Flexible working

Parents and carers have to balance their commitment to working at the University with often considerable, complex responsibilities elsewhere.  Some form of flexible working may help with this.

What is flexible working?

Broadly speaking, it's a variation from a 'standard' working pattern such as the standard Monday-Friday 35 hour week.

Here are some examples of varying when you work, individually or as a team:

• Part-time or reduced working hours : for example 3 full days per week, or shorter days than standard.
• Job sharing : one full-time role is shared between two employees
• Condensed/compressed hours : working additional hours on certain days to allow a free day once a week or once a fortnight.
• Flexi-time and shift-swapping : selecting the hours worked within certain limits and by agreement within the team.

Examples of varying where you work could include:

• Alternate location : being based in a certain building might make it easier to get home, to school or to hospital for emergencies.
• Working from home on certain days.

Flexible solutions

Team member

As parent or carer, you may be:

• caring for disabled or elderly adults and/or young or disabled children, or
• managing other changes in personal circumstances

In balancing your working week, you may also be thinking about, for example, the impact of nursery fees or domiciliary care costs.

Line manager

Here, you could find that flexible working might:

• provide continuity (where the alternative might be to lose a skilled and experienced team member)
• if someone reduces their hours, make it possible to buy in complementary skills from another part-time employee
• give another team member the opportunity to upskill and take on new responsibilities
• better accommodate peaks and troughs in workload.

Across the team

As a team you can:

• re-evaluate how you operate overall, and perhaps find other opportunities for more efficient working
• use flexi-time or home working to save time and money by avoiding travel at peak times
• exploit widely-used technology such as Skype for discussions between colleagues in different locations.

Requesting flexible working

An employee has the legal right to formally request flexible working in certain circumstances. Rather than seeing flexible working as a 'problem' or 'demotion', the University regards it as a mutual opportunity for line managers or PIs and their staff to re-think to achieve a win-win outcome.

Your line manager should consider all requests on an individual basis and should be able to explain their decision.

Human Resources can provide further information on flexible working including flexi-time, job sharing and working from home, as well as the new shared parental leave. For more advice, contact your HR Manager .

Meanwhile, GOV.UK has produced a good overview of the options and benefits of flexible working, including an online tool for putting together a case. Another source is Working Families . Business Gateway provides a guide to the law and best practice.

When your children are older or other circumstances have again altered, you may seek to increase your hours. Approach this again as a potential win-win - you may be helping a colleague who now wants to scale back.

Shared parental leave

This is the new scheme, available to parents after the birth or adoption of a child. There's a clear explanation on GOV.UK, and an HR services page with a link to the new University policy.

(The contents of this HR page will be expanded soon, but meanwhile you can see the slides and FAQ handout from the presentation on 22 May.)