Empowering teams to decide for themselves their working patterns has proved a huge success at SLAB. "Overall" says Moira Williamson, Personnel Manager, "the surprise was how quickly the majority of employees took to the flexibility and never looked back."
The board's 330 employees range from solicitors and accountants to mailroom and security staff, and handle around 400,000 grants for legal assistance, processing a net expenditure of over £150 million every year. Almost all the staff are based at the Edinburgh head office.
The results from the pilots showed an overwhelming success in both business and people terms. Most have shown enhanced service delivery, reduced short-term sickness and improved morale. Swiftwork assisted the Board with Phase 1, from October 2001 to October 2002. Sustainability of the methodology introduced by Swiftwork is demonstrated by the continuing improvements that the Board has achieved. Indeed the outcomes are so dramatic in terms of business performance, employee morale and customer satisfaction that the Board won the prestigious LloydsTSB Scotland Employer of the Year Award in November 2005.
Some headline results are as follows:
- Staff turnover: down by 10% after Phase 1 and by a further 44% after Phase 2;
- Self-certified sickness absence: 19.4% reduction after Phase 1 and by a further 11% after Phase 2;
- Recruitment advertising / agency cost: down by over 72%
- All pilots showed improvements in productivity / performance against a backdrop of a 45% reduction in overtime costs;
- Pre and post project staff satisfaction surveys show that 87% staff now feel the organisation creates a good work-life balance for its staff (53% in 2001) and 89% agree that they enjoy working for the organisation (67% previously).
Moira Williamson puts some of this productivity gain down to the fact that handing over to teams the responsibility of managing their own workloads had brought the Board to the elusive holy grail of HR: employee empowerment. "People would come up with comments like 'I feel trusted' or 'I feel in control'," she recalls.
Aims
"We had a multitude of reasons for pursuing work-life balance," says Moira. "When the decision was taken in 2001 to apply to the DTI Work-Life Balance Challenge Fund, the Board had been through a period of substantial organisational and other change. With employment levels low in Edinburgh, the recruitment market was tight. Many of the Board's staff were young people, working full-time. They had opportunities to move to new jobs and staff turnover was relatively high. In a market which is very competitive on basic salaries, we wanted to be attractive to potential employees in other ways as well."
The Board was also aiming to increase its customer focus as part of a package of business improvements. "People needing access to legal aid are often experiencing life difficulties. We wanted a more mixed employee age profile so that we could empathise better with our clients and provide an improved service," says Moira. Equally important were the quality and efficiency improvements the Board was confident a new culture of flexibility and creativity would provide.
Key Initiatives
To begin with, Swiftwork organised a series of focus groups with staff to identify their key work-life balance issues. This gave clear identity to the project and provided the framework for a continuing programme of communications to educate staff about work-life balance and to give examples of the options available. Such communications were necessary because the focus groups and the Board's own staff opinion research had shown that knowledge of work-life balance issues was poor.
A series of workshops for managers was also held. Traditionally, their approach to managing time had been reactive, policing the existing, rigid flexitime system. They also shared the general ignorance of work-life balance issues. The management workshops increased managers' understanding of the business benefits of improved work-life balance and gave them the confidence to manage realistic and appropriate work-life balance solutions in their teams. Equally, the workshops helped managers recognise and address their own work-life balance issues.
Pilot Projects
The focus groups and management workshops prepared the ground for a series of pilot work-life balance projects. The Executive Team took the decision to actively encourage all parts of the organisation to participate and share in the benefits of the project. Teams were urged to take the lead by putting their heads together and arriving at practical work-life balance solutions that they could then discuss with their manager and put forward for consideration as one of the pilots. Each team agreed amongst themselves their service hours, cover and other working arrangements.
"Before the project started, I had imagined having perhaps four to six pilot schemes covering standard flexible working arrangements. However, we got 19 pilot proposals in the initial wave from teams who had each arrived at their own individual solution," says Moira.
Each team who made a proposal got together with the HR department and the Swiftwork in a 'surgery' to discuss their ideas. The surgery also briefed the teams on developing implementation plans that included details of how the success of the pilot would be measured.
Analysis of the pilot proposals showed that the Board's offices needed to be open from 07:00 to 21:00, Monday to Friday, to accommodate flexible working. The Executive Team quantified the costs and satisfied themselves of the benefit.
By the end of March 2002 all the 19 pilots had gone live. Three new proposals have subsequently been received and the initiative "is growing like topsy," says Moira.
The pilots covered a range of work-life balance solutions:
- Enhanced flexible working - various schemes: including the abolition or reduction of core hours; and flexible hours including starting earlier in the morning and working later in the evening;
- Compressed hours - four-day weeks and nine-day fortnights;
- Homeworking - on either a regular or an occasional basis.
