The retail industry is without doubt one of the biggest departments in UK PLC. With around three million people working across retail and wholesale, it’s the largest private sector employer in the country. And right now, it’s also on the front line of the looming skills shortages that are likely to create challenges for all sectors.
So we’re absolutely delighted to have launched a formal partnership with the British Retail Consortium, which will allow us to help retailers find and keep the best available talent, while delivering career progression for flexible workers.
Flexibility in working hours is one of the most important reasons that people give for choosing to work in retail. But the problem is, this flexibility is often confined to sales assistants and support staff; when it comes to store management, flexible options are thin on the ground.
As a result, employees can become trapped by their need for flexibility, unable to progress their careers or develop their skills because the next step on the ladder is missing. And that has a social impact, limiting earning opportunities for low-income workers, as well as a commercial one.
We began tackling this issue early in 2016, working with the BRC to develop a pilot scheme with Pets at Home which investigated the options for redesigning store manager roles on a part-time and job sharing basis. And right now, we’re part-way through our Retail Pioneer Programme, again with the BRC’s support. The programme is helping five major retailers investigate how flexible working could deliver radical sustainable change for them and their employees.
And that’s just our starter for 10; by formalising this strong working partnership, we’re confident that we can take our passion for flexible opportunities to another level. Together, we are ideally placed to help retailers develop practical, flexible working solutions that will allow them to meet their 2020 goals, particularly with regard to gender equality, employee engagement and career progression.
The challenges ahead of the retail industry can’t be avoided; but well-designed, flexible management roles will go a long way towards unblocking career progression, and make the industry more appealing to workers of all ages. This partnership, and the potential for change that it offers, is the start of a new era for retail employers and employees alike.
To find out more about our consultancy and training services, please email info@timewise.co.uk
Published October 2017
For anyone involved in social care, there’s a feeling of relief that the crisis in this sector is currently so high on the agenda. But while much of the conversation has been around how future care will be funded, there has been far less focus on another critical issue: how to attract and keep enough staff to keep the system working in an age of austerity.
And while there isn’t an easy way to fix the wider issues the sector is facing, a new Timewise report, Caring by Design, highlights a solution to this specific problem: compatible flexibility. That is, designing jobs and schedules for care workers that are compatible with the rest of their lives.
As our report notes, there are currently 1.5 million people working in the social care sector in England, of which 82% are women. And the combination of an aging population and the associated increase in the number of people with disabilities means that, by 2025, a further 1 million carers will be needed.
Add to this the fact that, at 27%, staff turnover in the social care sector is more than twice the average for other professions in England, and it’s easy to see the scale of the problem that care providers are facing.
So why are care workers leaving? Well, although the social care industry is billed as being both local and family-friendly, the reality is very different. As our report highlights, unpredictable rotas, unsociable hours, large chunks of downtime in the middle of the day and the need to travel long distances between clients all take their toll.
Here at Timewise, we believe that compatible flexibility is the answer – and we’ve shown that it works. As part of the work that went into our report, we ran a pilot with Rathbone, a London-based community support provider, to test whether a geographical, team-based approach to scheduling could address these issues.
The outcomes were very positive, with the reduction in travel time freeing up time for regular team meetings. This allowed carers to have more input into scheduling, as well as reducing their sense of isolation, improving teamwork and making the system feel altogether fairer. The meetings also allowed team members to share information about clients and their needs, which in turn improved the quality of care.
Our report recommends some key actions that care providers and policy makers need to take if they’re to deliver truly compatible flexibility. Overall, the learnings delivered by this report are a great starting point, with the potential to have a huge impact on care staff recruitment and retention – but much more needs to be done.
So we’re calling on social care providers and policy makers to change the way the sector operates, and make it work for its army of carers. That’s going to require radical thinking, further research and widespread action; but we know it’s possible.
And we’re also calling out to those of you who work in other sectors which could benefit from a flexible strategy injection. As our report shows, we know how to use flexible job design to transform the working lives of a group of employees – and we’d be happy to do the same for yours.
To find out more about our consultancy and training services call 020 7633 4444 or email info@timewise.co.uk
You can read the full report here: Caring by Design
Published June 2017
By Stephen Smith, HR Director at Lloyds Banking Group
I’ve been with Lloyds Banking Group in all its evolving shapes and forms for 43 years. I started when I was 18 years old when people had a job for life and climbed the career ladder with one organisation. Things have certainly changed at Lloyds Banking Group over the years. We’ve moved from a largely clerical environment to become a multi-faceted organisation, where around a third of our colleagues work in an agile way today.
Leaders still have work to do though. The world is changing. Society is changing and importantly technology is creating new opportunities for us to work in different ways. All these changes impact how we engage with both our customers and colleagues and we are facing a huge shift in the regular 9 to 5. We need to be ahead of the curve and be open and adaptable to our changing society. We need to look at what is possible when a candidate or employee requests reduced or flexible hours, otherwise we face a real risk of losing good people.
At Lloyds Banking Group, we call it Agile Working. We need to be agile in our approach to hiring and staff retention, whilst, increasingly, good candidates want a more agile and flexible way of working. For women, it was once a case of giving up your career to start a family, but now it’s about making both work so that the individual, and the organisation, are getting the best situation for their needs.
We’re all different and we all have different needs. Agile working reflects and responds to the diverse needs of our customers and colleagues better and that is why I always try to think beyond the formal process for flexibility. In response to this, I recently made an appointment for Group Operations HR Director, but instead of looking at a traditional, full time role, I brought in Charlotte Cherry and Alix Ainsley as a job share. To really mix things up, both Charlotte and Alix are based in Bristol, whilst we are based in Central London. They were strong candidates for the role, so I approached this hire – as I do with all hires – with a mindset of how we can make the situation work and not how it can fail.
