FlexForward24 Takeaways
In November we hosted FlexForward24, our annual forum bringing together professionals – passionate about flexible working and all that it encompasses, who share their knowledge, expertise and thoughts on how flexible working continues to evolve, it’s impact on our working and personal lives and their predictions for the next steps going into 2025. Our FlexForward events are attended by business owners, CEOs, MDs and HR Leaders who all appreciate the benefits of offering flexible working to their staff.
We were delighted to welcome back David Blackburn and Dr Charlotte Rae as our expert speakers. We have shared below an overview of David and Charlotte’s presentations, for those of you who weren’t able to join us.
David Blackburn – I am deeply passionate about flexibility, flexibility is central to the future of work. The Prime Minister is saying the single biggest objective of the government, (I’m not making any political observations here) is about productivity – so how do we get Britain working?
Some of the stuff I know that both Charlotte and I are going to touch on today is about flexibility, not just as a way of working, but actually how it should be central and the powerful impact that it has on addressing those productivity questions.
This is really about not just where and when we work, but about what work will look like in 2025 and in the next decade.
Dr Charlotte Rae – I’m an academic psychologist and when I saw those headlines about improved well-being, improved productivity and performance, I really wanted to understand more about the science and the mechanisms and the journey that staff are going on as they undertake that transformation.
So let’s start busting some myths in flexible working and the four day week.
David Blackburn
It is amazing to think that in March, we are five years on from the global pandemic and the national lockdown. Of course, the world of work has fundamentally changed in that time and I love the phrase about how the pendulum has shifted.
For those of us who’ve been doing human resources for as long as I have – almost 30 years this year, this is where we see this pattern coming in cycles, pendulum shifts, swings from academics talking about, mechanistic and humanistic trends in the way in which we think about the workplace and the organisation.
There was a massive swing post pandemic, talk was around employee well-being and health, the different style of leadership, the level of engagement that we need, the how the psychological contract itself has completely changed.
So where are we right now?
What do the numbers tell us about flexible work in the UK?
You’ll also, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 5-6 years, be aware of this whole idea about retention versus recruitment, we continue to live in one of the tightest labour markets in the UK post the Second World War.
The number that the recently published ‘CIPD Labour Market Outlook’ continued to highlight is the high percentages of hard to fill vacancies across multiple sectors.
Very much so in the healthcare sector, but also very true in education – so how does flexibility play into that challenge?
Another conversation that is that I’m having a lot and actually is part of the work that I’m doing right now with the Bank of England, as a senior advisor for skills and the evolution of their HR function, is thinking less about roles and more about skills.
So thinking about the individual as a whole person, as individual who we might employ in a specific role, will probably have skills that we’re not utilising, skills that we don’t tap into, skills that we could be leveraging.
If we think about our organisation as delivering outcomes and tasks and deploying our employees’ skills equally, what are the skills that we see emerging and how does that link to organisation culture. We have known for a very long time, that productivity drives customer service, customer experience, outcomes and profitability.
So I want to say absolutely upfront and I know that there have been lots of headlines about RTO, (I love that abbreviation!) Return To The Office.
So RTO that organisations have been mandating and that got a lot of traction, (mostly in the United States) but some degree in the UK too. The reality is that it isn’t borne out by the numbers.
The real data of the number of people who are working in a flexible way in the UK, I personally think and I when I was looking at the open data – I think it’s under reported.
Flexible working practise is now pretty standard across the UK.
You will know that the right to claim flexible working changed in April, 55% of employees in the first month (the CIPD reported) accessed their right to request flexible working.
Again, you’ll have read lots of headlines saying this is crippling employers, this is a bad thing, employers don’t really know what to do about it.
The CIPD figures just counter that because actually you’ll see that almost 2 thirds of those requests are accepted, so actually a big surge which we would expect and something that some of us and myself included campaign for, it’s involved in the Flex first campaign.
On the other side, what you see as well as the number of people actually exercising collective working is the expectation employees have.
A recent study by AEON (the power provider) 52% – more than half employees surveyed said, “I would only consider working for a company that offered flexible working”.
Why?
Because 76% say it helps their overall well-being and 2 thirds say it helps their work life balance.
And this is something that Charlotte’s going to tell you lots about because again, the scientific evidence, actually the science shows how it impacts well-being.
Now, why do we think, why should this be important? So that’s the reality of the landscape.
Flexible working is absolutely here to stay.
I feel like I’ve been saying that for the last four years, but it absolutely is. It continues to be a major factor in employee’s choices.
