Making work work

Experimenting with flexible working in local government

Words by Denise van Blitterswijk, Inclusive Economy Project Officer at London Borough of Camden

Over the past few months we collectively experienced a dramatic alteration to our ‘normal’ work patterns. Everyone has been forced to quickly adapt to new ways of working, which has demanded an unprecedented reconfiguration of our work-life balance. The variety in how people have experienced this change, depending on their employment status, sector of work, and housing and family situation, has exposed the vast inequalities in our societies and in the world of work. Conversations about what the future of work should or could look like, already live with debate around trends of automation, have become more nuanced.

These changes also add urgency and opportunity to our existing ambition to play a leading role in ensuring that London’s labour market is characterised by inclusivity and flexibility rather than precarity and instability.

With work as we know it turned upside down, we decided that now is the right time to not only look outwards but also inwards, and walk the talk to make work work. This blog reflects on some of our experiences of a flexible workweek pilot for the Inclusive Economy and HR/OD Senior Management teams at Camden Council.

We are not unique

Ideas around alternate work patterns are anything but new, nor is the concept of a four-day workweek. The past decades have seen organisations and governments playing around with the idea and experimenting with different variations of a flexible workweek. In 2019’s General Election, Labour set out a shorter work week policy, which then became the topic of much debate. The Covid-19 pandemic, however, has accelerated thinking — recognising that the potential economic, social, environmental and democratic benefits it could bring may help us create a better world of work going forward (summarised for example in the 4-day workweek manifesto).

This has led to a proliferation of interest for the four-day week throughout the UK — including Scottish First Minister encouraging businesses to introduce a four-day week; a cross-party group urging government to consider it more widely for the UK; the Welsh Future Generations Commission advocating for piloting a four-day week; and a report making the case for Liverpool to transition to a compressed model. A recent study makes the case for a shorter workweek specifically as part of recovery strategies to mitigate the expected rise in unemployment.

Despite the enthusiasm and ambition, we need to remind ourselves that a four-day workweek is not a silver bullet and is not straightforward — we have seen other organisations like the Wellcome Trust shelf plans for a trial after concluding that it is too operationally complex to implement.

So when we started thinking about how we could transition to a more flexible way of working ourselves, we decided that for this trial to work in two diverse services, we needed to start small, actively involve and consult our colleagues, measure impact, and be open and transparent throughout.

Designing our approach

The sudden and radical changes to our ways of working have put us through a huge learning curve. Whether we liked it or not, we all have had to find new ways to connect and collaborate — on reflection, this prepared the ground for how we designed the flexible working pilot. We have been having open conversations about our experiences of the lockdown transition and asked colleagues to express their needs and concerns, and used these insights to design a 3-month pilot for a flexible workweek.

Restating that there is not a one-size-fits-all approach, there have been slight differences in the way we designed the trials for the two participating services, and also within services we have seen teams take different approaches to introducing the pilot. Nevertheless, we based the design of the flexible working pilot on key shared values:

• Flexibility and autonomy: the flexible arrangement is not prescriptive, but allows people to choose to work in a way that works best for themselves, colleagues, and customers. For some people this means a compressed four-day week, for others this means working more flexibly over five days. Participation in the trial is fully optional for both services, and anyone can drop out at any point.
• Collaboration and service delivery: the pilot is open to everyone in the service, and we actively work together with both internal and external partners to shape and reflect on the pilot. We carefully consider the impact the new ways of working might have, not just on our staff but also our service users and wider communities. We are finding the best ways to ensure consistent service delivery across the board, whilst balancing flex working within different teams.
• Learn and adjust: we measure the impact along the way, and have regular check-ins to understand developments — and adjust where necessary.

Learning as we go

Halfway through the pilot, colleagues who took part report they are more focused, experience efficiency gains, and have more time to relax and switch off. Perhaps unsurprisingly, people feel that having one extra day off — or being allowed to work flexibly more generally — makes a stark positive difference to their physical and mental wellbeing. Those people who decided not to participate in the trial report that they feel like they benefit from having a day to focus on their projects without distractions from meetings.

Of course, it hasn’t been flawless — longer working days can feel more intense and there is a sense of meeting fatigue, particularly with the risk that meetings are squeezed into fewer days. Importantly, we need to be aware that it is not just about changing where and when we work, but more widely about how we work. It is key to avoid simply replicating “normal” working patterns but over different hours; for this to work and to be genuinely inclusive, we need to challenge ourselves to go further than looking at flexibility merely as time and place.

This also means that when we do go back to the office, and we want our flexible working approach to remain sustainable, we need to be careful not to fall back into old patterns. Like many other organisations, Camden has agreed we will not try and go back to the way we worked prior to the lockdown, but we continue to support the greater flexibility people have been benefitting from and use our workplaces for face to face connection and collaboration.

Whilst the ambition is there, it still needs working out how we can achieve this in practice. We are learning from the flexible working pilot and the lessons learnt from the Covid-19 response in our borough. We are also reviewing how our HR policies and processes can be adapted to facilitate new, flexible ways of working and how they can help us get rid of the remnants of a presenteeism culture. Ultimately, it’s about having the right policies in place to empower employees to work in a way that works for everyone — but that can also act decisively if it doesn’t.

What’s next

On a whole the experiences have been largely positive so far — but we have another few weeks to go until we can fully reflect on the pilot as a whole. We will continue to collect data, dig deeper into individual experiences, and understand the impact this trial has had on key measures like wellbeing, productivity and collaboration.

We realise that we are lucky to be in a position to experiment with different and more flexible working arrangements, but we know the experiences of the two services are not representative of all other services and teams across Camden or local government more widely. We will commit to sharing our learnings and hope that this can serve as a testbed and that our experiences (whether positive or negative) can spur further thinking about a future of work that works better for everyone.