NEW! COVID-19 Response Kit
Keep connected with your people
Bespoke consulting package including:
- Corporate & crisis communications response (including employee communications, media, social media, intranet copy etc.)
- Leader communications support (email templates to leaders about what’s happening and their role)
- Team communications support (emails from leaders to teams about the latest updates and what they need to do)
- Flexible working e-guide (focusing on communication – connection – delivery practical tips, common questions, guidelines etc.
- Flexible working training (for leaders and for teams) delivered via Zoom.
Get in touch to find out more.
Flexible working capability building
Many organisations have flexible working policies, but in our experience, we tend to see a number of common challenges with embedding it as a cultural norm, including:
- Work being considered where you go, rather than what you do and achieve for your team, stakeholders, clients or customers.
- Inconsistency of access – it depends on who you work for you (whether your leader supports it and have the confidence and capability to manage a team that works flexibly) and which part of the organisation you’re in. This ad hoc access often creates a sense of ‘us versus them’ between teams and contributes to an overall perception of inequality.
- Penalisation for working flexibly – those who do work flexibly often report higher rates of productivity, but they feel they’re penalised for working flexibly as they’re not as visible by being in the office as others.
- Gender-skewed uptake – flexibility seen as something for working mums, rather than normalising it for a range of reasons and as available for all employees (without penalty).
Our approach to helping organisations embed flexible working as reason-neutral and available for everyone is based on the following available services:
- Flexibility audits – what is working well, where are the gaps, what is the demographic baseline and what is the cultural, behavioural, systemic and attitudinal change required to make ‘flex for everyone’ viable and realistic?
- A flexibility framework – based on a set of Guiding Principles, bespoke designed for each client, these set the foundation around which flexible working requests can be evaluated fairly. It also outlines a four-step approach for both employees and managers to follow to have productive and positive conversations while de-biasing decisions (prepare-discuss-test-review).
- A flexible working toolkit (one for managers, one for employees) combined with tip sheets e.g. ‘managing performance in teams that work flexibly’; ‘set up working from home for success’ etc.
- Flexible working workshop – this 2-hour session is bespoke-designed for each client, to help leaders understand the organisation’s guiding principles for flexible working, how to prepare for the conversation about flexible working and how to design, test and trial solutions with their teams while meeting the needs of all their stakeholders.
Interested in this capability? Get in touch and let’s discuss how this service offering can help your organisation embed diversity and inclusion as a strategic business imperative.