Case study - Organon Research Scotland

Organon Research Scotland

Background

Organon is a Dutch-owned pharmaceuticals research company situated between Glasgow and Edinburgh with 340 permanent employees.

Of these, 290 are scientific staff, graduates at a minimum and mostly highly qualified or experienced. The remaining employees are laboratory support, administrative, finance, human resources and purchasing staff.

The firm's main motivation in introducing a flexible working policy was to attract and retain highly skilled staff, over half of whom were at a prime age for considering their work-life balance (56% of staff are aged 25-39, and there is another pocket aged 50+ dealing with either elderly parents or partners who are retiring).

In addition, an increasing number of employees in the age bracket where maternity leave is a consideration are women (the current gender divide of staff is 49% male and 51% female). Organon wanted, as far as possible, to retain those women who went on maternity leave.

Flexible working arrangements

There are two systems for moving to flexible working at the company - a formal 'right to request' - which is mainly for quite permanent changes - and informal flexible work arrangements which are often for temporary changes to working patterns.

The company's formal policy gives all staff 'the right to request to work flexibly', not just those with young or disabled children or those who have worked for the company for 26 weeks.

The policy states:

'If you meet the eligibility criteria above, you may request a change to the hours that you work, a change to the times when you are required to work or to work from home.

'This can cover working patterns such as annualised hours, compressed hours, flexitime, home-working, or job-sharing.' However, employees are expected to give serious consideration to the impact of their request, before lodging their application'.

Only one application can be made every 12 months under this formal policy.

However, there are also informal approaches to flexible working which run in tandem with this formal right to request, and the majority of staff working flexibly go through such informal routes, particularly if there is no change to their total working hours.

Informal flexible working would be discussed between the individual, Human Resources department and line manager; without the need for completing an application form.

Take-up and patterns currently in operation

Around 25-30 members of staff have made a permanent or long-term change to their working patterns. The majority do this when they come back from maternity leave. Many others make temporary changes to their working patterns to accommodate specific short-term requirements.

There is a wide range of reduced-hours working patterns. A large number are on four day weeks - and which four days they work is completely flexible based on their job, taking into account their tasks and their childcare arrangements. There are also about five different patterns of three-day-week working; some who work mornings only; one on 15 hours a week - five hours on three days - and someone working four, five and a half hour days so they can pick up their daughter from school. One person works a nine-day compressed fortnight.

No-one is on term-time working, which is considered difficult to fit in with task requirements. However, under the more informal, short-term arrangements, some staff take extra unpaid leave of 10 or 15 days over the school holidays; one person has done this for three years.

There have been no formal requests for permanent homeworking. The company would currently have difficulty agreeing to this, although Organon hopes its technological improvements will make this more possible in the future.

A number of people work from home on an ad hoc/occasional basis, but this is mostly quite senior staff who do not have to do 'hands-on' lab work or other on-site services.

Reasons for requests

The majority of requests have been from employees with children, particularly staff returning from maternity leave. But other reasons include: a nine-day fortnight that 'fits in better with the employee's life - it gives her a bit of breathing space'; and someone who wanted to spend more time with his (schoolteacher) wife. One of the male team leaders changed their work pattern temporarily to take his child to speech therapy for a set period.

Rejected requests

There have been 25-30 changes to employees' working patterns and only one has been rejected because the pattern requested did not fit in with the requirements of the job. The request was for compressed hours, fitting five days' work into four, but the job - animal husbandry (feeding, cleaning and watering animals) - was a five day a week job. In the end the applicant accepted a reduction in working hours to a four-day a week, thus releasing resources towards another post.

Response of line managers

Line managers were initially apprehensive so Human Resources (HR) talked through everything with them. HR's aim is to offer support and if necessary alternatives to a proposed arrangement. The situation is helped by the fact there is a six-month trial period. However there have been no situations in which a flexible working arrangement had to be changed.

The management do take past performance, attendance and timekeeping into account when looking into a request. One person had asked for compressed working but had a bad timekeeping record, so HR asked them to show they could improve that first.

Union involvement

The on-site union is Amicus, which has had quite a good relationship with management, but union officers are slightly apprehensive of the fact that the company had recently introduced a staff consultative committee (including non-union staff representatives).

The management had given them a draft of the formal policy when it was initiated, and a few minor comments had been made, but generally the union had been very happy with policy.

However, the union is not involved with the running of the policy - patterns are generally agreed directly between the individual concerned and the management. The union officers had not been asked to intercede in any individual case.

There are a number of issues related to the policy which the union is taking up, however, such as changes to the flexi-time system, the fact that some people regularly work beyond their contracted hours and the operation of a revised performance management system.