Employer perspective - Reframing what's possible with flex

Laura Bevan is Chief People Officer at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital NHS Trust. She’s also part of a national working group looking at people policies across the NHS, as well as a mum of two.

Laura talks to us about how RNOH recognise the significant part that flexible working plays in providing people with the best employee experience.

Flexible working can be tricky in a healthcare setting. With services that put patients at the centre and need to be delivered around the clock, balancing the needs of the service with supporting employees to work flexibly is no mean feat. It involves the need to think creatively, have fantastic organisational coordination and supporting systems and be adaptable to changing needs and priorities.

Most NHS organisations have recognised for many years that offering flexibility is crucial to attract and retain the people that are in such high demand – our nurses, our doctors, our allied health professionals and the many support staff within our organisations. However, it was truly the Covid pandemic that pushed NHS organisations to reframe what is possible from a flexible working perspective and make a seismic shift quickly. The pandemic got NHS Trusts supporting homeworking on a much greater scale than ever before. But of course, this too wasn’t easy. It can create a real challenge to have different scope for different staff groups – for example, while it may be relatively simple for a medical secretary to type letters at home on a device linked to the Trust systems, it is not possible for the nurse giving hands on patient care to work from home. It’s important to not let flexible working opportunities create unhelpful divisions amongst staff.

Being open to making flexibility work

At Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, our aim is to provide the best staff experience in the NHS and we recognise the significant part offering flexibility has to play in this. In the annual NHS staff survey, we perform consistently well in relation to the questions that ask about flexibility and flexible working. I think this is because we try and start from a place of considering what is possible and are open to trying to make flexibility work, recognising the benefits this brings.

Juggling life commitments with work is different for everyone. A parent with school age children may have very different needs from someone with caring responsibilities for a parent for example or someone who is looking to retire and return but only work a few hours per week.

We have a wide range of flexible working support available that is in place for staff including annualised hours contracts, supporting career breaks, part time working, people working full time over 9-day fortnights, people working some of their time from home, people working both long and short shifts, people taking part of their pension and working reduced hours, and many more! For some staff, having some certainty about their work pattern is equally important to having flexibility. We therefore seek to support staff to work shift patterns that work for them and communicate rosters well in advance.

Encouraging supportive and open conversations

There is no magic bullet to getting this right. The important thing is supportive communication between managers and the people in their teams, listening to their needs and requests and seeing what may be doable. We encourage positive conversations about flexible working at all levels of the organisation and we consider this as one of the things that contribute to employee wellbeing, when we discuss appraisals too.

On a national level, the NHS is focused on this too and a national working group looking at people policies for roll out broadly across the NHS has prioritised work on a Flexible Working policy to further encourage organisations to pay attention to this and help support and build the workforce we require in the future.

On a very personal level, I get this. As a mum of two children I have really valued the opportunity to work flexibly throughout my career and I’m lucky that in my role, I am supported to have the flexibility I need. I anticipate that, like me, many people prize this as being one of the primary things they value about their experience of work – I get to give my best, while not forgetting I have responsibilities and focus outside of work too.