Claire McCartney: Welcome everyone to our CIPD webinar. Apologies just for being a couple of minutes late but we are ready for you now and looking forward to the discussion. So, our CIPD webinar is on the upcoming changes to the flexible working legislation. So, on the 6th of April in just a few weeks the new Flexible Working Act and accompanying day one right to request flexible working will come into force. So, in this webinar we're going to be exploring in detail the upcoming changes to flexible working rights, what that means for employers and how to create flexible working cultures that support your organisational and employee needs.

I'm Claire McCartney and I'm the CIPD's Policy Advisor for Resourcing and Inclusion and head up much of our work on flexible working. So, I'm really delighted to be your chair today and I'm very much looking forward to the discussion. So, we've got some great panellists lined up for our discussion today including our Chief Executive here at the CIPD, Peter Cheese, who co-chairs the Flexible Working Taskforce with the Department for Business and Trade. We hope also to be joined by Tony Mulcahy who's Assistant Director at the Department for Business and Trade and we also have with us Charlotte Lack who's Employee Relations, Occupational Health and Policy Manager at E.ON UK. So, a very big warm welcome to our panellists. So, please do get your questions to our panel as they speak and we've reserved a good amount of time at the end of the webinar to answer as many of these as we can.

Just to flag with you, we won't be able to respond to individual legal specific questions but you can make use of our HR Inform helpline. So, before we get into our discussion today I'm just going to do a little bit of housekeeping with you. So, just to let you know this session is being recorded and will be, available on demand through the webinar section of our CIPD website. Please do submit your questions to the panel in the Q&A box. We're not going to be monitoring the chat box so do put them in the Q&A box.

As a reminder again CIPD members can get individual legal advice so do call our HR Inform helpline. It's available 24/7. CIPD members in the UK and Ireland can also access our wellbeing hub and helpline together with award-winning workplace provider Health Assured, we provide CIPD members with three help and support 24/7 and 365 days a year through telephone or online consultations with qualified therapists. Members can access the phone number and the online services through the memberships benefits web page and you'll see more details about this at the end of the session as well. So, before I hand you over to our first panellists I'd like to just say a little bit more about our work and resources and I know that Peter will expand on this further. So, we've been helping to support positive change around flexible working for several years through our work with the Flexible Working Task Force, our responses to government consultations and calls for evidence, our flex from first campaign and practical resources for our members. And actually we've just updated all of our flexible working resources which include a fact sheet and law page, employer guide on planning and managing flexible working, guidance for managers and employees on requesting flexible working and we also have a really good practical toolkit, cross-sector case studies. So, please do make use of these resources alongside helpful guidance which will be launching on April 6th from the Department for Business Trade and also from ACAS as well.

Now our research shows that two fifths of UK employers believe the right to request flexible working legislation has been effective in increasing the uptake of flexible working in their organisation. So, making it a day one right should further bolster its effectiveness by increasing access and uptake more widely. But we also know that some organisations feel unprepared for the new legislation changes. So, what do you need to know in order to offer support in the workplace, manage requests pragmatically and overall ensure that you can create working arrangements that benefit your organisation, but also your people. So, we'll be getting you up to speed on all of this today. So, over first of all to our first panellist Peter Cheese who's going to talk about our work in this area and the important role that he plays in co-chairing the flexible working task force. So, over to you Peter.

Peter Cheese: Thank you Claire and welcome to all of you. Good afternoon. It's a great attendance so we know this is a very important subject and the flexible working task force just to give you a little bit of context, was established I think several years ago so pre-Covid and it was established with the intent of bringing together a lot of different representative groups across unions, across different sectors and indeed civil service departments as well, to engage on the subject of how do we encourage more flexible working. So, this was pre-Covid and it was recognising that in many ways that flexible working had plateaued and from our own research in the CIPD what we could see was that when you think of all the different forms of flexible working, the very predominant form of flexible working was more part-time working but it had very much plateaued. We hadn't really made substantive change in our ways of working as I've often said on many platforms almost since the industrial era and the whole idea of work being something where you turn up Monday to Friday and you work these certain hours and you've all got to be in certain places at once.

Those ideas in many ways have been challenged by the younger generations coming into work and saying well we want more flexibility; you can see many surveys that pointed to that over the last sort of 10 years or so. Now why is flexibility and flexible working important? Well, I think there are lots of reasons for it, not least inclusion. So, the opportunity to give people the ways and means in which they can work if they are for example constrained from their ability to come into work every day because of the hours of work or because of the place of work and then of course that won't apply to everybody, home working that can support those with other caring responsibilities would be an example. So, we have known for a long time that flexible working has many benefits but the fact is that the cultures that we've had in our organisations often have mitigated against it and there's a lot of presentees and bias in the sense that people have got to be in a place of work, I need to be able to see what you're doing and if I can't see you, I don't trust you and it's extraordinary to think in the 21st century how prevalent some of that culture was and I would say it still is in many regards. So, of course as we've gone through the pandemic, the pandemic has opened up a whole new way of thinking about flexible working, particularly around this so-called hybrid or home working.

