brilliant teachers
It’s no secret that the profession is struggling to find and keep its teachers. The government has admitted that it has missed its targets for teacher recruitment for six years running. And when people do join the profession, they often don’t stick around long; government figures have also indicated that a third of NQTs leave the profession within five years. Increases to teacher workloads certainly haven’t helped.
Of course, there are limits to what schools can offer current and potential teachers. They will never be able to match corporate salaries, for example. But one thing they can do is try and give their staff more control over their time and work-life balance.
The education profession is in crisis. Long hours, constantly changing workloads, and better paid opportunities elsewhere, are all factors that are making recruitment and retention an ever increasing challenge.
While flexible working cannot tackle all of these issues, it has a big role to play in improving work-life balance for teachers. It can help make the profession (one dominated by women) more accessible to those with other commitments such as family.
This project explored how to create part-time and flexible pathways in secondary schools. Key points are summarised below.
By Cathy Halstead, Editor, Timewise
Here at Timewise, we are keen to share our flexible working expertise as widely as possible. But as we all know, the peer to peer viewpoint is also a highly useful resource. So we asked Justine Campbell, EY’s Managing Partner for Talent, UK and Ireland – responsible for attracting and retaining talent – to share what the firm has learned, and how it has benefitted, from the journey to a fully flexible culture. Here are her insights.
As our recent Power 50 awards highlighted, flexible working is no longer about people juggling caring responsibilities. People of all ages, from all sorts of backgrounds, are choosing to work flexibly for a wide range of reasons. The result, Justine believes, is that flexible working is no longer a nice to have; it’s becoming an expectation from prospective employees.
“In a 24/7 global culture, backed up by supportive technology, flexibility is becoming the norm. So any employer that wants to be truly competitive needs to have flexible working as standard. It’s a business imperative.”
It seems obvious, then, that making flexible working available to potential candidates should be part of a future-focused firm’s recruitment strategy. But being willing isn’t enough, says Justine.
“If you want to attract the best talent, you need to be prepared to shout about your approach to flexible working, not wait to be asked. And given the number of hires we make each year – over 2,000 experienced candidates in 2018 – this is something we take seriously.
“We state clearly that our roles are open to flexibility, and empower and challenge our hiring teams and line managers to deliver on this. For us, the key question is not ‘Can we make it work’ but ‘How can we make it work?’”
Similarly, flexible working has a big impact on retention; by offering people what they want, you’re more likely to keep hold of them for longer. And it doesn’t end there, according to Justine.
“We often say that you can’t put a price on flexible working. Speaking personally, I wouldn’t trade my flexibility for a salary hike; it’s worth too much to me. But at a firm-wide level, being able to hang on to talented employees is about more than just retention rates.
“For example, Michael Heap, who was a 2019 Timewise Power Climber, now works for us three days a week, to free up time to develop his own tech business (Tmup). This is teaching him new skills and developing his entrepreneurial abilities. EY and our clients will benefit from that as much as we do from his day-to-day experience.
Proactively offering flexible working to potential and current employees is also likely to lead to a more diverse workforce. And that has been shown to have a positive impact on the business as a whole, as Justine notes.
“It’s easy for businesses that don’t have diversity of experience to get stuck in their ways. In our world, we need a degree of professional scepticism, which we wouldn’t get if we only had identikit employees. Successful workplaces reflect the outside world, whether that’s in terms of gender, age or ethnicity, and flexible working has a key role to play in making that happen.
Clearly, formally defined arrangements such as part-time or annualised contracts need formal contracts. But Justine has found that incorporating informal flexibility into EY’s culture is also part of the solution.
“We think of it in terms of outputs – that is, what needs to be delivered by when – rather than focusing on how long people are sitting at their desks. So if one of my team wants to go for a run before starting work, or drive home before making a call to avoid the rush hour, that’s fine by me.
“As long as you trust your employees (and if you don’t, perhaps you should question why you employ them), you should be happy for them to work in the way that suits them best. In my experience, it makes people more productive, as well as having a positive effect on their wellbeing and loyalty.”
However, to make all these elements work together, there’s one factor that can’t be overlooked: the role played by an organisation’s leadership. As Justine explains:
“There are so many factors involved in making flexible working a success, from investing in technology and job design to championing role models and training line managers. It’s not just an add-on or a written policy; you have to embed flexible working into your company culture. And that’s not going to happen unless it comes from the top.
“We have members of our leadership team working part-time or flexing their hours in a variety of ways, and they’re very open about it. That kind of visibility is worth a huge amount; our leaders are not only setting our flexible strategy, they’re also showing by example that it can be done.”
As EY’s experience shows, a lot of work goes into creating a successful flexible working strategy. And, as Justine and the team at EY have found, it’s well worth getting expert support.
“We’ve been collaborating with Timewise on our flexible hiring strategy since we started on this journey and their support has been invaluable. They have set the standard for flexible working and will ensure you make a success of it.
“The fact is, if you want to be competitive in the future, you need to be flexible. The future of work starts now; get some support, make a start and make it happen.”
