Flexible working post COVID

[TryingToBeFlexible]

Hi I run an office based business with 14 employees, 9 have been with me since before covid and the rest have been taken on in the past 18 months (we have grown and had a few staff retire). Prior to covid everyone was office based with fixed hours and were happy in their role.

7 of the staff work part-time, we are going to introduce a policy, when staff return, where if you work 5 days a week (these may be short days) you can WFH one day a week - booked in advance so we still have cover in the office. IMO we can only manage one day because of the high ratio of part-time staff. We have a couple of part-time staff that don’t work every day who want to work “flexibly” although they haven’t defined flexibly - as I understand it they want to work their hours on any day and at any time they feel like (including outside office hours of 9-5). They feel that because they worked well during covid at home they should be allowed this!

I feel like I’m at my wits end trying to please everyone, we get customers visiting the office and need staff cover to answer phones/cover drop ins. I have explained my reasons why we have set the policy and said it would be reviewed if we grow or have more full time staff. I’d happily consider a flexible working request for a fixed change of hours but can’t just let it be a free for all. By doing this we could be left with everyone decamping home on a sunny Friday afternoon! At the moment there are 3 of us in the office full time covering drop ins and clients and the rest at home.

Customer and staff expectations are so out of alignment, I just feel worn down, I try to please everyone and they just want more. We need all staff in the office as much as possible but appreciate that times have changed and we need to be more open to flexible working.

I guess I’m asking how to manage this, alter office hours from 8.30-5.30 so staff can maybe start a little earlier/later? We just aren’t big enough to allow a fully flexible work policy.

Can you allow the part-time staff one day wfh too?

But yes not unreasonable to say they have to work set days and times

You pay people more who have to be in the office.

I think you need to ask them to specifically request in writing what they want to do when you all return to normal office based working. Then you have to look through the requests and figure out what works.

I think a policy of the option to work one day a week at home is fine, with openness to flexible working requests that work for your business. If some people request instead that they want to work 7am-3pm 5 days a week, then you can consider whether you would have cover for that, taking into account everyone else's requests and what work everyone does (some many need to be office based more than others). But if you don't know what they want, I don't think you can make a decision.

My employer is very pro-flexible working. Everyone does it. No one is in the office 5 days a week and none of us work 9-5. It's just the norm in my industry. But there is no blanket policy except to say they are open to flexible working requests. When I started, I told them what I wanted to do: wfh half the week, core hours in the office on the other days, while working outside of core hours too (early mornings and evenings). You have to have people be explicit about what they want so you can decide on a case-by-case basis. Maybe given them all a deadline to submit a request to you and then you can decide on them all at once?

Pro rate the WFH time for part time staff so if someone works half a week they get two days from home in four weeks. Then everyone is treated fairly.

Yes they should all submit a formal flexible working request

Maybe it's just a question of managing their expectations. DH changed jobs during the pandemic, but although he has mainly been working from home so far but he doesn't expect it to stay that way.

The policy of only allowing a day WFH if you work five days is excluding part time staff. So I can see why they would be peed off at that.

Get everyone to make formal flexible working requests and see if/how you can make it fit. But you do need to make it clear to people there is a business need to be available in the office between certain hours and everyone will be expected to cover that.

Get everyone to make formal flexible working requests and see if/how you can make it fit. But you do need to make it clear to people there is a business need to be available in the office between certain hours and everyone will be expected to cover that

You can't do this, you cannot coerce people into using their formal flexible working requests unless they want to. You could certainly enforce contracts that they spend the whole time in the office, but of course any company that is reliant on a few full time staff to manage part time workers in the office is at risk if they lose the full time staff anyway, so you don't want to piss off the few.

You will likely need to pay people more to be in the office, it's just the reality of competing for workers when there are a lot of jobs that can be done more flexibly, good employees will leave for better offers.

I think you need to stop trying to please everyone and strengthen your management style a little. Work out what you need, what contracts currently say, get the flexible working requests in, agree to what you can accommodate and turn down what you can’t.

You can't do this, you cannot coerce people into using their formal flexible working requests unless they want to. ok so don't make them but say if they want to work flexibly they have to submit a request

Can you make it so it's one day work from home for every 5 days you work?

