The retail labour market has recently been facing difficulties, explained Louise Tait, Wickes' HR director.
She told HR magazine: “Over the last few years, the retail labour market has been tough, in terms of supply to keep up with demand. By 2023, it became a real necessity for us to attract and retain talent.”
An engagement survey revealed that 66.5% of store managers were satisfied with their working arrangements. They were expected to be in stores full-time.
While flexible working was the norm across Wickes’ support centres, Tait wanted the whole business to benefit from the chance to manage their own working arrangements.
Achieving that in customer-facing roles was difficult to balance, however, to ensure that the firm continued to deliver for its customers.
Tait hoped that switching to a flexible working arrangement would help boost employees’ wellbeing, as well as internal mobility.
The company was made up of 40% female employees, but “that number drops off as you move through our leadership layers”, she explained.
“We had a real opportunity to use flexible working to progress and develop our internal talent, for them to be able to move into those more senior store management roles in a more flexible way,” she continued.
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Wickes became participants in a flexible working pilot for frontline and site-based workers, run by flexible working social enterprise TimeWise, alongside Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and construction company Sir Robert McAlpine.
The pilot implemented flexible working across 14 stores. TimeWise worked with Wickes to understand what the barriers were to flexible working in each of its customer-facing roles, and what this pattern might look like in practice.
For six months, store managers, operational managers and duty managers could choose between a range of working patterns: informal flexible options, such as flexi-time, split shifts and compressed hours; and formal options, such as reduced hours, job shares and fixed pattern.
Implementing flexible working took a lot of trial and error, Tait explained, and was done with the help of the whole business.
“One of the biggest learnings we had was that you really have to do this with full engagement of your leadership teams,” she said.
“We engaged with them right from the start and it created a real sense of accountability and ownership about it.
“What that meant was we established a really clear set of principles around what flexible working meant for Wickes – what it was and wasn’t. One thing we agreed on was a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work.”
The HR team had to make sure it wasn’t getting caught up in assumptions about what employees wanted, Tait remembered. While some colleagues trialled a four-day work week, and it worked for some, for others it led to feeling their work was more intense within a shorter work week.
Each month, participants took part in monthly focus group surveys to assess how the programme was going.
“What we found was that making sure we were really clear on the job role was important,” Tait described. It became clear that, while store managers were working flexibly, operations managers needed to feel equipped to lead a team.
“It showed us that we needed to do more training with our operations managers so that they felt confident leading a store team on a more regular basis,” Tait said.
Managers also learned how to divide employees’ time so that it worked for everyone. Instead of thinking about employees as full-time and always in, they were encouraged to start thinking about working arrangements in terms of hours. This made it easier to divide time up and make sure that all bases were covered, Tait explained.
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At the end of the six months, more piloting was needed, so the HR team extended the scheme for a further six months, to ensure the flexible working pattern was working smoothly.
By the end of those six months, store staff had been actively involved in shaping the process, Tait said. "We’d gotten the practical realities of scheduling and support, which meant that they felt confident when we got to rolling it out, to be able to put it into practice."
After the extended trial, 96.5% of store managers who took part were either satisfied or ‘very satisfied’ with their working hours. Store performance was unchanged.
The number of participants that reported low levels of job satisfaction decreased, from 12% to 7%. Satisfaction with work/life balance increased from 20% to 80%, and wellbeing went from 66.5% to 96.5%.
Meanwhile, 28% of participants reported taking less sick leave. According to TimeWise, this equated to 17 days saved over a three-month period, and £1,631.66 in savings.
There were other noticeable benefits of introducing flexible working, Tait added. “There was a lot better communication between the store teams.
“These are not contractual changes; this is about a line manager being able to have a conversation with an individual and agree how to support them and their flexibility needs.
“We had to put quite a bit of training into how to have a great conversion about flexibility at work.”
This training gave line managers the confidence to know they could make decisions at a local level.
Wickes has now offered flexible working options for all store managers in the UK. Tait is now looking at how to adapt this framework for its distribution employees.
“It’s for the local teams to work out what their version of that looks like. It means they take real ownership; things come to life much more that way,” she noted.