But it is very, very important to recognise and I know Charlotte will pick this point up as well that whilst there's been a big attention on home working and hybrid working and it's caught a lot of media attention, the reality is that even during the pandemic less than half of our workforce across the UK was able to work from home because their jobs required them to be in a place of work, whether it was in a manufacturing site or a hospitality, a venue or whatever it might be. So, when we think about flexible working, it is all these different aspects of ways in which people can work which affect you know the times that they work, the hours, their schedules, their place of work and so forth and it is a very important part of what we're trying to understand and promote. And indeed that was a big part of the work of the flexible working task force, was to understand how much these different forms of working were being understood and then what guidance we could collectively provide to organisations to encourage them to offer more of these ways of working because I said you know, I started on that point about why are the benefits?

Well, absolutely about inclusion definitely also about things like wellbeing as well and indeed you know, we need to make, we make sure we're measuring these things as well. But productivity outcomes that come from this as well as part of people's opportunity to work in ways that suit them and help them in the work that they do. The postcode as I said this has all been accelerated and therefore one of the things that we've campaigned for and indeed it became a big subject of discussion for the flexible working taskforce was this idea of a day one right. And most importantly I think that day one right says that you have to think about flexible working in the design of your jobs and how you promote them and all the rest of it from the get-go whereas I think historically we were saying well, OK somebody might come to me after a few months and request to work flexibly but I didn't have to give them many reasons why I might not want to do that or support that. And frankly a lot of it, I think was based around the sort of cultural norms of organisations that so long had existed where well, you need to be working here full-time and you need to be turning up every day. And also I would say and want to emphasise that we hadn't always trained our line managers well enough to understand how to manage people who are working in different ways.

And that plays out to the inclusion idea too because I've often said that if people who were working more part-time had a bias against them, that they were being therefore less committed to the organisation or not as productive or whatever, we have to address those challenges and we've got to train line managers to do these things properly, to really embed a culture of more flexible working and make sure that people are not disadvantaged because they're not always visible or they're working part-time or they're working compressed hours or whatever it is. So, this is part of a cultural change as well and but the legal change, which is you know, the day one right to request as I said we've been supportive of we think it's the right thing to do and it will encourage us all to think about how do we look at all of our jobs and look across the spectrum of different forms of flexible working and say all right, how can we provide for that, for our work force today and for the future.

And the final point of making all of it and going back to benefits is and again being reinforced through the Covid pandemic is that we have seen consistently through our surveys now over the last two or three years that people want to be able to have that option to work more flexibly and that has really, really grown since the pandemic and you look at the things that, reasons why people want to join organisations apart from maybe the money, but certainly things like purpose but absolutely this opportunity to be considered for flexible working and have and know that they're coming into an organisation that embraces those ideas and has a supportive culture. So, I think this is an exciting shift but there are definitely things for us to understand and that's the purpose of course of this webinar and I know the significant number of people who joined. So, I won't say any more than that Claire and hand back to you.

CM: Brilliant thank you so much peter. I think that's a really good overview and great to hear about the importance you place on flexible working cultures and all of the work that we've been doing including the task force. So, I'm now delighted to see Tony on the call and I'd like to hand you over to Tony Mulcahy to hear in more detail about the Flexible Working Act and the changes that will be introduced on April 6th and he's going to give a policy official perspective around this. So, over to you Tony.

Tony Mulcahy: Thank you and apologies for the that, IT staff I think I'm of the generation that sees a keyboard and panics. But I got here in the end. Yeah so, I'm going, very logically I'm going to start at the beginning so in November 2019 the conservative manifesto made a commitment to promote flexible working and consult on making it the default unless employers have good reason not to. And on 12th December 2019, the conservative party won the general election, correlation doesn’t equal causation of course as my analysts keep reminding me. And then Peter has mentioned Covid a bit already but then on 31st January, the first case of Covid was recorded in the UK, on 26th March, the first lockdown measures were announced and then there were various lockdowns and other bits of emergency public health legislation to sort of get us through, all of which meant that the consultation promised in the 2019 manifesto was actually only delivered in September 2021. So, the consultation contained six main measures.

