There’s much more to Flexible Working than the 4-day Week or Working from Home!

Recently the media has been inundated with stories about the four-day working week. Financial Times, The Times, Daily Mail, The Guardian, The Express and HR Grapevine to highlight a few.

Much of the copy is not new, there are a few more pilot schemes beginning later this year but the concept has been discussed at length previously – including in our blog, "The Four Day Week – It’s simply not that straight forward!”,  from August last year. 

So what else is possible?

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.

To expand on a few of these concepts…

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.

Compressed hours: Unlike the four-day week concept being heavily pushed compressed working 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 realized 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.

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 huge 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 of suitable future flexibilities possible.

To find out more about Crown's Workforce Management system contact one of our specialists today!