The London Borough of Camden
Challenging a culture of presenteeism
The company
The London Borough of Camden (Camden) is a local authority that provides
services to people in an area in which dense housing and inner city
deprivation exists alongside key commercial sites and some of the
capital’s most expensive houses.
Workforce
No. of employees 6,600 (excluding teaching staff)
The problems
- Managers recognised that existing arrangements, such as a generous
dependants’ leave provision, were focused solely on the needs
of parents.
- A need to reduce sickness absence rates
- A need continuously to improve the delivery of customer services,
which includes providing excellent services to staff
- A need to make sure that Camden is recruiting from a diverse workforce
Response
A work-life balance strategy was introduced in 2001 with the aim of
improving on the flexible working options already open to staff.
The process:
- Camden undertook a consultation process to discover what work-life
policies staff would find most beneficial. The most popular options
were:
- Increased opportunities to work from home
- More flexible hours
- Compressed working weeks
- These ideas were developed and take for consultation with managers,
employees and relevant trades unions
Policies:
Flexible working options are open to all, although individuals do
not have an automatic entitlement to work flexibly.
New flexible working options include:
- Extended home working
- Job sharing (already in existence but re-launched)
- Compressed working week
- Voluntary reduced working hours
- Temporary amendments to flexitime
- Term-time working
- Annual hours scheme
New leave options include:
- An employment break scheme
Challenges
Challenge: some managers expressed
concerns about managing staff who might be working different hours
from them or working from a different location.
Learning: Camden realised that it needed
to change its culture and performance management systems to a) ensure
a greater emphasis on results and b) to erode a lingering culture
of presenteeism.
Solutions: a series of ‘Talking
Behaviours’ workshops were organised; managers were encouraged
to run these with their teams to discover ways of improving service
while still offering individuals better opportunities to work flexibly.
A Flexible Working Project Group and organisational
development team were charged with developing training modules for
managers and their staff to help them introduce more flexible working
arrangements.
The Flexible Working Project Group has developed a communications
strategy around flexible working and produced a flexible working guide
for managers.
Business benefits
The 2002 employee survey measured early reactions to the council’s
enhanced work-life policy, with the following positive results:
- Greater acceptance of work-life balance:
- 29% of staff felt that the system “was not perfect”
but said it was “better than it used to be” and
“a step in the right direction”
- Only 1 in 10 staff said they were not interested in pursuing
work-life options
- Reduced absenteeism:
- There was a 2.5% reduction in the cost of sickness absence
and a reduction of 2% in staff turnover in the first year of the
scheme’s operation
- Workspace cost savings:
- Hot-desking has been introduced in several departments, thus
reducing pressure on accommodation
- Hot-desking has enabled some departments to extend their
opening hours
- Bureaucracy minimised:
- Camden introduced flexible working options with the aim of
keeping bureaucracy to a minimum - staff only need fill
in a form for monitoring purposes
Resolving teething problems
The 2002 employee survey also highlighted areas for improvement:
- Employees expressed confusion over which policies
was available to whom
- Employees thought there would be a lower take-up
among manual grades and customer-facing staff; in practice there
has been a greater take-up by women and by lower grades
- There were some resourcing issues for lower grades,
such as no ‘pool’ laptops
- A handful of managers remained unconvinced that
work-life balance would work for their teams
Some of these issues have already been resolved:
- More pool laptops have been made available
- A ‘touch down centre’, where staff can
work outside of their usual office location, has been set up
- Case studies and success stories are disseminated
among staff to communicate the availability of
policies and increase ‘buy in’
In practice
In the small Mental Health Brokerage team several members have between
them taken up four of the flexible working options. Initially the
team wondered how it would successfully manage the new arrangements.
The case: the Flexible Working Project
Group worked with the Mental Health Brokerage team to develop creative
ways in which the team could meet business and personal needs. As
a result:
- The department is now open for longer hours
- The team has a more structured approach to carrying
out its workload
- The team works better as a whole
An employee comments: “The flexible
working options are the best thing I have ever been offered by an
employer. They have rekindled my enthusiasm and commitment to fulfil
my role as a mental health broker.”
Benefits to Camden: improved morale,
productivity and customer service.
The future
The 2001 work-life initiative has been hailed as a success. The council
believes it will benefit further as take-up grows and as the e-government
agenda advances.
June 2003
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