Peter's mentioned it quite a lot already, the right to make flexible working a day one right. We looked at the business reasons for rejecting a request and whether all eight remain valid in the light of Covid. We looked at actually the consultation proposal was to require employers to suggest alternatives if the specific request could not be met. We looked at the administrative process underpinning the existing right to request, how often a request can be made and how quickly an employer must respond. We asked whether people were aware they could request a temporary arrangement using the statutory right and actually we just sort of looked at a bit of informal flexible working and what that might mean. And by informal, sorry it's horrible civil service jargon, by informal basically we mean anything that falls outside the statutory framework. So, then another chunk of time, but in December 2022 the government published its response which sets out how it was going to take things forward. It said it committed to make flexible working a day one right. It said we would maintain the eight business reasons. It introduced a new requirement for the employer to consult with the employee before deciding to reject a request. It said that the government would allow two requests in any 12-month period.

It required the government would require employers to respond within two months. They’ve removed the requirement on the employee to set out how the effects of their requests could be dealt with. They’ve produced guidance on making temporary requests for flexible working and they’d issue a call for evidence on informal flexible working. Saying a bit more about all that. The day one right for us and for our ministers it was a really important step because it helps primarily it helps remove the perception that flexible working is something that you earn and if we're talking about making it the default, I keep saying that, it's default isn't it in English not default which is American. If we were talking about making it the default then and clearly that's sort of quite an important step.

As peter said already it, by its very nature, it puts a much greater focus on recruitment and job design, and if people have been knocking around long enough they may remember the government had previously issued a consultation on requiring people to say in adverts whether or not they could, what flexibility was available in their role which eventually got dropped for all sorts of reasons, probably the biggest one being that at the moment people who say things in adverts mean it. And as soon as government starts trampling all over that territory in its big size nines, not particularly big anymore is it, size 11s, then people would be the statements in adverts would be less trusted, I think but it'd be less meant less genuine by the organisations that were making them. And also it increases the number of people who now fall into scope of the statutory right to request flexible working by 2.6 million so quite a big additional chunk. We looked at the business reasons, there was there was no clear consensus if you weighed these things, there were people were hugely in favor of reducing the business reasons but actually when you looked at the argument there was arguments, there was no consensus around which you might remove. And also we had quite a few responses from businesses that that said, they actually needed more reasons that Covid that illustrated, that they needed more reasons and culture came up quite a lot but the flexible working wasn't, didn't fit with the organisational culture which is kind of precisely the thing we're trying to tackle here. So, the eight bits, all that bit of the existing legislation that's been around since 2014 remains unchanged actually.

So, there are eight business reasons and ministers were very much of the view that the current approach was the right one and that ultimately it has to be up to the employer the business, to say what might work. So, they they very clearly in favour of retaining the eight business reasons. So, we had a really good, really good discussions with CIPD, a good consultation feedback and work with the task force which meant that the policy proposal requiring the employer to suggest alternatives which I shudder to admit was my idea, was consigned to the waste paper basket, very, very quickly.

And an alternative approach was developed which looked at requiring the employer to consult before deciding to reject a request. We quite like that because it it kind of reflects good practice anyway. You kind of want people to discuss these things in an open and honest way and kind of that's the glass half, full glass half empty actually it just provides another little bit of grit in the system and it's something an employer, something more an employer has to do before they can reject a request which may just be enough to tip them over the edge and get them to think, it may not but it's it's a it's a little bit more, makes it's a little bit harder to say computer says no, actually you've got to have to think about it, a bit. On allowing two requests as I've said before the headline policy objective is to normalise flexible working. So, it's quite important to increase the frequency of the ability to make a statutory request, there were quite, views all over the place here and in the consultation from having no limit to staying where we were um actually so, to felt as a a defensive civil servant too, felt quite a safe place to go, that's the next step in that we're increasing it. So, its, we're taking a further step towards normalising flexible working overall. Reducing the time frame I think ministers and everybody sort of accepts that this will put a bit of additional pressure on businesses that employers that isn't there at the moment, but the one thing Covid taught us was that all this can be done incredibly quickly within a week or so in an emergency situation. So, it felt appropriate to shave a bit of time off the three months. Removing the requirement for an employee to say how the impacts of a flexible working request would play out in there with their employer, clearly makes no sense at all, if you're making it a day one right.

Now would the employee know on their first day of employment what impact their request would have and actually there was some interesting feedback from consultation responses on that too, about it could potentially be unfair that people, older people, people who are more experienced, people who'd spent longer in the organisation, perhaps more senior people would be better able to make a request than perhaps others in an organisation. So, that requirement is removed, people were really or individuals in particular, were were totally unaware you can use the existing rights request to make a time limited change to your contract. So, that's a job for us in terms of guidance and on informal flexibility, we actually issued a call for evidence that's now closed. We're currently analysing responses and probably as soon as the legislation's through, I'll probably get now to say what's happening with that next.

