Metropolitan Borough of Wirral
Social Services
Work-Life Balance? What balance?
From Care and Health Magazine, November 2002
www.careandhealth.com
Work-life balance is an ideal we would all share, but is it possible when service users need come first? Legislation on flexible working comes into force in April 2003. The Employment act 2002 contains statutory rights for employees to request flexible working. How is your organisation proposing to deal with this? Are you adopting the 'do minimum' approach? If so, it is a missed opportunity, as Wirral Social Services have proved.
When Rachel Robins joined Wirral Social Services in April 2001 as HR manager the challenges were the familiar ones, low morale, people working long hours, poor recruitment and retention and high absence. All common themes throughout the country. Little did Wirral Social Services know that within eighteen months of her appointment Rachel would have, quite literally, revolutionised the way they worked. It all started when she and her colleagues put together a DTI challenge fund bid for a work life balance project. They were delighted when funds were granted and they set about changing the shape of work, as everyone knew it.
They started by tendering for consultants to help them implement a flexible-working project. They did debate trying to go it alone but felt that they needed the help of people who knew, from experience elsewhere, that it could be done.
Swiftwork were the successful company and, in the form of Simon Phillips, arrived to start the ball rolling.
Rachel did wonder if it was possible to implement flexible working throughout an organisation with such diverse and complex work patterns. "Local government is often rigid or formal in its policies and procedures. We did have a flexi-time scheme but it had been written from the perspective of nine to five working. Our challenge was to revolutionise work patterns in a way which was relevant in emergency social work teams, in residential settings, for front line staff and managers alike."
Members and both Social Services and Corporate Policy and Personnel directors, Kevin Miller and Bob Williams, then took the very brave step of tearing up the rule book and allowing the project a completely free rein to innovate. This was essential to the project success. The project team knew this would be important at the time but with hindsight they feel it was absolutely vital to the success they achieved.
Rachel recalls, "We started with a set of only three ground-rules." Any suggestions for change should:
- Not increase the cost of service delivery
- Be open to everyone
- Not impact negatively on colleagues
Swiftwork promoted a team approach to the project, getting teams together for briefings and forming focus groups to get people thinking about how they could organise their work differently.
The project was launched with a work-life balance week. Everyone had to look at his or her work pattern and try to do something differently, even if it was only take proper lunch hours. In reality people leapt at the chance and did much more. One team providing 24-hour services tried self-rostering; others tried flexi-time or compressed working weeks.
At the end of the week staff felt they had had much more ownership of their work time and a new enthusiasm for team working and meetings. What followed, has been eighteen months of changes and initiatives, facilitated by Swiftwork, suggested by staff and co-ordinated by Rachel and her team.
At first managers were anxious about sustainability and service delivery. Managers were well supported through the early stages. Over forty attended an initial workshop. They were surprised by the possibilities that a work life balance approach could deliver for them.
So what is flexible working? Well in Wirral Social Services it is whatever makes sense to the team and obeys the three ground-rules. To a sceptic it sounds like a recipe for chaos but it works. How it works in practice is that all changes to staff work patterns are agreed as temporary variations to individuals contracts. These are then reviewed six monthly or when there is a change in the team. People have to accept that variations cannot be fixed forever as this would inevitably have a negative impact on other team members as new people join or other peoples needs change.
"Temporary variations are the only way to ensure the ground-rules are met on an ongoing basis", believes Rachel. They also have the benefit of generating regular management reviews. Feedback from managers has been that they now spend much more time on managing teams than administrating them.
The balancing of elected members views was another challenge the team had to address. Especially when some teams embarked on radical schemes including compressing full time hours into four days. 'We had to make sure members realised that this did not mean they could make cuts. It is the hours put into the work not the number of days over, which it is spread that, is important. In fact people who are choosing their hours are less stressed and so work more effectively.'
In a recent project report filed with the DTI, Wirral Social Services has been able to demonstrate improvements against a series of measures of which, improvements in sickness rates (32% cost reduction), morale and retention of newer staff are examples.
Were there any down sides to the project? It did, at times, generate huge amounts of work for Rachel and her team processing contract variations but
they did feel it was worthwhile.
Did the front line staff feel the same way? The following are some comments from staff collected during the project evaluation.
Adoptions Team: "It works because team members talk to each other."
Childrens Team: "Extremely useful in reducing stress in the mornings... a huge difference to my working day."
Older Peoples Team: "Fantastic! This small change to our working lives has made a significant difference with regards to reducing stress levels and being able to balance home and work commitments."
Rachel says, "We wanted to get away from the view that flexible working is just for women with children. We do not ask why a person wants to change. The whole point is to give people the opportunity of a better balanced life however they define that for themselves.
When we started the project, lots of awful work habits came out of the woodwork. It really made everyone look again at how they organised their job.
Simon Phillips (Swiftwork) has been very good. He has not done the work for us, but he has kept the project high on everyone's agenda. You also need the external knowledge a consultant brings to do things differently. Someone, who can say, have a look at this or that way of doing things."
Morale has definitely improved during the project. Corporate HR has been extremely supportive; they are now looking at how to take the project forward and spread it wider in the organisation.
Managers thought it would cause them work but it actually saved them time. How many management hours normally go into sorting out rotas for example?
People are now much more aware of what else the council offers, career breaks and Carers provisions which were not well used previously.
The voluntary involvement of staff has been fantastic. We all know how hard it is to inspire people to be involved in projects, but everyone supported this one.
Our main achievement? A major cultural change in a very short space of time.
Any organisations who dare to be different can contact Wirral Social Services, or Swiftwork for more information on this project.