HR advice - permanent change to working hours?

[nickEcave]

I have been in my administrative job in HE for 5 years. I have a permanent contract for 17.5 hours per week which does not state the days to be worked. I used to be part of a jobshare, working the second half of the week (Wed lunchtime - 5.30pm on Friday). My jobshare partner left over 2 years ago and I agreed to take on an additional 6 hours a week, so I have been working 4 short days with one day off since then. The additional hours are agreed every 6 months and the current arrangement comes to an end in January.

Owing to changes in the department I have been told I will no longer have the extra hours after January and will revert to 17.5 hours. I am hoping to stay in the job and take on another job or training on the two days when I would not be working. However,I think my Head of Department would like me to leave the post so that it can be re-advertised at a lower grade. If she were to insist that the 17.5 hours were to be worked over 5 days rather than 3 then it would no longer be financially feasible for me to continue in the job. Does anyone know if they will have to put me back to my original days, even though these were locally agreed with my manager and not stipulated in my contract?

Tricky one, what (in writing or verbally) was agreed at the time you took on the extra hours about what would happen if and when they were no longer available, were you assured you would go back onto your previous working pattern or was it left open? Are the extra hours a distinct 'role' in themselves or is it more the case that it is additional work within the same role you have always done?

As you may know, things don't have to be written down to be part of your contractual terms and conditions of employment. They can become contractual through 'custom and practice'. So until you took on the extra hours it was clearly custom and practice that you worked 2.5 days whatever was or wasn't in the written contract. However depending on the nature of the agreement at the time you agreed the extra hours, and how closely the change in the number of days you work can be linked to the extra work, it may be that this is now overridden and custom and practice is that you work 4 days (for instance if you are clearly doing Task X on Mondays and Task X is part of the extra work which you'll no longer be doing, that is a clearer argument in favour of you not working Mondays anymore, if you see what I mean, whereas if it is all blended together it's harder to make that distinction).

And overriding this is that, if there is a sufficiently robust business reason, employers can override contractual T&Cs re working days regardless of the agreement of the employee/custom and practice anyway (sometimes called dismiss and re-engage legally). So depending on why it is that they are saying you now need to work 5 days rather than 3 you may or may not be able to successfully argue against it. However this is a bit of a nuclear option and HR would almost certainly advise her to try and compromise/agree a way forward or a compromise with you first of all, so there is hope!

But assuming the worst case scenario and your manager does push for this, how badly do you want to stay in this job? As an HR person, my primary advice to managers is to avoid messing with people's working hours/days if at all possible, but if there is a serious/intractable problem that can't be solved any other way and we need someone to work hours they really don't want to/can't, we sometimes have a quiet word about whether voluntary redundancy is of interest to them. I am not saying you are entitled to redundancy (you probably wouldn't be strictly speaking) and of course in academia as elsewhere money can be really tight so VR not always an option but it can be a way out...

Thanks *Maxelly", that's really helpful. I think it will come down to how badly the manager wants to regrade my post. Similar posts have been advertised a whole grade lower and as I am at the top of my grade and they could appoint at the bottom of the lower grade they have a financial incentive to try and get me to "move on". My additional hours are to assist with general workload, rather than being task-specific and were arranged to suit me as I was doing the department a favour by taking them on! I have continued to work my original agreed "pattern" for 5 years with the 6 additional hours as a top-up. The pattern that I believe the Manager will want, of working 3.5 hours a day over 5 days, is not one that anyone in the department has worked before.