So, it's a quick summary then on the changes to the right to request which will come into force on the 6th April, an employer will be required to consult with their employee before rejecting their flexible working request, an employee will be able to make two statutory requests in any 12-month period rather than the current one request. The decision period will be reduced from three months to two months and the requirement for an employee to explain the impact of their request will also be removed. If anybody is particularly interested all that is in the employment relations Flexible Working Act. And the day one right, which we're also introducing, is being taken forwards by the flexible working amendment regulations. So, just two different ways of delivering the policy, which will bore you probably, but made my life a little bit more difficult. Have I got a couple of minutes just to say a bit about the other changes we're introducing on 6th April or have I run out of time?

CM: I think maybe just a minute, if that's if you can, if you can cover it, Tony, that would be wonderful.

TM: So, we're introducing on 6th April, the new right to carer's leave will come into force, which gives all employees from day one a right to one week's unpaid carer's leave. The redundancy protections for pregnant women and redundancy protection that a mother currently enjoys when she's on maternity leave is being extended back into pregnancy and for a period of return to work. And also and I shudder to raise this today, given all the coverage in the press on BBC, but we're making some, we're introducing some new flexibility to paternity leave so that it can, it can be taken in non-consecutive blocks and the dad has up to a year to take it. That was it. Thank you.

CM: Brilliant. Thanks so much, Tony. I think that's really helpful for you to run through the changes in detail and, you know, to help organisations and our members think about anything else they need to do to make sure that they're well prepared for this. So, that's really great. Thanks so much. So, now I'm going to hand you over to our final panellist, Charlotte Lack from E.ON to provide a practical example of some of the things I know that they've been doing already, because they've already introduced the day one right to request flexible working and create a supportive culture around flexible working and I know Charlotte is going to talk about some fields-based roles as well. I think that's really important following on from Peter's theme around front line roles and people that need to be in the physical workspace. So over to you, Charlotte now.  

Charlotte Lack: Excellent. Thank you and welcome everybody and thank you for having me here today. I should also say as well. Happy international Women's Day. I couldn't not say that. So, yes so as Claire mentioned, I'm really proud that here at E.ON we're way ahead of the curve already with us having been offering day one right to request flexible working for the past 18 months. And I guess the ability to think and work flexibly really does lie at the heart of our employee value proposition. We do recognise and are challenging all the time some of the stereotypes that I know you mentioned, Peter, of flexible working to fit with diverse lives. You know, we have blended families. We have multiple, multiple carers bringing up families and we just wanted to keep pushing those boundaries. And we've always supported colleagues with working flexibly. But as again, both Peter and Tony have mentioned, the pandemic for me was an absolute game changer in how that accelerated our need to respond to this, this change. And to, I guess, bring that to life, you know, the call centres, we had a situation which I'm sure lots of other organisations had, where in order to sustain our customer service to our customers, we needed in a lockdown situation to set those roles up from home.

Now, in the past, that would have been a completely no-go area as one of the roles considered that can't possibly work from home. But as you said, Tony, it's amazing what a crisis can do to make you actually turn it around. And I guess what we've done from that is we've really taken on board the feedback from our colleagues and also from our own experience of rather. Other than a current trend, which I think has been emerging over the last six months of organisations asking colleagues to go back into the office, we're really pleased to say that hybrid ways of working is an enduring part of our model. So, our call centre agents, for example, they typically work two days in the office and the rest remotely. So, I guess just to call out some of the other things that we've done here at E.ON, we've chosen to move away from lengthy policies and procedure documents and instead introduce some high-level principles.

So, just a couple to call out that might be helpful to share is, we adopt a flexible first approach from day one, all our roles are open to some degree of flexibility and for all colleagues. So, what we say is that when, where and how we work is focused on optimising the outcome. And we tend to think of our offices more now as resource centres. So, we have a principle around we travel for purpose. And I was saying to Peter earlier that, you know, I think, again, returning to the office post-Covid, there isn't this stigma of, oh, I'm an office day. Therefore, I must get there for half past 8 and I mustn't leave before 5 o'clock. That presenteeism culture has really shifted. So, not surprisingly, again, we really believe in gender equality and that both parents and caregivers are equally important in bringing children into the world. And we wanted to do much more to actively support our working fathers and secondary caregivers. So, on the 9th January last year, we were really proud to have introduced equal parent leave and what this has meant is that. The enhanced maternity package that we offer our maternity leavers of 18 weeks full pay, we've now mirrored that for the secondary caregiver and a year on. I'm really pleased to say that we've had an amazing take up of 124 colleagues, mostly men, working fathers that have taken that leave. And again, there's been a real mix of people from different roles, different levels of the hierarchy and again, something that you mentioned about the pending change with paternity being given more flexibility of how you take it rather than two weeks together, we again give everybody flexibility to work with the business to say you might want to take it in a block of 18 weeks or you might want to phase that out over the course of a year.