What employees are thinking about – and this data is from the global learning and development provider, Franklin Covey, not only is the world of work changing, the workforce is changing.
Now we can talk about the multi generation workforce – we know that it’s the first time that we have 5 generations working alongside each other. But really interestingly, what you see from those numbers is, for each generation are slightly different, but all workers actually think of having big thoughts about why would I stay with this employer? How likely am I to leave?
We know that one of the big drivers is around both personal development and flexibility, when and where I work is an important factor and these are some of the statistics that the Franklin Covey study looked at.
The financial reward is important, but I think it’s really interesting. Fulfilment and being myself, that’s really about equity, diversity and inclusion as part of the culture.
We’re going to come onto and talk about culture, a place where I feel that I truly belong and I can truly be myself. Do I have the autonomy and sort of control and if we think about autonomy, which we know is one of the intrinsic motivators, mastery of purpose, flexibility is about choice.
50% of people say not just when I work and where I work, about half of the respondents saying this is an important factor when I’m thinking about whether I want to change my workplace.
But that’s all happening at the same time, as in the global economy we know that we are short of skills.
That’s not just true of the UK, that is true globally.
There’s a huge amount of studies on this from the world, the World Economic Forum, from McKinsey to Gartner.
The skills based organisation is my new passion area to talk about and I talk about it quite a lot.
I spoke it about it at 2 events last week. If we think about the skills, this isn’t just the skills that we have today. In 2025, what are the skills that we need? Are they skills just for today or are employers struggling to find them.
But if we then start thinking about the skills for tomorrow and the World Economic Forum talks about 2030, McKinsey is already saying 2035. If we don’t have the right skills today, we definitely do not have the right skills for tomorrow. Whether it be teachers, healthcare workers, or in the AI space, which is omnipresent. Also in the data analysis arena, green technologies and learning technologies.
The list is very, very long.
CEOs are saying, “I’m concerned about the availability of skills sets, few organisations actually are doing this consistently, but what are we doing about it and who are the organisations that are doing something about it.
How does this link to flexibility? I’m going to bring that back round to us. Is this an idea about understanding the whole person? I’m not talking about the technical skill that somebody has.
I am talking about leadership skills and people skills and business skills, commercial drive or a passion for learning or adaptability.
So if I put you in a role which puts you in a box, which puts you in a chart and a kind of hierarchy, it doesn’t matter what organisation, actually you are a collection of skills which I can deploy against a task and an outcome. But in order to be able to do that, I need to understand the whole person and why is this important?
Because as we’ve said, we know that we work in a really tight labour market.
We know that the employees are making decisions about the organisations that they want to work for, where flexibility and culture is key.
This is a piece of research from Gartner that says one of the top HR priorities for 2025 – the number one is organisational culture that organisations are getting this right.
And when Charlotte busts her myths in a little bit, you will see, that amidst this, the noise that says the four day week is never going to work, that we must all get back to the office.
And one of the reasons about the office, and I’m very, very open in every talk I ever do, but I say, I absolutely believe that the office continues to happen in its place. But simply saying to people, get back to the office. the question your employees will ask is why?
- Why is that important?
- What am I going to get out of it?
- What am I learning?
And the thing often people say is, well, it’s impossible to manage or develop or maintain organisational culture in a hybrid working environment. I would say that’s absolutely not true.
Organisational culture can be maintained in a flexible working environment.
The only difference is it has to be more intentional. You don’t have necessarily do anything particularly different, but you do have to do something.
So in this world where everything is changing around us, we have a skill shortage.
– We have a challenge in our talent pipeline.
– We don’t have enough people to do the roles that we need.
These are the characteristics that they have identified about future ready workers.
And it’s really interesting that adaptability is right at the top. And what might I say for adaptability?
I might say flexibility, but actually these are absolutely synergies as concepts and ideas, and they are not alone because as Emma mentioned in the intro, I work with SHL, Savile and Holdsworth.
Savile and Holdsworth, if you don’t know, you’ve probably done a psychometric test by Savile and Holdsworth.
They’re the world’s largest provider of psychometric and adaptability assessments.
They have just done a piece of work and the number one they their findings absolutely echo this because what do they find?
Responsiveness to change and adaptability are the single most important behavioural traits, psychometric traits, human characteristics that help you to be deal with change better responds to change, be more impactful and effective in your role.
There is a common theme between all of the research, which is as Emma says is one of the reasons I love talking to Charlotte.
