Flex Plus working and disability inclusion
Or: why don't employers offer more deeply flexible jobs - and what can we do to change this?
Today sees the parliamentary launch of our new report ‘The 39 Steps: Realising the potential of Flex Plus working for disability inclusion’, led by the fantastic Catherine Hale (with supporting roles from me and Kim Hoque). Catherine is a disabled researcher, coproduction and inclusion consultant, who founded Chronic Illness Inclusion and has done amazing work developing the concept of ‘energy-limiting conditions’ and how this links to work and welfare. She’s previously written on the blog with the early findings from the research, but today’s final report not only includes lots more detail, it also includes our recommendations - ‘39 Steps’ - towards tackling these barriers.
Most policy proposals aimed at improving tackling disability and health-related worklessness focus on employment support or social security. However, in our new report ‘The 39 Steps: Realising the potential of Flex Plus working for disability inclusion’, we argue that we also need to think about the design of work itself - and in particular, the possibility of ‘Flex Plus’ working (a combination of remote working, worktime flexibility, and part-time hours), which is important for many disabled workers, and particularly those with fluctuating and energy-limiting conditions (FELCs).
In this report, we explore the potential of – and barriers to – Flex Plus working as a way of increasing disability inclusion, drawing on interviews and focus groups with 27 organisational leaders, line managers, HR managers, disability/inclusion leads and researchers/consultants. The full report is just below - on the rest of this page we briefly summarise both our findings and our policy recommendations.
Why don’t more employers offer Flex Plus jobs?
Many of our respondents could think of examples of valued workers who were offered Flex Plus arrangements. But often it was not offered to existing employees who needed it, for five sets of reasons:
Organisational culture - some employers have a ‘flex as compliance’ organisational culture, trying to do the minimum to meet legal requirements, and standardising what they offer to keep things ‘fair’. Other organisations, though, have a culture of ‘flex as opportunity’, trying to leverage the benefits of flexibility for everyone.
The nature of the job matters - it’s easier to apply Flex Plus working to some job roles than others (depending on interpersonal interaction or interdependency between staff), even within desk-based roles.
There are dilemmas in creating part-time roles, particularly in smaller teams or those with tight deadlines. Nevertheless, for some organisations it was ‘business as usual’ to carve out certain tasks/workload and redistribute this to other employees.
Not all employees are treated equally. Managers are unlikely to
grant Flex Plus arrangements to employees that they do not trust to perform when working remotely and at atypical times. Flex Plus working was also less likely to be granted to workers lacking market leverage or self-advocacy skills.
Line manager capabilities are critical. Many managers do not
understand the particular needs of people with FELCs, or how to create part-time roles. Managers also require skills in managing remote workers more generally, particularly outcomes-based monitoring of performance.
But things are even worse for new hires, where employers are unlikely to provide Flex Plus working arrangements at all. This is particularly because of what employers described as the ‘unproven’ nature of new hires, compared to trusted existing employees with proven and valued skills. But it’s also because of a lack of clarity about when job applicants should talk about flexible working needs; an unwillingness to advertise jobs as part-time; and the unintended consequences of diversity hiring practices.
So what can we do to tackle this?
These barriers are not intractable. The report offers 39 recommendations (hence the report’s title, ‘The 39 Steps’) aimed at addressing these barriers to Flex Plus working - the executive summary describes these in brief, and the final chapter of the report describes them more fully.
For employers, these include:
Establishing the business case for Flex Plus
Getting organisational culture right
Ensuring Flex Plus is available as a reasonable adjustment
Giving workers opportunities to show that they are worthy of trust
Better line manager training
Monitoring outcomes and improving practice over time
Better recruitment strategies
Most of our recommendations are to employers, but Government action is also crucial. The Government should help incentivise employers to implement Flex Plus working by introducing a requirement for all employers with 250+ employees to report the percentage of their workforce that is disabled, as well as exploring mechanisms for cost sharing of sickness absence. The Government should also contribute to better understanding of Flex Plus, including commissioning a major Flex Plus trial.
The fortunes of disabled people will also be significantly improved if the government implements robust disability employment policies more broadly - so we recommend the government implements the Disability Employment Charter. Finally, our report makes clear the many continuing barriers people with FELCs encounter in obtaining and remaining in employment. The government should therefore ensure that disabled people who are excluded from the labour market are provided with a decent, secure standard of living by the social security system.
We’re taking forward this work in different ways, including further conversations and pilot studies with employers as well as wider analysis, so please do comment / contact us if you’re interested.