And we are seeing a real mix of how people are taking that. So, again, I think you mentioned some of this earlier, Peter, but for me, just to call out some of the business case for change, I think there are so many reasons. As to why working flexibly is quite simply the right thing to do, but I guess some of my own observations, it really does help to boost colleague engagement and productivity. And if I think about some of the, again, life decisions that people have made since Covid, so I don't know whether anyone else has heard this, but there's almost been a dog pandemic. You know how many people bought dogs during Covid, but on a serious note, you know, isn't it great that we can work in a more flexible way that's afforded people that flexibility? They're getting the ability to do those things that might be increasing their wellbeing and making them more productive and happier at work. It's also helped us to attract from a much broader pool of talent. So, no longer are those geographical restrictions where it was a case of needing to be in a commutable distance to the office. We've been able to fish in a much broader pool because we can offer people to work remotely. We also offer career enhances career development.

So, in the first six months here at E.ON, when we advertised all of our roles as flexible, we saw internal promotion rates doubling and lateral moves went from 5% to 17%, which is just fantastic. It really does support modern families. So, for me, you know, people have got diverse lives and we quite simply need to keep up. It really does support with the gender pay gap. So, moving away from flexibility being seen as typically the role that the woman would have applied for with taking the main caregiver role of raising a family and part time. It's starting to put all careers and roles on a level playing field. It also helps those people who have previously struggled to manage their underlying health conditions to maintain a better level of attendance. So, this was, again, one of our key learnings from the Covid pandemic was we found that people that may. Maybe had conditions such as IBS or were struggling with menopausal symptoms through working more flexibly, they've been able to sustain a better attendance at work.

In my excitement, I did miss out one of the key things that I was going to talk about. So, I'm just going to flip back over and talk to you about one of the examples that I know, Claire, you're keen for me to share, which is we've been able to show here at E.ON that working flexibly really can be done in those areas that arguably are the hardest to reach and that's the field. So, we have a huge field force here at E.ON with over 3000 colleagues. And last year we were really proud to be double award winners at the Working Dads Employer Awards, citing one of our real examples, a chap called Manny, who is a meter tech in the field. And he found himself in a situation where his marriage broke down and overnight he became the sole carer responsible for his two young children. And he wanted to be able to drop the children off at school and pick them up again. And through working with his team leader, we were able to make that happen for him. And I think that's the thing for me is that we can't just keep thinking of flexible working as can this role be done from home? Can this role be done on a part-time basis? It's much broader than that in terms of introducing flexibility into the start and end of the day, being able to bank time and take time off, flex, swap shifts, earlier starts, later starts, those kind of things.

So, finally, I guess just some hints and tips from me to end. For me, you've got to remain open minded and you need to be creative, always start with a yes and then work backwards. So, if you if you have that in your mindset of yes, I want this to work, it feels like the right thing to do and then work out how you're going to make it happen rather than starting with a, I don't think this is possible. Try it, just try it, because by putting a bit of a review period in there, you might surprise yourself in what you can learn from that. So, just give it a go. Trust is absolutely fundamental. You know, you have to trust. We've mentioned about presenteeism. I hope that that is a word that almost becomes obsolete because we have to trust that as leaders, we're recruiting the right people into our organisations. So, start with trust, communicate, signpost, share successes, tell those colleagues stories and show people that are doing it across all different levels of your organisation. Because when people see others doing it, it gives them something that they can aspire and have that role model of.

And finally, you won't regret it. So, I've been in HR now for 24 years, showing my age, and I can remember I looked it up on Amazon today. I can remember one of the books that I studied in the CIPD was Armstrong's Handbook of Human Resource Management. I think it was on the 7th when I was studying. It's now the 14th. But one thing that's really stuck with me from that massive textbook and it's so simple, but so true is, happy people, equal, productive people. And I'm convinced that working flexibly and open, opening mindsets to flexibility is the key enabler of that. So, thank you.

CM: Brilliant. Thank you so much Charlotte. Really good summary. Really, really helpful to hear all the amazing things you're doing at E.ON and all of those practical tips as well, I think will be so useful for the audience. So, thank you so much for sharing those. Now it's time for your questions. And I've been seeing some really excellent questions coming in, which we will get to. We also ask for any questions in advance of the webinar. So, we're going to address some of those first, and some of them were specifically legal questions. So, we're not going to be asking, we're not going to be answering after this live legal responses, but we can collate some of your frequently asked questions and then we're going to respond to those after the webinar. But specifically on these questions, we've asked our employment law advice team at HR Inform Pro.