So ‘why would you not?’ is my simple answer. The right to request flexible working is here is not going to go anywhere. Employees continue to see increasingly flexibility as a priority. They have been using this in the choices they make about where they work.
So whether you have a talent shortage, the skills pipeline increases access to a more diverse range of candidates across the piece.
It helps you to narrow
- the gender pay gap
- the disability pay gap
Charlotte’s going to give you some mind blowing evidence to say it supports employer well-being.
We know that employees who are living healthy, happy, fulfilled lives are better employees who will deliver greater productivity for your organisation. It empowers adaptability and responsiveness to change, which loads of research is telling us are the single most important characteristics we need not just for today, but for tomorrow.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is me.
Dr Charlotte Rae
In the first section of my talk, I’m going to reflect on what we actually mean by that phrase, the 4-day week. There are different definitions and one thing I really want to communicate is the flexibility and the implementation of it. In the last part of my talk we’re going to look at the evidence base for the impact that it can have on staff.
If you have been paying attention to recent media headlines, you might have seen some messages like this.
– Rights to a four day week could be strengthened
– Labour’s four day week
But off the back of this I think it’s maybe encouraged a little bit of scaremongering around how the government are going to force everyone to do a 4-day week and a little bit of worry about that.
That is not what is happening here. Let’s unpack one of those headlines in a little bit more detail.
Workers in UK could get right to request a 4-day compressed week.
First let’s unpack requesting – some of you will know that from April this year, the previous government introduced legislation that means from day one you can request flexible working in your workplace.
And then the second part to unpack here is that compressed week.
What do we mean by a compressed hours 4-day week?
Well, broadly, I would say there are three main types of a four day week and compressed hours is shown in the middle there.
– So that’s where you do the same total number of contracted hours, but you just distribute them differently across the length of the working week.
– So you might move from working, say 5 standard length days to four longer days and you keep your original salary here.
There’s no reduction in how much time you spend at work, you’re just distributing those hours differently.
In contrast, we have what’s called working time reduction – 4-day week.
– Where you actually reduce the amount of time that you’re spending at work, but you keep your original salary
– So if we’re talking about a full time member of staff, they might go from working 5 standard length days to working 4 standard length days, but keep their original salary.
And this contrasts again where we’ve got part time working.
This is where you reduce the amount of time that you’re spending at work, but you also reduce your salary.
Now, there are a couple of distinctions here that it’s worth bearing in mind when it comes to that government legislation because what you can legally request from your employer now from day one of your employment is either a compressed hours four day, week or part time working.
There is no legal obligation for the employer to approve that, but there is the legal obligation for them to at least consider that request.
However, when you look at those definitions on the government website of what they consider to be flexible working, a working time reduction for what a week does not come under that current government definition.
And there’s been a lot of talk about the Employments Rights Bill that is currently in draft. I’ve highlighted here the essential message for us from that, which is they want to make flexible working the default, but forcing people to reduce time that their employees spend at work with no loss of salary, that is not what is on the table here.
So the government are absolutely not going to force everyone to do a reduced hours for a week.
That does not mean it isn’t necessarily a great thing to offer your employees, but you’re not going to be forced to do this.
It may be that this is something where you can stay ahead of the curve in terms of offering a benefit that other employers aren’t yet doing.
If you take away one thing from today, I want it to be the message that under this bracket of reduced hours, four day week, but it doesn’t capture the diversity of what’s going on in how people are implementing this. So some other models are a nine day fortnight or perhaps shorter days.
I always say there is many ways of doing this and organised because everyone’s operational needs are different and so it’s about identifying the shape and the flavour that is appropriate for you and the nature of the work that you’re doing. Really it’s about flexing that flex.
Now what I’m going to show you for the rest of the talk in terms of the data and the insights we’ve been gathering all come from the working time reduction bracket.
So they’ve had different implementations, but they’ve all got in common a reduction in time that staff are spending at work with no loss of salary and why would an employer do that? The benefits from the employee’s perspective are probably pretty obvious, but there are three main pillars of benefits that are why employers are considering doing this.
And these come under
- staff well-being
- performance and productivity
- recruitment and retention
David’s mentioned lots of these are really key in 2024 and are going to continue to be really key for enabling organisations to thrive by retaining skills. So what we’ve been doing in our research is we’ve been investigating, lots of aspects of what’s going on for people from how they’re feeling about work to mental health, to their sleep and even brain function with MRI brain scans.
I’m going to focus today on some of the results from our questionnaires, which are looking at staff well-being and performance and productivity.
