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14 November 2006
The views expressed here are the personal views of the participants and are not necessarily the views of their organisations.
The following people were present at this fe3 mindstretch®:
Karen introduced the mindstretch®, with a special welcome to Carol and Sue from FlexWorks who would be giving the benefit of their considerable experience on the subject of flexible working, and also discussing a case study.
The session began with some very brief background details on the rise of flexible working. While flexible working has been around from the early 1980s, it’s very likely that increased attention to the subject is a result of the Employment Act 2002. This legally entitles Britain’s 4.2million parents with a child under 6 or a disabled child under 18 to request to work the hours that suit them, on the days they want, at the place of their choice.
The new laws also increased maternity leave, introduced paternity leave and also a new adoption leave. Employers do not HAVE to comply, but if they refuse, it must be on the grounds of at one of the following:
Blindly axing valuable skilled employees is proven to be ultimately counter-productive, debilitating the business in the long term. It may also lead to inflated overtime bills (less people to do the same work), a decline in morale and also in productivity. Flexible working has been hailed as a antidote to this, identifying areas of low productivity and ineffective time, enabling you to target manpower more effectively and cut overtime bills.
Employee retention and recruitment has been important for some time, highlighted because of the increasing shortage of skills. A report published just this month by PriceWaterhouseCooper indicates that technology salaries are rising because of a global skills shortage, and Karen also noted that a recent report in the FT had stated that oil and gas production in the North Sea is being hampered by a lack of engineering and professional skills.
There are also a number of external factors which have increased pressure for flexible working; the demand for a better work-life balance and the rise of stress are two factors, but by far the largest – and inescapable – element of the work environment is that of the age demographic. In the UK, by 2012, the CBI estimates that only one third of the workforce will be under 45 and male. In 2003, one in 20 women provide more than 50 hours of care per week, and at this time, three million people were combining unpaid care and paid work. By the year 2020, there will be 7 million people aged 75 and over, the majority of them cared for by women.
Karen then gave some brief descriptors of “flexible working” and then gave an overview of the forms that flexible working took, with which most people were familiar. She made the point that team-based self-rostering sounded suspiciously like self managed teams.
She then asked the group that if this is what the definition of flexible working was, and these were the practical applications of it – what barriers were there in putting it in to the workplace. Participants came up with:
Going into some of these issues in more detail , Karen said that to some extent, the arrival of a flexible working revolution has been overstated - TUC data shows only 1 in seven UK employees able to work from home occasionally, and only 1 in 10 able to work flexibly.
She thought that the issue of flexible working was gendered on two fronts – firstly that flexible working more often than not is said in the same breath as caring responsibilities, children and women. Secondly, it is ironic that flexible working is often flagged up as an important strategy for gender equality in the workplace. Women questioned in a study looking at accountancy (Smithson et al 2004) were clear that their take up of flexible working arrangements meant a lower salary and career prospects – and men often shy away from asking for flexible working for just those reason. According to Stephens et al (2004) men are more likely than women to consider that flexible working would damage their career practices.
Looking at remote working raised a particular set of issues. One of these was the blurring of the boundary between home and work; given the incidence of women taking up flexible working, some Marxist critics have commented that the blurring of work and home in fact compounds the double-burden of women (work unpaid, work paid); the prevailing idea and practice of work assumes that men have no domestic/care responsibilities.
Taking issue with the point of gender, participants expressed a view that it was important to divorce flexible working from the statutory and legislative framework and move it on to the business improvement agenda, making it central rather than peripheral or compliance-based. The term, Helen suggested, should be changed from flexible working to “intelligent” working, as suggested by Flexworks and the business benefit emphasised.
Also in connection with flexible working were issues of employee visibility. Processes of managerial supervision have rested on the visibility and presence of workers with designated workspaces. The physical office space acts as source of self-discipline and surveillance by others.
As a result, home-located working is problematic for these conventional management strategies for two reasons; the first is employees who work at home are located in a private space that is a source of personal identity and autonomy – home may provide a basis for evading or resisting managerial overview.
The second reason, as mentioned by participants, is that time spent away from the office tends to undermine the corporate culture practices which are used to develop commitment and loyalty to the employer.
Sue said that it was important to develop social practices to maintain the bond between office-based workers and those who worked remotely, such as field sales staff; a number of people agreed and gave examples.