So, we had a question, first of all, from Gina, who was asking for clarity on the business reasons for saying no to request, can you state workload as a reason to say no, or are you expected to just keep hiring staff? So, our response from our colleagues at HR Inform Pro, you can't just say no, you have to take the employee through the procedure, consider the request reasonably and if you're refusing, base the refusal on one of the 8 prescribed reasons. Workload is not one of the reasons but inability to reorganise work amongst other staff is one but that is not the same as workload and refusals must be based on the correct facts. So, that's the response coming in for you, Gina, around that.

Hannah asks, with the upcoming changes to the reduction of time to respond to a request from three months to two months, is this timeline inclusive of trial periods, or is this the timeline to respond to the initial request, whereby the outcome may be a trial. So in response to that, it doesn't include the trial. The two months is just to get to an outcome, including appeal.

And then the final question that was asked in advance is from Jacqueline, and she asks, how does it work if the question of flexible working is raised at interview stage? Does this need to be considered as a request at the same as it would if the person was employed? So, the response here, the candidate is not an employee at interview stage, so doesn't have the right to make a flexible working request. They can only make a request once they're an employee. There's a risk that an unsuccessful candidate who raised a flexible working, raised flexible working at the interview could make a claim. But the only law that covers recruitment is discrimination. So, they would have to connect the flexible working point to a protected characteristic and make their claim around that. That's why it's really important to keep good notes on selection so that if it comes to it, you can show that your recruitment decisions were based on lawful, non-discriminatory reasons like qualifications, for instance. A typical response would be that you fully comply with flexible working laws and will deal with all requests from employees in the required manner.

We also had a question from Michelle who was asking, and I've seen in our questions live here, there's quite a few questions around this. It was asking about timescales in conducting the flexible working meeting. If the employee was then to appeal the decision, what are the timescales in relation to this? So, I thought I'd just come across to you, Tony, to say a little bit here from a policy official perspective, not from a legal perspective. So, Tony.

TM: Yeah, so the one thing I didn't mention when I ran through my notes was alongside all of this sits an updated ACAS statutory code of practice on flexible working. And that's now published. So, you can go and look at it. That's very clear on this, actually that says that the whole process, including the appeal, needs to be concluded within the two-month period. So, that's a statutory document that has force in a tribunal.

CM: Brilliant. Thanks, Tony. That's really helpful. So, we've also had a question and I thought I'd bring this over to you, Charlotte. Laura asks, how do you enable flexible working arrangements for frontline staff making these roles more attractive? Now, we've already heard a little bit from you about what you're doing, but I just wondered whether you might want to elaborate a little bit more.

CL: Yeah, I think it is just having that, as I say, flexible, open mindset to it. So, you know, we're leading the energy transition here at E.ON. We need to be as attractive as possible in the market to recruit the best talent. So, it's kind of a no-brainer that we that we just have that flexible mindset and approach, because as we've shown with many examples in the field, it doesn't have to be. We know there are some basics fundamentals that we cannot have a field engineer working from home because they've got to go in the van and go to customer properties. But there is so much that we can do. Like I say, be that just, you know, giving somebody a slightly later start time such that they can go and drop off the children or, you know, go and look after their care caring person. And again, on the flip side of that as well, being able to swap shifts maybe with a colleague or work a bit extra on a few days and then take that time, bank it and then use it the following week. So, it's just working with managers to help them to remain open and having that, as I say, that start point, if they start with yes and then work backwards.

CM: Brilliant. Thanks so much, Charlotte. And I thought I might just come in as well, because we've got a few examples from different sectors here around frontline flexibility. So, we work with one organisation which was providing greater notice and control over shifts in retail and they trialled this providing advance notice of shifts, giving more workers a stable core schedule and introducing a mobile app where workers could swap shifts without supervisor sign off. And they found that sales in stores with more stable scheduling increased, as did labour productivity. So, I thought that was quite an interesting example. And then one more from manufacturing, which I think can be a challenging sector. So, a manufacturing organisation found that having a team of multiskilled workers within the department meant flexible working could be accommodated more easily because employees could be flexible according to the business need and skills required. And the organisation aims to develop skills and employees who are informal, flexible working arrangements so that they're able to work in a range of different roles, making it easier to be flexible.

So, just a couple more examples there for people to think about. But I think I think you're right, Charlotte. Sometimes it's about trialling and piloting, isn't it, really? So, I'm wondering whether I can come over to you Peter around you started to talk about the importance of line managers. I just wondered whether you could say a little bit more about the role of line managers in supporting flexible working and making approaches successful. And then I'm going to come to Tony with a couple of more specific questions that have come through.

