Using our heads to solve your Reward challenges.
At Reward Heads we describe Total Reward as everything that an employee gets from their employer. Whilst that includes tangible financial elements like pay, bonus and benefits, that is also elements such as engaging work, development and flexibility.
And so reading the CIPD's latest report on flexible and hybrid working is enlightening. We very much see flexibility of time and place of work as enabling each employee to fulfil their potential, not just for themselves but the organisation. It is also a key way of tackling pay gaps by gender, ethnicity and disability.
Flexible working is clearly important to employees and pivotal to attracting and retaining workers, with 1.1 million employees reported as leaving a job due to lack of flexible working. It is noted as being particularly the case for younger workers. This group will represent an increasing proportion of the workforce in future years, suggesting that it is likely to be as important or more so in the future.
Perhaps due to its importance to employees and its impact on retention, hybrid working remains commonplace; around ¾ of employers have some kind of provision. Employers that provide it report positive impacts on recruitment and retention, diversity of talent, wellbeing, environment and business resilience.
Flexible working is not without challenge, though. Employers report challenges of effective management, connection of employees to the organisation's purposes and impact on organisation culture. Successful implementation of flexible working will minimise these and maximise the positive impacts.
The data about return to the office is particularly interesting. With just over 10% of employers saying that they will either introduce return to workplace or mandate further returns, it might appear on the surface that employers are largely comfortable with flexible working. However, half of the organisations that offered hybrid working had put in place incentives to encourage employees back to the workplace, and half of employees believed that there was pressure to spend more time in the workplace. This appears to paint a picture of many employers wanting the above benefits of offering hybrid working, while actually preferring that their employees don't. Incentives to make going to the workplace more attractive are interesting in this respect, but hybrid in name only is perhaps more problematic.
The survey notes that access to flexible working is not equal, with it being more available to senior staff. A quarter believed that senior employees are more likely to work flexibly than junior staff. An unmet need on flexibility for those in front-line and customer facing roles is also noted. Clearly this is a group where remote working may not be achievable; of the three in five that said they provided flexibility to this group, the provision was timing based: flexibility in scheduling shifts and in start and finish times. This may be a preconception that more Senior people have more flexibility and not necessarily true. But if it is, that could point to a long-standing assumption that certain roles cannot be done from home (which was really challenged in lockdown). In fact it is often these lower paid roles were flexibility of time and place can be most valuable, fitting around childcare and other caring responsibilities, or even second jobs.
Around a fifth of employees said that Employment Relations (Flexible Working) Act 2023 and the day one right to flexible working had made their employers more likely to grant flexible working requests. Employers were also more likely to say the legislation had had a positive rather than negative effect for both their employees and the organisation. This is interesting given the earlier finding that some employers were trying to bring employees back to the workplace, be it through incentive, pressure or, in the case of a few, mandate. Some of this may be due to the clarity and levelling of the playing field which legislation brings, but perhaps is more likely to demonstrate how every workplace is different and what works for some will not work for another.
We firmly believe that flexibility of time and place is a core part of the Total Reward offer and really live that at Reward Heads, asking all new recruits at interview stage when they want to work and what their contract should look like to enable them to be most effective, and equally where they want to work. Almost without exception, they want to work from home.
But we are also clear that this is heavily influenced by the nature of the work and the culture of the organisation and one size does not fit all. This very much reflects our way of consulting - our projects are all bespoke and firmly rooted in the culture, values and expectations of the clients that we work with.
There are many different ways of delivering flexibility from compressed hours to part time to working from home and the key is to find what works for your employees.
In the context of ever increasing National Minimum Wage and costs like National Insurance impacting employers, as well as some steep increases in benefits costs like healthcare, something that is a low-cost high-value benefit is well worth considering.
If we can help you to make the most of flexibility options and all aspects of the reward package, please reach out on rewardsolutions@rewardheads.co.uk