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Operational barriers to flexible working

Anna

Social Enterprise Timewise has just set up an Innovation Unit with the intention of breaking down 'specific operational barriers' to flexible working that exist in some sectors.

I'm curious: do you work in a sector that has specific operational barriers which get in the way of offering flexible working?  If so which sector are you in? And what are those barriers?

Please share your experience.

  • in reply to Julia
    Thanks Julia. Yes I absolutely agree it depends on how flexibility is defined; and as I said the willingness to consider new options. I guess as skills shortages continue to bite we will all have to be more creative.
  • A third of my workforce is a field-based team of service engineers. They are based at home but work responsively all over the country, sometimes for up to 14-15 hours a day although we try hard to keep the average to a maximum of 55 hours per week, with a weekend/night-time rota for on-call. We have one female engineer; otherwise the team is a nice mix of ages and ethnicities.

    Every now and then I wonder how we could offer these roles greater flexibility (although, it has to be said, there's not much call for it), but I struggle to see how I could, for example, offer an engineer flexibility to work three days a week and then, every two months, be asking him or her to be on-call for seven days in a row. And if an engineer can only be on-call on the days he or she is due to work can we also reasonably ask them to be on-call at the weekend? If not, this becomes unfair to other engineers as we need to ask them to cover more days on-call to accommodate those who want to want shorter weeks.

    To a degree, the situation is just waiting for the first person in this to submit a flexible working request. Culturally, it's not something I expect from the current group, but they do like to surprise me...

    However, if anyone out there has a similar dispersed, technical workforce and has found a working model for flexibility, please do let me know!
  • in reply to Robey
    Hi Robey, there's been a lot of talk recently about encouraging fathers to be more involved in family life by encouraging greater takeup of paternity and shared parental leave so that may drive a request from your workforce.

    As a specialist in this area my advice would be to get them involved in developing the solution - they can often see possibilities which you may not.

    The thing about flexible working is it covers a wide range of different options to address different needs - not everyone has young children they want to see daily; but they may need flexibility for other reasons.

    Thanks for contributing to this debate and demonstrating that there are possibilities out there.