How to be a brilliant social enterprise employer: Make flexible working the default

Offering flexible working as default can give social enterprises with stretched budgets a competitive advantage when recruiting, as the majority of workers want the option but most jobs don’t currently offer it. 

That’s according to Jimmy van Santen from Roots HR, which specialises in human resources for social sector employers. 

Van Santen (pictured) cited a report published by the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission which found 91% of women and 83% of men either work flexibly or want to, whereas, only 9.8% of jobs are advertised as flexible at hiring stage. 

The Equality and Human Rights Commission report also found 400,000 people cannot work because there's a lack of flexibility in the roles that they can apply for. There are 1.5m people trapped in part-time roles, often in jobs they’re overqualified and underpaid for in comparison to their skills and experience, because there is no flexibility in the roles that they want to go into.

According to the Office for National Statistics, there are 11m ‘economically inactive’ people. Van Santen believed many of these people would be able to access work if it was available flexibly, for example the 1.1m 25 to 49-year-olds who currently don’t work because of caring responsibilities, about a million of whom are women.

Van Santen was speaking at the most recent SE100 Social Business Coffee Breaks webinar, on how to be a brilliant social enterprise employer, hosted by Pioneers Post founding editor Tim West. The Social Business coffee breaks webinars, organised in partnership with NatWest Social and Community Capital, aim to provide inspiration and practical advice to help social businesses to grow and thrive.
 

What are the benefits of offering flexible working?

Time flexibility and location flexibility were the two types of flexible working van Santen recommended social enterprises make default options. 

Time flexibility takes the form of having set operating hours for your business, for example 6am to 6pm, but enabling your staff to work their seven or eight hours within that period, at starting and finishing times of their choosing. This can include core hours to ensure the whole team is working at the same time at certain points. This can enable staff to plan personal tasks, such as dropping kids off at school, around their working hours. 

Location flexibility, or remote working, enables staff to work from home or another suitable location which isn’t the business’s primary location. How many days an employee works remotely can be chosen by the employee or set by the employer. 

Either form of flexible working offers a number of benefits, said van Santen. Crucially, he said studies demonstrated that flexible working increased employees’ work-life balance and productivity. 

He said that after doing pilots with clients, Roots HR had discovered that flexible working often led to increased productivity. He said: “Productivity actually was going up or remained largely the same, but it never went down despite fewer hours and remote working.”

Flexible working arrangements could offer reduced costs for both employers and employees, said van Santen. For employees, that might be reduced commuting costs, or less spent on food. For employers, if people were working remotely or on compressed hours, there might be less need for office space to accommodate the full staff team so they could downsize, reducing overheads. 

Van Santen added that there was evidence people were prepared to accept lower salaries for roles with flexible working arrangements. This was a big opportunity for social enterprises to create a competitive advantage by offering flexible working, as often their stretched resources meant they couldn’t offer higher salaries, he emphasised.  

Legal requirements and best practice on flexible working

Under the UK government’s Employment Rights (Flexible Working) Act 2023 employees can now make a flexible working request on the very first day of their employment, and can make two requests per year. An employer has a maximum of two months to deal with the request, including any appeals process. 

Van Santen offered his thoughts on best practice regarding flexible working requests, and how that went beyond the legal requirements:

• Make flexible working default for your organisation wherever possible. Change your mindset from ‘what are the legal requirements?’ to ‘how can we make this work?’
• Offer a consultation on any flexible working request (employers are only legally required to offer a consultation when they plan to deny a request). This will help you understand the reasons for the request and ensure the employee is aware of any consequences, eg reduced pay.
• Allow employees to bring a companion to a flexible working request consultation. This isn’t a legal requirement but changes the power dynamic of the consultation and makes employees feel more comfortable. Van Santen says most people are happy just to know it is an option and will attend on their own. 
• If unsure of whether to approve or deny a request, offer a three-month trial period to gather evidence.
• There are eight legally allowed business reasons for denying a flexible working request: extra costs that will damage the business; the work cannot be reorganised among other staff; people cannot be recruited to do the work; flexible working will affect quality; flexible working will affect performance; the business will not be able to meet customer demand; there’s a lack of work to do during the proposed working times and the business is planning changes to the workforce
• Have an appeals process. This isn’t a legal requirement, but adds checks and balances to the system, particularly if just one person is making the initial decision. 
• Aim to deal with requests more quickly than the legally allowed two months to reduce any anxiety an employee may have around the request.
• Ensure the request process is transparent and that employees know they have the right to make requests

Supporting teams with flexible working

Roots HR has found remote working employees, particularly those working remotely all the time, are at high risk of feeling disconnected from their employer and teams. But van Santen said that can be mitigated with good management. 

He emphasised the need to train managers in how to handle flexible working requests and how to manage flexible working teams, covering project management, performance management and ensuring staff wellbeing.

By putting in place a clear communication strategy and proactively highlighting the organisation’s mission and values, van Santen said you could make remote working employees feel included.

He said: “Here at Roots HR, for example, we have a real process in place where we use [Microsoft] Teams an awful lot. We have a real strategy in place to understand how we communicate in the best way possible, and to ensure that we still have that collaboration that’s still creative when we do projects. It’s an absolute key thing.”

Ensuring remote workers maintain a healthy work/life balance is a crucial role for managers, said van Santen, as it could quickly erode. He explained it was important to make sure remote working employees didn’t work outside of regular hours and mix their work life with their private life.

He said: “Make sure they take their time to to have their private life, to be with their family, be with their friends, and only work at the times that you would expect them to work, not in evenings or nights, because that’s often a much sign of much bigger issues and stress that they might face.”

For social enterprises considering offering flexible working to their staff, van Santen advised involving employees in informal consultation about how it could work. He says these conversations could be incredibly valuable in setting suitable practice and policies. 

   Links and resources:   

 Jimmy van Santen's webinar slides

 Template flexible working application form

 Factsheet - handling requests for flexible working

 Roots HR toolkits

 Roots HR offers a free hour-long consultation on HR matters

 To access a 25% discount on Roots HR’s flexible working policy, email Jimmy van Santen before 31 January