Policy overview
We are committed to developing innovative working practices. Flexible working is beneficial for employees and ourselves. It helps us to achieve excellent service provision and promote work-life balance.
We believe that working flexibly can:
- increase employee motivation
- reduce employee stress
- improve performance and productivity
- support employees with personal circumstances such as:
- health conditions
- a disability
- caring for others outside of work
Agreement to flexible working arrangements is subject to:
- operational consideration
- potential benefits
- costs
This ensures that we provide excellent services to the communities we serve.
Principles
Flexible working provides us, and employees, some flexibility over working arrangements. As long as we can deliver efficient and effective services, we can allow employees to work in a way that suits their needs, for example:
- a reduction in working hours
- change to when hours are worked
Meeting this need helps to attract and retain the best people.
Our smarter working approach supports flexible working. Smarter working helps to support employees with their health and wellbeing. It also enables LCC and employees to perform well by choosing:
- by choosing the most efficient way of working
- improving work-life balance
- using technology to reduce the need for travel to offices and meetings
- focusing on the work you do rather than where you do it
Examples of working flexibly are:
- part-time working - working less than the standard full-time week
- job-sharing - typically two employees carry out the duties of a single post. We employ each job-sharer on a part-time basis, but together they generally cover the whole post. We divide the pay and benefits pro-rata
- shift-swapping - employees rearrange shifts amongst themselves or within teams. This applies if the needs of the business or service are met
- term-time working or term-time plus a number of weeks - an employee whom we do not employ full year. We employ them to work during school term times. All leave entitlement is taken outside of those weeks. Employees can also work term time plus a number of weeks
- contractual homeworking - an employee's contractual work base is their home. They must adhere to our health and safety policies for homeworkers. We may agree to an entitlement of home costs or expenses, for example, telephone or office use. Managers will refer to the relevant policies for these
- compressed hours working - employees work their contractual hours over a shorter number of days, for example:
- employees may work longer hours on four days, rather than over five days
- employees work nine longer days over a fortnight
- annualised hours - we calculate the number of hours of work over a year. The hours are divided across the year to fit with annual work peaks and troughs
- flexi-time - employees adjust when they work their contracted hours to fit around both work and personal commitments. Working more hours one month and taking time back the next to maintain work-life balance
- long distance working - where employees may live in the UK outside of Lincolnshire where they are not required to regularly attend a Lincolnshire office base in person. The employee's contractual workbase will be in Lincolnshire and they will cover any costs if they do need to travel to the workbase
- flexible retirement - access to pension benefits while working fewer hours or at a lower level of responsibility
Examples of smarter working are:
- Choosing your work space – with their manager's agreement employee's can choose whether to work from home, in the office or out in the community depending on which is most suitable for the task. They still have an office as a contractual work base and can book available desks and meeting rooms in managed workspace
- Using Microsoft Teams for meetings – using teams for most meetings as a quick and efficient way to get people together who may be at different locations
The smarter working policy provides more information.