Charlotte and Alix worked together as a job share in their previous organisation and have become very symbiotic in their approach. So much so, colleagues and the senior management team don’t even notice they’re working with two different people.
With that in mind, I would argue that if we can make a senior level job share work, then why not the same approach with our customer-facing staff? We have some good examples of branch managers job sharing too. With the right communication, I think we can leverage job sharing further across every part of the business
At Lloyds Banking Group we are taking the future very seriously. We are increasingly seeing a younger generation of millennials who do not want a full time job, opting instead for a portfolio career. This is something we are looking to address, which makes our Agile Working policy even more important than ever. HR Directors really need to look at what can be achieved with every hire.
It is not always easy to embrace change but think about the benefits an agile approach can bring. With a job share, for example, you have two heads and two opinions. By offering flexible hours you are retaining talent that might otherwise leave the job market. I only wish I’d had this insight 10 years ago. At Lloyds Banking Group we are committed to building a culture that encourages innovative agile working policies and practices. We recognise that embedding these are essential if we are to truly benefit from the business advantages and employee benefits that different ways of working can bring. We owe it to our colleagues to give them the best opportunities possible.
Published May 2016
Small businesses lead the way in flexible working in the UK – often out of necessity. After all, if your staff roll is still in the 10s, do you really need (and can you afford) a full-time Finance Director or a full-time HR Director? And smaller businesses often need to be more adept at ducking and diving the highs and lows of customer demand.
To celebrate the successes of small businesses when it comes to flexible working, Timewise set out to find the ‘UKs most flexible small business’. We were looking for a small organisation that allowed all staff to work flexibly if it suited them. We also wanted to see the successful use of a wide variety of types of flexible working. And we wanted to showcase an employer where flexible working made a huge contribution to the smooth running of the business.
We found a worthy winner in Broad Lane Vets of Coventry.
More than half of the 40 employees at this vets’ practice work flexibly in some way. Company Director Elly Pittaway says that flexible working helps to cover the long shifts at the practice’s three different sites. It also helps to attract and retain staff in what is an increasingly feminised sector.
Published March 2015
The high prevalence of flexible working amongst Britain’s SMEs seems to have grown, in the first instance, out of necessity. Workload is often volatile and finances precarious, so a permanent staff working 5 days a week just isn’t helpful. It works better to keep staff time closely pegged to output.
Jenny Vadevalloo of Timewise Jobs, reports that her clients from smaller businesses frequently look to hire quality part-time staff: “Let’s face it, when a new business reaches the point where it needs a Marketing Director for the first time, it rarely needs that level of seniority for more than a few days a week. And it certainly can’t afford the full-time salary the role would demand.”
Jenny adds, “SMEs can do very well through part-time and flexible recruitment. They can access top skills for the pro rata salary that’s within their budget.”
Adam Marshall, Executive Director of Policy and External Affairs at the British Chambers of Commerce, agrees. He adds that by hiring people into part-time or flexible roles, a small business can also expect to reach a larger talent pool and attract experienced candidates, including those with a ‘portfolio career’ or family commitments. “You can often get skills and talents that you might not otherwise be able to get in your workforce, and you also have the potential to attract individuals to your business you might not be able to take on for full-time, nine to five work,” he says.
To a large extent, flexible working grew out of small business, as a way for entrepreneurs to balance other commitments during the startup phase. Linda Aitchison, Managing Director at the Marketing Room, resists the ‘mumpreneur’ label, but says it seemed natural to work flexibly when she was juggling bringing up a family with launching the West Midlands-based creative marketing agency 10 years ago.
“All but two of our team are mums of children now aged from seven to 16, so we have worked hard to create opportunities for flexible working,” Aitchison says. “Being widowed means that I have more responsibilities within my family on a practical level than before, so I finish early on certain days to be at home with my children after school, but I make these hours up at the weekend.”
Flexible working can take many forms, including part-time, job-sharing or splitting, home and teleworking, or freelance work. Some people work staggered hours, enabling them to work full-time, but with different start and finish times; others work compressed hours, fitting in the standard contractual hours over fewer days.
“Not everyone will undertake a revolutionary redesign of the way they fill vacancies and the way they approach work, for some it’s as basic as allowing individuals to work at home as and when they need to,” says Marshall. “The majority of small businesses that operate flexible working do so because it makes good sense for their business and enables them to get the best out of their workforce.”
As small businesses grow, it can be easy for them to retain a strong culture of flexible working, as they’ve grown up with it and understand its benefits.
Simon La Fosse’s technology search firm, La Fosse Associates, has a staff of 70 and has been fourth in the Sunday Times Best 100 Companies to Work For for the past two years.
Allowing staff to do things in the way they want to do, that fits around their work schedule and family commitments inevitably reaps results, he argues. “Nobody came to work to do a bad job and you have got to remember that, so it’s easier to just give as an employer, and you find it comes back in spades,” he says. “The person who knows they are being trusted by you to do the right thing, invariably will do the right thing.”
A more flexible approach and even different skills are needed to manage teams who work flexibly, with a focus on employee effectiveness and output rather than simply clocking in and out. But La Fosse believes that this is a vital part of a successful business, anyway. “Any company that hasn’t got systems in place to measure output is a company that’s totally out of control,” he says. “Just making sure everyone turns up at the right time and stays late is lazy, rubbish management, really. It encourages presenteeism, which I think is appalling.”
It’s precisely this kind of culture change that small business owners and their employees are best placed to lead, Marshall insists. “Where we see it being a business and employer-led proposition, flexibility works fantastically,” he says. “Employers and employees are perfectly capable of coming together to develop different ways of working that allow both to get maximum benefit.”
Published June 2014