And I won’t walk you through all the details of what we’re collecting, but this is just to show you that the trial unfolds over a period of time, firstly with a couple of baseline weeks when they’re on their original working patterns and then they switch to the new working pattern and continue that for period of 12 weeks.
So before I show you the data, I want to tell you about who has taken part in this research.
So first looking at employer sectors
And here I want to bust a little bit of a myth that the four day week could only be done in office jobs.
Oh, it could never work for us, you know, in a residential care setting because we need to cover a rota – 24/7.
It couldn’t work for us in manufacturing because, we need people on a production line in order to produce our key output.
So what I’m showing you here are the sectors of the employers who’ve taken part in our trials so far.
Now you can see that actually this is dominated by office jobs, marketing and professional services being the most common sectors, but by no means is this exclusively who has been trialling a four-day week or a nine day fortnight or shorter days – we have a residential care company in the trial, we have a brewery in the trial.
So you can absolutely do it whatever the type of sector, but the implementation of it and the practicality of it is going to look different for those different sectors.
So an office job we might be looking at how can you adopt AI or how can you change how you’re doing meetings, with the healthcare setting that they could look at the and finding the quieter times when you didn’t need quite so many staff on call.
There are always efficiencies that you can look at where, for example, there’s a delay with a handover.
So the four-day week is not only for office jobs, it’s for any sector, but your shape and implementation of it will be different according to the nature of the work that you’re doing.
Next, employer size, again, you can see a trend here where it’s dominated by SMEs, really quite small businesses where there’s a really high degree of trust and buy in from both the staff and the business owner. But we do have some larger employees in the trial. There’s another not shown here who just finished their trial who were 170 employees.
The main implication here is that the larger your team, the larger your organisation, the longer preparatory lead in you’re going to need because you’re going to need to think more carefully about how the different types of work within your organisation will be adapted and how you’ll still enable team collaboration.
So next looking at the actual implementations of the 4-day week in terms of 9-day fortnight, short hours of the arrangements, what did the new week look like for the employers?
And I think another common misconception people can have is or we couldn’t possibly do a 40 week because we need to maintain our opening hours.
Let’s imagine you know, a retail environment or hospitality environment.You don’t want to close off your sales.
Iyou think about retail or hospitality or a healthcare setting, hospitals are already staffed 24/7, but you don’t have a single member of staff working 24/7.
You have a rota, you have staff working some days and off on different days and that is what a lot of employers have done in our research programme.
The most common arrangement that people went for was having staff off on different days and this was often because they needed to cover a rota or they wanted to make sure that they could maintain their current opening hours or customer service coverage.
I think a lot of people assume a 4-day week means we have Fridays off, that’s a minority of employees. You can see here that’s four out of the 14 employers who who’ve completed their trials.
Some employers closed on a different day because that was their quieter day. So again, I want to convey there’s flexibility here. It’s about identifying the approach that is appropriate for you and the nature of the work that you’re doing.
So now let’s come on to looking at some of the effects that this has on staff. I’m now going to show you some of the data from our weekly questionnaires.
So what you’re looking at here in these graphs, the 1st 2 bars are when they were on their original working hours.
And then that dotted line is when they switch to the new working schedule and they continue that for a period of 12 weeks.
And then there’s another dotted line.
And then that final bar is 6 months on from the original end of the trial period to see what happens longer term.
Does the honeymoon period end and things rebound to where they were or are those benefits kind of preserved over time?
So on the left, that graph is showing you burnout
This is specifically work related burnout.
The sorts of questions that we ask are at the end of the day, I feel all used up or I just can’t bear the thought of going into work tomorrow.
So we can see that as soon as staff switch to the new working schedule, this starts to improve with burnout coming down, but it gets progressively better over time the longer that people have been on the new working schedule.
Then on the right there, we’ve got work engagement.
This is how enthusiastic and motivated you feel about work.
The sort of feeling of you’ve woken up in the morning, you think, oh, I’m, I’m looking forward to going to work today.
And so we can see a pattern of slowly but surely this steadily climbs week by week as people go through the trial and the longer that they’ve been on the new working schedule.
Next, this is sleep.
How frequently are you experiencing sleep problems?
And again, it shows a similar pattern.
It’s so interesting to see the, the timeline of this.
But as soon as people switch, this does start to improve quite rapidly within, you know, a couple of weeks.
But again, it gets progressively better as time goes on.
And we think one of the many reasons for that is an increase in what we call psychological detachment.