PC: Yeah, absolutely. And Charlotte touched on this as well. I mean, using some of those examples, actually, this is this is where we're trying to empower managers, for example, to work with their teams on shift swapping and arrangements like that, whereas I think so often in the past we have this idea that no, I will tell you what you can and can't do. And what's interesting to me on that is, is that sort of sense of a degree of control where we sometimes talk about autonomy and the ability of individual employees to be able to work with their teams and within their teams and be empowered to do that is actually a very important part of overall engagement as well. But it very much plays to your point, Charlotte, that you made. and I touched on as well about this idea of trust. So, you know, I think so many cultures in the past, command and control, here are all the rules, you work when I tell you to work stuff, did not speak of a trust of our people. But, you know, along with trust has also got to be a degree of competence.

And as I said, the reality, I think in so many organisations historically is we have not trained line managers well enough to understand how to manage more diverse teams and more diverse ways in which they work. And examples like, as I touched on, this point about an inherent bias, because if I'm biased towards the idea that, well, this person is working really hard, they're always in the office before me and they're always in the office after me, therefore they must be committed or whatever, or more productive. So, we have to teach managers much more about looking at things like the output and the outcome of what people do. And then being able to trust them with their teams to support some of these more flexible ways of working. But, you know, maybe, you would want to comment on, well, I'm sure you will have some views yourself, Charlotte. What did you have to do to really drive forwards over these last couple of years or so, these ways of really embedding more flexible working and training managers to understand how to deal with these sorts of questions?

CL: So, yeah, I mean, I completely agree with everything you've just said, Peter. And I think, you know, to accompany that mindset shift, we do do an awful lot of upskilling of our line managers because, again, in some areas of the business, those line managers can change quite frequently. So, it's about making sure that, you know, because I've always said it shouldn't ever feel like a lottery as to which line manager you're with, as to whether you have a positive experience or not. We want to have a consistent colleague experience. And again, through our EVP, we try and approach everything through the lens of the colleague. What does the colleague journey look like? So, making sure that it is consistent. And, you know, we've got huge diverse networks in place as well. So, I think they've been really instrumental. So, the Working Parent Network, again, being able to invite people, have a sponsorship of those by senior leaders. So, again, it's kind of walking the talk as well as just rather than just saying it, we're actually giving examples, sharing and showcasing those stories with our colleagues. But absolutely, it's something that you have to continually work at all the time to make sure that that experience is more consistent for colleagues.

CM: Brilliant. Thanks so much, Charlotte. It's really helpful. And Peter, so just a few more specific questions, Tony, and again, coming from the policy official perspective, not giving legal advice, but one question says, do all organisations nationwide have a legal responsibility based on the current updated law to follow this guidance, even if they don't have an internal policy related to flexible working. Are there any organisation sectors that don't have to adhere to this?

TM: I think a very quick answer to that is no. It's kind of the law, you have to do it. The comfort blanket, if you like, if that's how you're looking at this, is around the business reasons. So, people don't need to accept flexible working requests where there are good business reasons not to.

CM: But also, it's Great Britain, it's not Northern Ireland, is it, Tony, applying?

TM: Yeah. Employment law generally applies to Great Britain, so England, Wales and Scotland, and not Northern Ireland, who do their own thing. Thank goodness, quite often they do the same thing. But that's up to their government, which they've got now.

CM: Brilliant. Tony, I'm not sure whether you've got, whether you can respond to this question. How will the two requests work for those staff who have already had one request in the last 12 months. From April, will it reset and all employees will have two requests from that date, or will we need to look at previous requests too?

TM: Yeah, so I do know the answer to this, but I can't because we asked the same question with our lawyers when we were going through the legislation. Unfortunately, it's probably an age thing, but I can't quite drag it up to the front of my mind. So, rather than giving a rubbish steer, I'll send a note back.

CM: That's fine. We can include it. We can include it when we create our responses after this webinar, so that's absolutely fine. And there's another question just saying, is the new employment definitely going live on the 6th April? People have seen conflicting suggestions at a time between April and July. So just whether you can confirm that, Tony.

TM: So, I can't confirm what's happening with an election, because that would probably stop it.

CM: Sure.

TM: But actually, in terms of the legislation, the regulations making it a day one right, say 6th April on the regulations, and the primary legislation just needs a piece of parliamentary process that we need to go through. It's called a commencement order, which is just a routine thing. But it wouldn't make a lot of sense to do, to do it in two bits. So, it's all coming in on the 6th April and the day one right will come in. And that was the point when I talked about the regulations and the Act, it kind of, I think people got confused because some of it's in regulations with a clear commencement date of 6th April and other bits of it are in the Act. But the commencement date for the primary legislation, the Act, is kind of a hidden thing, but it's happening, it's happening now. Actually, they've been written those orders and they'll be laid and they're all coming to force on the 6th April.

