Flexible working no longer just for office workers

Tuesday, 10 January 2023

As experts predict that 2023 will be the year of increased adoption of flexible working, workplaces are finding new ways to offer it to staff who need to be on-site.

AsureQuality is a company that provides food quality assurance to many Aotearoa food producers businesses.

The nature of the work means many of the 1700 staff work testing food in laboratories, or training other businesses off-site, which makes it difficult for them to do traditional version of flexible working.

But AsureQuality wanted to create a flexible work policy that worked for all of its workers, not just its office-based staff.

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This year the business began flexible working arrangements for all staff, who were asked to suggest flexible working ideas that worked for them.

One option that became popular was working a school day shift from 9am to 3pm.

While the laboratory workers needed to be onsite in the lab to do their job, there was still a proportion of paperwork to complete every day that could be done away from the lab.

So those people working school hours, worked a six-hour day in the lab, and finished their two hours of paperwork from home later in the day.

AsureQuality general manager of people and culture Georgina Daly​ said six months into its flexible work project, and is only just getting started.

“Employees are predominantly rostered, field-based workers where traditional work from home methods are not relevant. We had to think more broadly about flexible options for those workers,” Daly​ said.

“So much of our talent acquisition has to do with the flexible work options we offer. It really helps us stand out against other businesses,” she said.

Another business that had to find ways to allow flexible working was ACC.

As the country emerged from lockdown last year, the state-owned accident insurer started a working group to figure out how the organisation would work in the future.

Six hundred leaders within the business were taught about hybrid working and how to lead a team that would not always be in the office.

ACC deputy chief executive of people and culture, Michael Frampton​, said hybrid working was about more than the location where work happened.

“Into the future it’s an approach that offers real promise for enabling us to deliver even better services for our customers and even better work for our people,” Frampton​​ said.

ACC and AsureQuality were both involved in a study that looked at how businesses were preparing for the future of work by the Business Leader’s Health and Safety Forum.

The study spoke to business leaders across a range of industries about what they expected from the future of work.

It found that while pre-Covid some businesses were considering the option of flexible work, this year every business in the forum was considering flexible or hybrid working.

Dr Zoë Port​​​, management lecturer at Massey University, said organisations should be flexible about flexibility.

“The most obvious other form of flexibility is flexibility around work hours, which might be start times, finish times, a compressed work week … some organisations even offer their employees ‘summer Fridays’, where they get to work a half day on Fridays during summer,” Port said.

Organisations that refused to look at flexible working as an option may start to lose staff as employees may look for more accommodating employers in what remained a tight labour market, she said.

Covid-19 had forever changed the way that people worked, and this year would see a continued rise in the trend of flexible working, she said.

“For many people, the past few years have caused a shift in attitudes around work and work-life balance, and workers are increasingly looking for ways that work can fit into their lives, not the other way round,” she said.