Flexible working arrangements offered to social workers and social care staff working in Adult Social Care. - Find a freedom of information request

Flexible working arrangements offered to social workers and social care staff working in Adult Social Care.

Please can you let me what flexible working arrangements are offered at present or have been tried in the past year?

1. Recruitment:

a) How many new social workers and social care staff have applied for positions since January 2021 to January 2023

b) How many have and been recruited since January 2021 to January 2023

c) How many workers have been offered flexible working arrangements

d) How many new starters have requested flexible working arrangements and, out of these, how many have been approved?

2. Retention

a) How many social workers and social care staff have left the organisation in the past year as a result of not having flexible working arrangements agreed.

b) What has been the impact on services and the community due to the flexible working arrangement?

c) What benefit has this had for the workforce?

d) What have been the challenges of flexible working to your services/teams?

e) Have flexible arrangements had a positive impact on recruitment of Social Workers?

I can confirm that the information requested is held by Lincolnshire County Council. I have detailed below the information that is being released to you.

1.a,b

c. It is our policy to agree flexible working (subject to operational requirements) following an application from an employee.

d. We do not hold this information

2. We do not hold central records of flexible working requests and approvals and it would take longer than the 18 hours allowed under section 12(1) of the FOI Act 2000 to collect this data as we would need to contact all managers individually.

All employees have the right to make a flexible working request and have that request considered.

Where possible we will accommodate such requests as long as there is no detrimental impact on the delivery of our services. There are challenges in managing teams where several employees request flexible working patterns We recognise that flexible working helps employees with their work life balance and health and wellbeing and can also help attract and retain staff.