There’s a lot of work going on in the Greater Manchester area around delivering quality jobs that fit with people’s lives. The region’s ten local councils are working with the mayor, Andy Burnham, to shape a plan for good jobs and growth that leaves no one behind. And one of the councils, Manchester City, has taken things a step further by signing up to the Timewise Accreditation Programme. As Sam McVaigh, the council’s Head of Workforce Strategy explains:
“Emma Stewart came to speak at a Council Scrutiny meeting just over a year ago. When she talked about the programme, we were struck by how well it would integrate with much of the work we’re already doing. We felt sure that our drive for equality at work, our employee health and wellbeing strategy and even our carbon reduction agenda would all be enhanced by a stronger focus on flexible working. Most importantly, it also resonated with the kind of place our staff were telling us they wanted to work.
“We were also aware that, as champions of the plan for good jobs within our region, we needed to be the change we wanted to see from local employers. And it was clear that Timewise had the knowledge and experience to help us come up with robust, practical, flexible solutions. So we signed up to the programme, and have been working with Timewise ever since.”
The programme saw Timewise deliver a series of workshops and training programmes, including a bespoke session with over 60 senior managers and the authority’s chief executive. It threw up a number of challenges, which Sam sees as an important part of the learning experience:
“To start with, there was a perception among some managers that flexible working is all about giving employees what they want. So there was a real lightbulb moment when they got their heads around the Timewise concept of two-way flexibility – that is, solutions which benefit employers as much as employees. That was a real turning point in how well managers engaged with the programme.
“We also came across a mindset that flexible working can only really work for office-based staff. Some managers started off by saying “Flexibility just isn’t for us”. But through the work with Timewise, it became clear that there’s much more to it than standard part-time hours or remote working. So, for example, although call centres do need to be staffed between fixed times, options such as compressed hours or nine day fortnights are worth exploring for these teams.”
The staffing crisis in the NHS has the organisation close to breaking point. Large numbers of staff are leaving, with many citing work-life balance as their main reason. And recruitment is challenging, with huge numbers of unfilled vacancies. As a result, agency costs for locums and temporary staff are spiralling.
Flexibility could help to tackle these issues, yet there is no clear definition of what flexible working means within the NHS. The organisation currently tends to operate on a request-response model, in which flexibility is seen as a problem to be accommodated rather than a way to meet the non-work needs of their staff. The variety of roles and ways of working in the NHS adds further complexity, with different solutions needed for shift-based working.
In the last year, Timewise has begun working with a range of NHS Trusts to scope how flexible working can enhance their ability to retain staff. We are also conducting an action research project to help NHS Trusts retain nurses within a 24/7 workplace.
Timewise recommends that the NHS implements a three-part Action Plan for Flexibility, to drive sustainable change
1. Define what flexibility means
The NHS needs to develop a clear definition and vision for flexible working
2. Design flexible job roles
The next step is to create flexible job design options for each profession, job role and specialty.
3. Develop a flexible culture
Organisational cultures which drive and promote flexible working at team level will be essential for the changes to be successful.
In this report, we recommend a fresh approach to redesigning NHS jobs and working practices, taking into account the specific clinical and operational constraints in each profession, job role and specialty. This innovative approach to flexible job design will create role-specific flexible options, for staff at all levels, and will help the NHS to:
Flexible working, done well, could help the NHS to deliver a 24/7 environment which works for all their staff, whatever their other responsibilities. The result would be a dramatic increase in the organisation’s ability to attract, nurture, develop and keep its hard working, talented people.
Published July 2018
Flexibility in working hours is one of the most important reasons cited for choosing to work in retail1. And yet employees who need flexibility all too often become trapped in shop-floor roles by the lack of opportunities to work part-time or flexibly at store management level.
Following an initial pilot with Pets at Home, Timewise launched our Retail Pioneer Programme in 2017, developed with the BRC and five pioneer partners: B&Q, Cook, Dixons Carphone, Tesco and the John Lewis Partnership.
We set out to understand what was getting in the way of offering flexible working at store management level. Through in-depth research with each of the five retailers, we interrogated and challenged the cultural and operational barriers to flexibility. We then identified key changes needed to break down the barriers, so that employees who need flexibility can progress their careers and employers can make the best use of their talent.
Current take-up of flexible working at the five Retail Pioneers’ stores
How retail staff feel about current practice
Under-utilisation of skills
Talented people who need flexibility are being underdeveloped because of the lack of flexible career progression. This might encourage them to leave the industry, and deter others from joining it.
Diversity issues and the gender pay gap
For some of the five retailers, attracting female talent to their stores was a particular challenge. Other retailers had a diverse gender mix at shop floor level, but this reduced dramatically at supervisor or manager roles. As flexible working is disproportionately attractive to women, there is a real opportunity for flexible career pathways to have a positive impact on the gender pay gap for retailers.
Our research points to the need for a 2 step change process:
1 Redesign existing part-time managerial jobs to make them achievable and attractive, supporting management teams to explore how they can redesign workloads and schedules collaboratively.
2 Open up all roles to flex, promoting and hiring people flexibly into managerial roles.
Based on the insights revealed by our research, we worked closely with each of the five retailers to develop tailored action plans containing our recommended job design options. We have been delighted with the responses from the Pioneers, who are taking a variety of approaches, depending on their particular findings and their business priorities.
1 Retail 2020, What Our People Think, May 2016, BRC
Published May 2018