So that’s how easy you find it to switch off from work at the end of the working day.
Or have you still got your To Do List running through your mind as you’re drifting off to sleep?
And we can see a steady climb in that as people go through the trial.
Next, productivity.
Now we measure this in a number of ways.
There are pros and cons to different approaches here.
And so please feel free to ask me in the questions if, if that’s of interest
Do you think one approach to this that usefully cuts across different job roles and within an organisation is to ask staff to set themselves 5 work goals or tasks for the coming week ahead at the start of each week.
And then at the end of the week we ask them how well did they achieve those goals?
Essentially did they take off their To Do List And what we see here is that it takes a 2-3 weeks for people to warm up to this and for a good new routines to bed in and those efficiencies and to be found.
Then over time this this steadily climbs.
And overall it’s an average increase of about 7%.
So that’s not massive, but that’s 7% more that staff are getting done than previously.
So even if you weren’t concerned about the well-being aspect of this, there are some potential performance enhancements on here.
So in the final few slides, I just wanted to flesh out some of our results a little bit more in terms of that link between well-being and performance and productivity.
So I’m a psychologist and I think that there are two main psychological routes to getting that enhanced performance when people switch to a four day working week.
So one of these routes is because the brain is better rested and so the time that you are at work, you’re firing on all cylinders and you’re really able to maximise your cognitive output.
And there’s some hints that this might be going on in some of our data, because what we’ve found is the more that someone’s well-being improves when they switch to the four day week, nine day fortnight, shorter days, the more their productivity goes up.
So the more that someone’s burnout goes down and the more that their sleep quality goes up, the more their productivity improves.
And this was particularly strong for sleep.
So you can imagine how if you’re sleeping better next day at work, you’re going to be able to fire on all cylinders.
Next, we’ve looked at how well-being is associated with improvements in work engagement.
So that’s the enthusiasm and motivation for work.
Again, we’re seeing that the more someone’s burnout improves and the more that their sleep improves, the more that their engagement goes up.
And it’s particularly strong here for burnout.
So you can imagine feeling less burnt out.
Naturally you’re going to be more motivated and engaged and looking forward to work.
The other half of this equation is motivation.
Staff who have flexible working options are more motivated because there’s that kind of social contract with the employer. And when an employer offers something like a four day week, a nine day fortnight, a form of flexible working, that sends many cultural signals, it says I care about you and I care about optimising life outside of work and in work, that really helps create the buy in.
And with the four day week and nine day fortnight, there does need to be strong buy in from staff.
They need to engage in making efficiencies, they need to engage in effort for habit change, and they need to invest a little bit of cognitive effort in changing how they’re going about their working lives and routines, whether that’s changing how they’re approaching e-mail or thinking carefully about the production line and how they’re going to change a process to make it more efficient. Because of that need for buying from staff that you know that there’s that link there between an employer signalling we care about you and then the staff responding to that and saying great, you know, in return I’m going to give you good performance. So we think these are the kind of two routes to that enhanced performance on the four day week brains firing on all cylinders and that cultural buy in and motivation to find efficiencies.
So I’m just going to end by saying our research programme is very much still open and we help with early questions about feasibility and implementation through to helping staff find deficiencies with a piece of training work. Going into the trial phase, measuring what has the impact been for staff on well-being, on performance and productivity with a custom report for the employer.
So if you’re working with anyone as a client or, or if you’re here representing an organisation and you’re curious about trialling any of these things, we’re very much still open.
You could try working time reduction, you could trial compressed hours. We haven’t got much data there yet, but we’d really like to get the sample size up there to understand. Or what’s the magnitude of benefit on burnout on sleep for reduced hours four day week versus a compressed hours four day week? It may be a compressed hours is more feasible the nature of the work that you do and it may be that there’s still a flexible working benefit there of offering that as an option for staff.
We’d also love to get more data from control participants who don’t change their working hours.
So if you’re not ready to make a change, but you’d like a report from us on how well-being changes then and we’d love to hear from you there too.
I’d just like to finish by thanking academic colleagues who’ve been helping our research funders and the employers who’ve taken part. These are the employers whose data I’ve shown you here today and really looking forward to the discussion and questions.
If you would like to receive copies of David and Charlotte’s presentations, just drop an email to [email protected].
Or if you would like to learn more about how to implement flexible working, speak to [email protected].
If you would like to know more about taking part in the 4-Day week trial contact Charlotte Rae.
If you would like to know more about David Blackburn’s consultancy service click here.
