Social care charity Community Integrated Care has introduced a four-day working week for its more than 300 employees.
The plan, which started this month (August), allows head office and support function staff to condense their normal working hours into four days rather than five, choosing either the Monday or Friday as a non-working day.
According to the charity, it aims to provide greater choice for current employees while creating a more attractive offering for new recruits, and also delivering further support to its frontline workforce that operates over a 24-hour period.
In addition, Community Integrated Care has established a flexible return to the workplace, with workers having the choice to work in the office, virtually from home or a mixture of the two. Employees will only need to go to the office for meetings or training that need to be held in person, while the office spaces are transformed into hubs used for learning and collaboration.
The arrangement has initially been introduced across the support function teams, including the finance, HR and quality departments, but the aim is to roll it out further later in the year, with operational teams having the chance to work more flexibly too.
Teresa Exelby, chief people officer at Community Integrated Care, said that listening to the workforce is “hugely important” to the business and it is clear that employee expectation for a flexible approach has altered dramatically in recent months.
She explained that this move has been built with employees’ voices at the heart of it, giving them the freedom to choose and build their own ways of working.
“Our hope is that by ensuring that our colleagues can achieve a positive and healthy work-life balance, this will in turn boost the wellbeing and productivity of our workforce. Ultimately, our main goal is that this all leads to us being delivering the best lives possible for the people we support,” Exelby added.