Spot on @mindutopia

Have you actually drawn up an illustrative model that shows how you plan to have enough cover in the office? I would work out how many 'sessions' you need to cover and then allocate them fairly across the staff (with a prorated allocation for part timers) and then see what is left over- this is the time that they could work at home.
There would need to be a contingency plan for sickness etc.

Fully flexible risks not having anyone in the office, while everyone in the office permanently means less flexibility.

What is the minimum number of people you need to provide cover you need in the office ? Do you need full cover for all office hours? Is there any advantage to being open for extended hours, of which people only have to do core hours on site.

Start a schedule , five days columns and rows to represent the people, initially just numbers 1 .. 14. Fill in the slots so you have the cover you need then spread the others across the time. You could even scheduled across a fortnight.

Then you will see what requests you can accommodate. Decide whether people can swap shifts and just tell you or all requests need to go though you. HTH

Where my DS works, they offered one day work at home and asked what days they would like. Most wanted Fridays off, a few for Monday and hardly any for mid week. You are going to cause problems whatever you do, so you are best suggesting what suits your Company best and not trying to suit everyone.

Surely everyone should get one day out of five to wfh?

If that isn't going to work, then you'll need to rethink.

Or 2 out of 10 for full time 1 out of 10 for part time?

@FinallyHere

Fully flexible risks not having anyone in the office, while everyone in the office permanently means less flexibility.

What is the minimum number of people you need to provide cover you need in the office ? Do you need full cover for all office hours? Is there any advantage to being open for extended hours, of which people only have to do core hours on site.

Start a schedule , five days columns and rows to represent the people, initially just numbers 1 .. 14. Fill in the slots so you have the cover you need then spread the others across the time. You could even scheduled across a fortnight.

Then you will see what requests you can accommodate. Decide whether people can swap shifts and just tell you or all requests need to go though you. HTH

Why don't you get them all into a meeting - show them this - and ask them to come up with a solution? Show them the problems clearly and ask them point blank how they expect it to work.

Sorry thanks for all the responses, I don’t think we are prejudiced against part time staff by letting staff that work 5 days work at home 1 day a week. We have 3 staff that work short hours 5 days a week so they are eligible too (the rest of the part time staff do 3 full days).

The main reason why I don’t want to have staff that work 3 days to work at home is communication, pre-covid the staff not working every day would say they missed out what was going on in the office on their days off - if they are only in 2 days a week that is even less time in the office and I’d just spend my time telling them what’s going on! They have been given the option of changing their hours over more days but they don’t want to.

For extending the working day, the problem is afternoons because the part time staff doing 5 days a week work until 2.30-3ish. We really need at least 3 people in the office but ideally more. If we did more flexible working almost everyone would choose to leave early.

The problem is most of the staff are happy with the new policy are looking forward to being back. We just have a couple of very vocal part time staff that keep on complaining to the happy staff and now they are starting to question why we can’t be more flexible. I feel like there are 15 of us with a significant number of part time and we can’t please everyone it just won’t work for the business. It’s much easier for Barclays Bank or Deloitte to decide to let everyone work from home and only those that want to be in cover the phones/customers because they have 20,000 staff!

If the job can be done from home (like it has been done for the past 18 months) then it seems a bit rubbish to expect people to come in 4 days a week. Peiole can surely answer phone calls from home

You may find yourself losing staff if you are going to be inflexible about it. Many people are enjoying the increased time and sense of wellbeimg they get from being in their own environment / not having to commute and a lot of places are moving to wfh/hybrid working now.

Also bear in mind when people say they miss important updates because they are out of the office means that your communication style across the office relies on people being there.

There may be better ways to communicate what's important, like a notice board, a virtual one that everyone can see. A way to interact on slack or teams of some similar technology.

We noticed when we're were sent to WFH that some some people (those who regularly had coffee breaks with the boss) no longer knew everything but everyone was on average better informed because more information was being shared intentionally rather than just filtering down.

The big corporates tend to have these systems already in place so have less disruption from distributed work forces.

