What are other companies offering in terms of work-life balance and flexibility? Are there any new trends or creative offerings that people have seen and/or implemented? We've had some feedback that our offering, which we believe to be competitive is "at odds with prevailing trends". Currently we offer Hybrid working (2 or 3 days in office per week) and a 'work from anywhere' policy.
We've recently gone back the other way, with employees being required in the office 4 x days a week. This was a decision made by our executive committee. We are a manufacturing organisation, so the majority of our workers are shift workers, and flexible working wasn't really a thing anyway; however, it's not gone down well with office based staff. We've made this change globally, as the exec have a desire for people to come to the office and collaborate more. Sadly, we'll already had some people resign over this decision.
I think it's tricky at the moment, as some businesses are really struggling and grasping at straws. If anything, in central London, I've seen it moving the other way, with more companies saying that they want employees back in the office, with some now even mandating 5 x days.
We have 40% of our time in the office, rather than saying in days and allow employees to choose which days they are - although teams generally co-ordinate so they're in together. We can also work out of any of our offices which gives a few different options. We agree quite a lot of flexible working requests and support differing working patterns/compressed hours/partial retirement/job shares, some of these have been real success stories. We are also flexible on start/finish times, unless they are on set shifts, so that employees can decide on their working times (within reason!). Our new office also has less desks and more 'collaboration' spaces - meeting rooms, pods, break out areas etc, to encourage working with others in the office but concentrating on head down tasks at home. We've recently introduced buy/sell holiday so people can choose if they want more time or more money, our annual leave is generous at 31 days + BHs. Our engagement survey shows that people really value the flexibility.
I did hear of somewhere that had an annual hours approach so people could do longer hours in the winter and shorter days in the summer or just work when was convenient/better for them rather than set hours.
At my previous company, they introduced a “no-meetings Friday” quarterly — it was still a working day, but it gave everyone space to catch up on emails, complete online courses, or work flexibly. It made a noticeable difference in focus and wellbeing.
We have had some great feedback from our Flexible Summer offering where colleagues do not have to come into the office (the rest of the year we require 2days a week) for 6 weeks during July and August.