The impact of remote working on the psychological contract, Karen felt, had yet to be fully appreciated, regardless of management attempts to maintain a cultural bond between the employee and the organisation. She quoted Felstead et al (2003), where many of the remote workers they interviewed considered themselves almost in the light of independent consultants; others felt that the organisation had forgotten them, and that they were not supported.
Moving onto her next point, Karen said that it struck her as common sense that without trust, much flexible working and home working in particular, is impossible. But trust is more likely from some managers rather than others; there are often mixed messages with surveillance techniques (logging on, call monitoring, use of intranet sites, email etc).
The group felt that one of the ways of developing a proxy for trust is to shift measurement from input to output.
Summarising, Karen thought that the whole subject of flexible working was prone to an inherent contradiction. While flexible working creates new ways of working, the prevailing cultures – which are based on a male perception of work – still reward the old ways of working. So employees who work flexibly – the vast majority of whom are women - are negatively affected in terms of pay, career progression and perception.
This provoked some debate; Carol Savage and Sue felt that from their own research, lots of men do want to work flexibly, although they agreed they were less likely to ask for reduced hours.
Carol Thwaites thought that there had to be an irresistible need for change and a commercial imperative given that the barriers to implementation were so significant. Mike agreed, and added that often this came from customers. In the case of Hyde Housing, more of their customers were now in work, increasing the demand for out of hours conversations with association staff.
Moving on to the positive benefits of flexible working , Carol Savage pointed out that often flexible working was seen as an end in itself and that actually, it should be viewed as a tool to achieve specific goals, not a box-ticking exercise. She said that when ParcelForce was short of drivers, it was this that led them to consider employing different types of workers on different types of contracts – to continue the service, rather than improve work life balance. Without this hard commercial rationale, there was a danger that flexible working would fall into the “too difficult” box.
She added that occasionally, a blocker to change was in mistaken perceptions of what the organisation “wanted”. In Avon for example, despite the push to help representatives work flexibly, the HR team worked from 9 to ten past five. They were adamant that not only was this appropriate but that everyone thought it was and didn’t want to change their working hours. However, when FlexWork asked the question, someone said they wouldn’t mind working late nights so they could tend their allotment one day a week.
There was some discussion about whether experienced, senior people who wanted to work only a couple of days a week provided a very different kind of competition for existing staff members. This might add to hesitation about the use of flexible workers.
Karen suggested that to some extent, while all of the benefits appeared very positive, these seemed insufficient to drive the flexible working agenda, given the lack of take-up among organisations. However, she thought that the drivers of change in the work environment were those which were out of the control of the corporations – that is, the demographic profile of the workforce.
Carol said that flexible working arranged on an individual basis can create chaos in an organisation and that ground rules for flexible working need to be put in place. She mentioned that individual arrangements with airline flight attendants resulted in not enough people to man the flights. When FlexWorks became involved in this organisation, they suggested that flexible working should be looked at on a team level, rather than an individual basis.
In Rhyme, employees could work where they liked as long as they were available to clients at all times, because they were “named contacts”. In an investment bank, changes in working hours were less to do with work life balance and more to do with workload efficiency. Carol explained that if you were a long term fund manager it doesn’t matter where you work as long as you come up with two good investment ideas a month. However, if you were a hedge fund manager and not at your desk when the client called, clients were likely to go to the competition. Those bankers working with the New York markets didn’t have to be in the office until the markets opened – at about midday UK time. So in this case, she said, it was more about fitting in with the job requirements.
In BP, flexibility was related to the financial reporting cycle, where not all parts of the cycle required staff there all the time.
In Centrica IS, presence in the office depended on the stage of the project and what’s been produced. For example, coding can be done anywhere, but testing requires you to be in the office.
In British Gas, a different perspective was required from managers and employees on what time was spent in the office. Carol also mentioned the issue that engineers in British Gas had about their service level agreements which they failed to meet in the winter; the use of annual hours enabled them to target working hours when more boilers were likely to break down (i.e. in the winter!) and give more time off in the summer – when there was no issue with SLAs.
Keith asked how she thought the manager role in the investment bank had changed as a result of different teams coming in at different times – would they need to be there all the time to see everyone? Would theirs be a 24hour role?