You are treating part time staff differently from full time though, whether you think it or not. If they work 3 long day why couldn't they have a day at home every two weeks?

I think I'm also confused - presumably you need e.g. 2 people in the office on any given day?

So if you employed 3 people, 2 could each have 2 days one week at home and the other 1 and then rotate round once every 3 weeks. If you've got 5 people and only need two in the office at once you can each work 3 days from home. What is that means you can only allow staff one day from home?

I think your approach is very old fashioned and out of date with what employees will expect and look for post Covid. It's clear that's the case when you say that you think employees will "decamp home on a sunny Friday afternoon". It sounds to me like you don't actually trust your employees to be working when they aren't in the office. You say that your clients will expect people to be in the office when they drop in and that you need people to answer the phones. Why can't clients have the mobile numbers of employees to allow them to work from home or have a system that diverts to employees phones? It's not rocket science. And yes it's nice for clients to be able to pop in and see people but will this actually be the expectation post covid? Even if it is can't you adjust clients expectations so that they are aware your employees now work from home a lot of the time so visits should be booked in advance or if they are on the spot then there may only be a couple of people in the office? You could even put a positive spin on it by sending comms to your clients to say that because of employee and client feedback and because you are prioritising the mental health and well-being of your employees they will now be wfh more often.

Our new policy is that you can wfh 60% of your working hours and in the office the other 40%. You can also work flexibly within a normal working day to make it work for you. In reality employees tend not to work totally random hours because they need to be online when their colleagues are so they use their own maturity to make assessments about what is appropriate on any given day. Eg today I went to get my haircut at 10:30am but last night I worked until 9pm.

@TryingToBeFlexible

Sorry thanks for all the responses, I don’t think we are prejudiced against part time staff by letting staff that work 5 days work at home 1 day a week. We have 3 staff that work short hours 5 days a week so they are eligible too (the rest of the part time staff do 3 full days).

The main reason why I don’t want to have staff that work 3 days to work at home is communication, pre-covid the staff not working every day would say they missed out what was going on in the office on their days off - if they are only in 2 days a week that is even less time in the office and I’d just spend my time telling them what’s going on! They have been given the option of changing their hours over more days but they don’t want to.

For extending the working day, the problem is afternoons because the part time staff doing 5 days a week work until 2.30-3ish. We really need at least 3 people in the office but ideally more. If we did more flexible working almost everyone would choose to leave early.

The problem is most of the staff are happy with the new policy are looking forward to being back. We just have a couple of very vocal part time staff that keep on complaining to the happy staff and now they are starting to question why we can’t be more flexible. I feel like there are 15 of us with a significant number of part time and we can’t please everyone it just won’t work for the business. It’s much easier for Barclays Bank or Deloitte to decide to let everyone work from home and only those that want to be in cover the phones/customers because they have 20,000 staff!

Hi, We have true flexible working where we are. And the benefits of it for the organisation and staff far out weigh any issues that need ironing out. I think that there are issues you do need to address. Potentially, the blanket no flexibility re part time workers could be deemed as discriminatory. Secondly, if your reason is partly fuelled by communication and keeping staff informed, that's down to your poor management communication skills! And that needs addressing in another manner. I, personally, would look at this from a timetabling perspective. So, how many staff you need in the office, minimum for core hours and office opening hours. Do you really need a fully staffed office between 230 and 5? Would there really be a significant impact if this changed? (could be worth doing a study of how many visitors happen during that time). Presumably your telephone system is one that can be accessed from home and can be setup so that these automatically divert? Once you've looked at the above I'd split the day into 2 or 3 blocks, eg morning, lunch/middle of the day, afternoon. And arrange the staff based on current arrangements with the actual number truly needed. See how that pans out, whether you can cover this way. It could be for example, that actually your business would operate with all staff working 1/3 of their hours in the office eg 2 day for PT and 1.5 days for FT. Then you'd need to have a plan for how annual leave would be covered - possibly by putting the onus on the employees that they need to arrange cover for their in office days. If you realise you cannot do similar to above then I would be explaining formally to the staff why. Then I would state that legally they can apply for flexible working, that you'll consider all requests, but there will need to be suggestions for how to manage the issues that you perceived.