Many teams are operating combinations of two or more of these three broad categories to meet the individual needs of team members, whilst maintaining their required cover during 'team service hours' - hours when they must be available to their internal or external customers.
Key Outcomes
Follow-up meetings with the teams were held to review progress. "Overall, all the pilots are working well and the teams are very happy," says Moira.
Some teams found it difficult to establish new working patterns without any company 'rules'. Equally, some managers found it hard to let go and difficult to allocate work without having standard rules on working hours applicable across their team. In general, however, the reviews showed that the teams have welcomed the experience of working more closely together and being more dependent on each other. All feel that they are able to deliver a better service.
Because individual team members have to provide cover for each other the new working arrangements have also meant greater sharing of knowledge and expertise.
"This has given our work environment a completely different feel. We now operate as a team and have much wider knowledge of all areas of the solicitors' work," says Carol Scott, Legal Secretary.
"Our new way of working has meant we are more open and honest in our communications. We have to get together as a team and plan how we will provide our service. The honesty is essential as everyone's needs have to be met for it to work," says Yvonne Stuart, Executive Assistant.
"It's not all about people getting up early or working late," says Moira.
"We also have people who are going to the gym during the day and can benefit from off-peak membership. Another relatively new employee who was involved in voluntary work has been able to continue to meet her commitment to attend daytime meetings - she had previously thought she would have to give this up. We have always been keen to emphasize that that work-life balance is not just about single parents or people with domestic commitments. Everyone has work-life balance needs that the Board and other members of staff respect."
"Equally, we have always stressed that work-life balance is also about improving our productivity, efficiency and levels of customer service. It can only be successful if it is a win-win situation," says Moira.
The new arrangements have indeed resulted in a rise in productivity, partly because some staff are working outside their 'team service hours', providing valuable quiet time during which their output increases. The new work-life balance arrangements have also gone a long way to changing the Board's traditional long hours culture. "We're doing the same amount or more work, but in fewer hours," says Moira.
Overall, the work-life balance pilots are resulting in a greater engagement of both team members and team leaders with each other and with the way in which they plan and deliver their service. "It's nice to feel you're being trusted," says Lindsay Brown, Policy Officer.
"I'm now more involved and aware of the hours available in advance. It provides much better management information," adds Stuart Reid, Team Leader.
Phase 2: Further Developments
"The second phase was always going to be more challenging, since we had to open it up to everyone," says Moira Williamson. The take-up was very high across the organisation, with early opening particularly popular - a survey in 2004 found around half of all staff welcomed the chance to start before 8am.
The Phase 2 trials started in April 2003 and were formally reviewed a year later. A report detailed a range of further improvements in business measures plus positive comments from interviews with the teams and separately with their managers. Moira was able to report: "Flexible working...has helped to shift the culture to one that requires teamwork, and where productivity and job satisfaction have increased."
Another change was to rein in the homeworking until further developments in the technology can properly support it. Moira Williamson explains that part of the scheme had run away with them a little. In Phase 1 there had seemed no harm in allowing team members to opt to work at home informally using their own equipment so as to include an element of flexibility of place with the other hours-based choices. "We also thought in two or three years we would have the technology to make remote working easy and we could build up experience while we waited," she says.
Homeworking continued in Phase 2 on a similar ad-hoc basis, with employees allowed to stay home for a minority of their time once they had completed a health and safety self-assessment form. But the project review revealed that around 20% of 270 staff surveyed were teleworking regularly i.e. more than one a month.
Unlike the hours options, widespread homeworking is difficult to combine with the minimum cover arrangements that are the requirement for allowing teams to schedule their own work patterns and "some areas had left themselves a bit thin on the ground". She says the Board will not be able to include routine homeworking as a part of its new working arrangements until there are further developments in work systems, plus extra support and equipment for employees, in order for the Board to discharge its duty of care.
A further project is now to be set up to ensure this is formally taken forward. Letting homeworking go on informally would have meant the Board ran the risk of it becoming an implied condition of employees' contracts. So the homeworking option has been withdrawn from the formalised flexible working programme, though the business case will be kep under review.
Variation of Contract
Moira says she could not find any model for an employment contract that covered the hours flexibility the Board offers. Having taken legal advice, the HR team have drawn up a variation to employees' terms and conditions of employment that is effective from July 2005. This states that the full-time contractual core hours are 7 hours a day, 35 hours a week and that the Board has a right to insist anyone works the public opening hours of 9am to 5pm as a fallback position if the business demands it or an employee fails to manage their own hours, but that all employees, full and part-time, can access the benefit of flexible working.
Summary
Flexible working has ended up putting SLAB streets ahead of other public sector employers in its employment practices and promotion of work-life balance. "It's no longer a project," Moira says, "it's now part of our employees' terms and conditions and fundamental in supporting the way we run our business."