The Christmas Present of Further Rights for Flexibility?

Just what is being proposed?

The Government’s proposal would drastically reduce the time period of current arrangements, where workers have to wait for twenty-six weeks of continuous service before they have the legal right to request flexible working arrangements, to essentially it being available as soon as you are employed. In addition, further changes proposed mean that two statutory requests could be made in any twelve-month period rather than one and that employers would legally have to respond to them within two months rather than three. The current requirement for the worker to explain the effect, if any, the change applied for would have on their work and how it may be dealt with is also being revoked, thus the onus of understanding the consequences is back with the employer.

There is no proposal to change the reasons why an employer can turn down such a request, these being:

• It will cost too much
• They cannot reorganise work among other staff
• They cannot recruit more staff
• There will be a negative effect on quality
• There will be a negative effect on the business’ ability to meet customer demand
• There will be a negative effect on performance
• There’s not enough work for you to do when you’ve requested to work
• There are planned changes to the business and the employer thinks the request will not fit with these plans

All of this would mean that the process and timing of requests for flexible working from an employee are simplified and speeded up, and this mostly has cross party support, although many employee organisations still maintain that it still does not go far enough. The chief executive of the CIPD has said that the new measures would be an important first step and that they had been campaigning for this as a day one right for some time to create fairer, more inclusive workplaces. He added that it would be likely to be of particular benefit to older workers and those with caring responsibilities, enabling organisations to attract and retain more diverse types of workers boosting productivity and agility.

There are further proposals included involving removal of exclusivity clauses with those on lower wages meaning that they would now be able to work for more than a single employer.

Although some see this as no more than a simple paper exercise that employers will simply dismiss, via the above reasons, or that employees will be too reluctant to bring up during interview or probationary period, there is the possibility that it may lead to organisations being more amiable to offer compromise if not able to completely fulfil requests. As the size of the UK workforce declines is this further evidence of the shift in power balance towards the workers? Must organisations now take employees seriously if they want to attract and maintain valuable staff, enough is enough?

So, who could benefit from new flexibilities?

All forms of flexibility can be of benefit to workers as well as employers, this can take many forms (see below). If we consider the worker – employee relationship as a contract, then if the flexible working proposed benefits both sides of the contract whatever form it takes then there is more likely to be a positive outcome.

There may be a short term benefit to the employee if we tip the balance to increase their freedom to work when and where they like – however if this is tipped too far, then this may have detrimental effects to the viability of the business. Just as tipping it the other way, may have just as many implications on the attraction, retention, and maintaining goodwill of the workforce.

So, ideally flexibility must benefit both the business and the worker, and this may mean working differently than organisations have in the past, but the balance must be maintained between flexibility, a decent reward, security for the employee and long term strategic planning for the employer.

What are the options?

To expand on some of the possibilities of flexible working that fall under this increased right to request:

This is by no means exhaustive, and it must be noted that parts of each of these could be in effect mixed together to create hybrid working designs.

Some of these concepts may be familiar, others less so

• Part-time working: employers are contracted to work anything less than what constitutes full-time hours.
• Term-time working: a worker has a permanent contract but is planned to be off work, either paid or unpaid leave during school holidays.
• Job-sharing: two people share a job between them, often providing the same cover as a single full-time employee.
• Flexitime: employees are given the flexibility, within certain set limits, when to begin and end work often combined with banks of hours that can be worked/ taken off on future days.
• Reduced hours: This could include either reducing hours for reduced pay, or the current trend of the four-day week where hours are reduced but pay, and effectively work output, are not.
• Compressed hours: This is simply a method of changing shifts into longer blocks meaning that fewer days at work are necessary. For example, 4 x 10 hour shifts over Mon-Fri rather than 5 x 8 hour shifts over the full working week, or the nine-day fortnight.
• Annualised hours: the total number of hours to be worked over the year is fixed but there is often a variation over the year in planned hours to be worked meaning that when the work requirement is greater in a “peak” season more hours are planned and likewise in “trough” fewer hours are required. This is often planned with time off rostered into the shift pattern in advance to better plan this variation over the year. Some hours can be kept back to allow for further flexibility (known as reserve hours)
• Zero-hours contracts: an individual has no guarantee of a minimum number of working hours, so they can be called upon as and when required and paid just for the hours they work. As people have realised how demoralising this could be more businesses are distancing themselves from the concept by introducing a slightly more principled minimum hours contract.

Often some of these flexible working arrangements can be informal, but other more complex methodologies that require notice periods and rules to allow proper functionality may require formalising within the contract of employment, with guidelines explaining roles and responsibilities as to how the flexibility is to be managed. As with the four-day week and working from home not all these concepts will be a good fit for all jobs (working from home has been popular since the pandemic, but perhaps on the wane in this time of excessive heating costs?)

Managing the complex

As ways of working become more varied it has never been more important to understand your employees and any issues they have, as well as how they are contributing to the good of the business. Although much of this may be through output rather than hours contribution it is an essential part of the jigsaw in understanding what is happening within your workplace. Crown’s workforce management system allows you to harness this data and drives unparalleled corporate-level intelligent data analysis.

• Integration with Microsoft Power BI® presents enormous amounts of time and attendance data, captured from every level of an organisation, in simple graphical form
• Create dashboards showing the top-level insights you need with just one click, allow these dashboards to be analysed simply by driving down into lower levels
• Transform your data into easy-to-understand business facts
• Dashboards (with the ability to dig down into the data) created by the leadership team can be shared across the entire organisation
• Combine multiple data sources into one true database
• No matter where your data flows from (including third party ERP and HR systems), we can take everything into account
• Report accurately in whatever building blocks are appropriate, hours, headcount, or monetary cost etc.
• Automatically “roll up” data into daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual views, with year-on-year trending
• ‘Slice-and-dice’ data by many useful attributes without needing knowledge of complex data structure
• Interpret data from every part of our workforce management system

Bringing all this accurate and relevant data will help you to manage and make better decisions that boost efficiency and keep you in control of workforce costs, giving you more information and understanding of your workplace – all of which will inform you whether or not it would be acceptable to grant future requests for flexibility.

To find out more about Crown's Workforce Management system
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