Resentment is the biggest obstacle preventing flexible working practices from taking off while bosses are more relaxed then they were, colleagues and line managers may bear a grudge; Carol Savage, founder of flexible work specialists Flexecutive, say’s it doesn’t have to be that way.
It all started with a belief that flexible working was all about mums. Somewhere along the line, employers and employees created a hierarchy of need for flexible requests which put mothers and carers near the top, and left work colleagues resentful that they were left holding the corporate baby while the working mum went home to the real one.
Thankfully things have moved on, and according to a recent survey that Flexecutive carried out in association with the Financial Mail on Sunday, most working men and women do not regard flexible working as an issue solely for parents and carers. Today they believe it should be an option for all employees – including senior management.
However, peer resentment is still an issue when a colleague takes up the right to work flexibly – so what is going wrong?
It all comes down to how much you think as a team. For some time now, the focus has been on the need for employers and employees to strike a mutually satisfactory chord to make flexibility work – boss gets a more motivated, committed and productive member of staff, and employee gets to reclaim some balance in their lives.
But as long as people think individually rather than in terms of what the team has to deliver, then people are going to get dumped on and resentment will fester. It is only when teams come together, agree how they want to work (how they all want to work) and how they deliver results to their board, that flexible working regimes start to deliver, and what is more, deliver ahead of traditional long-hours regimes.
My most recent work in this area has been with Avon Cosmetics, perhaps viewed as the original flexible working company because of its Avon ladies. The reality was that Avon had a substantial head office resource with an historic long-hours culture.
When a comprehensive staff survey revealed increased dissatisfaction with work-life balance, Flexecutive was called in to help HR manager Jo Jones and Work Life Project Manager Tracey Robson develop a business case for flexibility and make it live throughout the organisation.
After a series of focus groups, it became clear that a team-based approach to the problem could yield the best results. By allowing functional teams to determine their own rules and solutions, there would be greater ownership of these solutions across all levels, while overcoming the barrier of peer resentment, especially toward employees with children being considered a ‘special case’.
We suggested a pilot, initially focusing on the UK Marketing Department. This would create a safe environment to try new methods of working, create a big impact on a small scale, and overcome management – and full time colleague fears.
As a first step, the 15-strong marketing team identified their key issues for successful flexible working: the agreement of core hours required to service the business, the need to create trust and respect within the team, and the importance of support from both peers and senior management.
It was recognised that time was needed for both team interaction and inter-departmental communication, and that any new framework needed to deliver results. It was also recognised that the team needed to set their own rules for example, was it permissible to go to Tesco mid-morning if working from home?
The resulting plan, which they all agreed to stick to for a period of six months, comprised an allowance of flexible hours within a boundary of 7am to 7pm, with core hours 10-12 and 2-4. After three weeks, something very interesting happened.
Tracey Robson commented: “The core hours were found to be too restrictive, with little room for ad hoc changes, but it was interesting to see that it was the non-parents who raised the restrictive hours as unfair to mums who needed to pick their children up from school.”
The plans were adjusted accordingly and delivered success. Resentment had been replaced by co-operation based on mutual respect for each other’s after-hours lives.
We had the same positive experience when we worked with Centrica to help build stronger work teams with higher morale by getting everyone in the organisation involved in re-engineering their flexible work process, with the emphasis on team-based solutions.
There are 50 people and 3 teams in Centrica’s emerging markets department in Stockley Park, and this is where we started. Each team came up with a totally different solution to working flexibly, with different ground rules. Again, this was very powerful, because it catered for everyone’s needs, not just working parents.
“The key issue for the teams was to focus on what they needed to deliver, rather than what hours they were putting in,” explains Centrica programme co-ordinator Luc Warner, “ It then becomes a question of allowing the team to fit their own pieces of the puzzle together, and agree what tools they need in order to do their job in a new way. Instant messaging, for example was identified as an important communications tool.”
Each team, including managers then developed its own charter, with its own solutions – and then worked to it. One previously cynical employee commented, “That’s not flexible working – that’s just good management!”
The results of the first pilot were so positive, with a motivated, creatively reinvigorated team, that pilots have been rolled out to 3000 people in the company’s Corporate Centre in Windsor, and among 300 staff at Central Information Systems.
And the moral of these stories? Don’t create a hierarchy of need for flexible working. Focus on creating a way of working that best serves your customer needs.
Peer conflict comes from allowing one group of people to have flexible rights over another. When you recognise that you must start with a level playing field, then not only can you get rid of the Cinderella Syndrome, you can enhance productivity and motivation across the whole team.