Carol compared this situation to the NHS, where although the service was provided 24/7, managers delegated authority to other team members when they weren’t physically present. She suggested that there would have to be more planning, less face to face work and more reporting.
Helen agreed, saying that in call centres, team managers don’t necessarily work the same shift as their teams. Going back to the investment bank, Keith commented that the command and control system that managers were used to using had been diluted and wondered how they coped. Carol said that this style wasn’t then really available to them but that one method of retaining control was through measuring outputs.
Paul commented that these examples seemed like very pragmatic solutions which were beneficial to the organisations, and wondered if there was an opportunity to look at flexible working in the context of wider HR strategies, which would make it more powerful.
At this point, Carol from Centrica said that this in effect, was what happened in their recent project. While property and HR might be strange bedfellows, the joint agendas made the rationale for the project very strong. From HR, the driver was to be an employer of choice, for which flexible working was a tool. In the case of property, their issue was an aging building well past its sell-by date which they didn’t want to replace. Their HQ in Windsor was under-utilised 50% of the time.
The Centrica HR team of twelve looked at BT and their experience of flexible working and decided to implement a pilot project which covered 250 people. Called Project Martini (Any time, any place, any where), the pilot wasn’t even completed when they were asked to implement the process over 3,000 people in Centrica.
The option to work flexibly wasn’t imposed, Carol stressed. The HR team were determined to give people the option to choose and in the end, only 40 people now work completely from home. The disruption in moving people in and out of offices was considerable. However Carol felt that the better work life balance they have achieved for people was an output from the process, rather than a driver.
The first part of the process was to identify what category of worker you were and this was based on examination of three elements – location, time and desk. For example, if you were at your desk for 60% of your time, you would be classed as office based. If you were away from your desk (at external meetings etc) for 60% of your time, you were classed as mobile.
Paul asked how much of this decision was, in fact mandatory.
Carol responded that there was a process of negotiation as to which category people would end up in. They believed that the decision would emerge through discussion, but Carol said that they met a lot of resistance from dinosaur managers who declared unilaterally that people would work from the office. This was countered by providing incentives for people working from home – for example, Broadband connections, lap-tops etc.
There was also a strong engagement process called the “Work Wise Journey” where the team came out of the process with a mandate for how the team would work to meet team and client requirements. This was followed by manager and team training.
The results have been very encouraging . Carol said one of the things she has learned from the process is the importance of asking teams to set their own measurements for success. She also noted that absence and sickness has gone down, and retention was up.
Answering some of the questions from mindstretch® participants, Carol said that the Inland Revenue had taken no interest in the benefits to workers, and that a Health and Safety video had been produced to help employees assess their environment, as well as a self-assessment form.
There was a question about people who really worked well at home – did they become disconnected from the business? She stressed that how managers manage is important to the success of people working at home, and that the manager influence was more important than either role or disposition (introversion/extraversion etc).
Centrica is now in the process of rolling out intelligent working to other parts of the business, for example, their call centres.
Carole Savage commented that in the first pilot, the process had forgotten the people left in the office – the support staff. It was important to try and give these people some form of flexibility, although they needed to be in the office.
Paul wondered if the importance of employer brand in these type of projects became even more pronounced, but also if there was some kind of Hawthorne effect on the pilot. Carol Savage agreed that they had all wondered if the last piece of research had been a little self-fulfilling, but that the long term impact had not yet been researched. She also said that yes, employer branding did become more important, but that the vast majority of people were working in the office for four days out of five, so it wasn’t such an issue with Centrica.
Carol Thwaites said that the ability to structure her workdays have made her more productive and that in the final analysis, it should be a business focused activity.
Paul suggested that the discussion had actually been less about work life balance and more about life balance. Tim added that it appeared that the HR role was facilitative and Carol Savage recommended that getting HR on board first was not a good idea, as it tended to weaken the commercial case. She also pointed out that not all roles are suitable for flexible working – teachers for example, have to be there when children need them, during the day. Carol Thwaites also added that Centrica never identified flexible working as a right.
Karen commented that the boundaries between work and home for some people were sacrosanct and following on from this, Ian asked what was known about the long term effects of flexible working. Carol Savage suggested that not knowing the long term effects was not really an excuse not to try it, but that evaluation was key.