CM: Brilliant. Thanks so much, Tony. We've had a question. What would you suggest for companies with employees working on client sites, where the client is quite anti-flexible working? How can they satisfy the client and the employee without rejecting requests on business grounds? So, I think I might come to probably Peter and Charlotte just to get a perspective on this.

PC: Yeah, I'm certainly familiar with that. I've worked in consulting myself and yeah, you have to sort of conform, of course, to a significant degree to what the client is asking. I'm not going to provide any legal guidance on this. I'm going to be very clear on this. But my sense is, yes, that you have to be able to support what the client is needing but at the same time, I think these are opportunities to encourage clients perhaps who find this so difficult to say, you know what, we can. I mean, a lot of what, and I don't know exactly the context that you're talking about, but if I think about consultants working on projects and projects can be delivered in all sorts of ways, you don't always have to be on a client site the whole time. And I think it's very important that we don't find ourselves in a position where we think that we've been constrained by the clients that we're working for and working against the principles that we have as organisations, which is, as we've all, I think, clearly articulated, when you do them well, are very, very beneficial to your staff.

And so, I think you have to try and work those things, but that would be my perspective. But I don't think it's a prescribed thing as it's only in terms of a business reason as to why you could not support flexible working in general, even if in particular periods of time you're working for a customer where that proves very difficult.

TM: I just made a note of the eight business reasons actually, and I can't see one quickly that says somebody else doesn't like it.

CM: Great, thank you. So, Charlotte, I'm going to come to you. Thank you for kind of a broader question around some of the common barriers and enablers to getting flexible working right. Could I just get your perspective around that, please? I think Charlotte has, I think Charlotte…oh you are there.

CL: I'm so sorry. My Teams just completely dropped out then, so apologies.

CM: That's all right, we can hear you, Charlotte.

CL: You can hear me OK? Yes, that was really bizarre. Yeah, so a bit like nothing much to add really to what Peter said, because obviously the customer does have to come first, but I would say try and look for small wins because it just feels like they need convincing. And if I think about, you know, the way that we're doing this, OK, we've had a few technical issues this morning, but generally, you know, how much more productive can things be when they're done in a Teams environment on, you know, a remote meeting as opposed to being in the room? The time and cost that can be saved in travel and, you know, that can be recycled into being more productive. So, maybe just test and trial a few little things that might slowly start to change their mind.

CM: Brilliant. Thanks, Charlotte.

CL: Sorry about that.

CM: That's all right. As we dropped off, I was just asking you about any tips around common barriers and enablers to getting flexible working right as well.

CL: Yeah, I think some of the barriers that we've been speaking about, you know, the fixed mindset, the presenteeism, the not being creative enough. And it's, you just have to be more open to it. And I think, you know, you were mentioning a lot earlier, Peter, about the world has changed. It's changing faster than ever. You know, if we want to keep recruiting the best talent, retain the best talent, we've got to do this. We just have to. And I feel, I almost feel like the legislation is becoming redundant because, you know, things like us introducing equal parent leave, I'd love to think that that will be a new piece of legislation soon that no longer will be talking about maternity leave and two weeks of paternity, but instead we're talking about equal parent leave but instead we’re talking about equal parent leave. So, I think it's, it's just, it's just trying to stay ahead of the times. And ultimately I keep coming back to it, but if your people are happy, they're going to be more productive. And that's surely good for business.

CM: Brilliant. Thanks so much, Charlotte.

CL: That's OK.

CM: So, we just actually kind of linked because you were talking about parental leave and paternity leave. Someone's just asking specifically, Tony, the paternity leave change, not having to take the weeks as a continuous block, etc. Is that expected to come in on the 6th April?

TM: So, it came in today, actually, so that you can apply today and take your leave under the new arrangements on the 6th April. It's all to do with notice periods.

CM: Brilliant. Thank you.

TM: It's actually enforced today, but in terms of applying, taking your leave, it works on the 6th April.

CM: Excellent. OK. That's really good. Well, I have to say that we are nearly at our time, but I just would like to say a really big, big thank you to all of our excellent panellists today to Peter, to Tony and to Charlotte, and also a really big thank you to all of you watching as well for all of your excellent questions. As we said already, we will address any commonly asked questions and come back to some of the questions after the webinar to share with you. We're just sharing also some of our practical resources at the CIPD for you to take a look at. Hopefully they will help you. And finally, please don't forget the CIPD's wellbeing support for members in the UK and Ireland with a free 24/7 telephone helpline staffed by qualified therapists and provided by award-winning workplace wellbeing provider Health Assured. So, thank you all. Thank you all very much and have a good rest of your day.