Flex Co. is a large retail organisation that prides itself on its progressive approach to HRM. As a retailer, it recognises that its success depends on delivery of a ‘fantastic’ customer experience and invests heavily in the training and development of its store staff. Alongside this, it has a range of other progressive HR policies, including Work–Life Balance (WLB) options. The WLB policy allows for part-time working, term-time-only working, a compressed working week and shift swapping. For store employees, flexitime and working from home are not permissible, although these are offered to employees in head office and regional offices. A trial of self-rostering, where store workers pick their own shifts (within specified parameters), is also taking place within a small number of stores.

Flex Co. operates a decentralised structure in which each store is a profit centre and each store manager is responsible for the delivery of a certain level of sales and profits and for managing staff and other costs within the store. In common with many retail organisations, Flex Co. store managers use a range of employee contracts to ensure that high levels of staff are available at peak times, for example lunchtimes and weekends, but that a skeleton staff operates at quiet trading times. This means that, other than at store manager and assistant manager level, most contracts are part time and there is a high use of zero hours contracts. Managers argue that this is unproblematic as most employees are either women with childcare responsibilities or students. They are somewhat resistant to WLB policies that afford greater employee flexibility as this conflicts with their capacity to devise staff rosters that meet store requirements.

Flex Co. has just conducted a staff attitude survey and is disappointed with the results in relation to its WLB policy. Most store staff have indicated that the options within the policy are not readily available to them. Many wish to work term-time only for example but, as school holidays are typically busy trading periods, managers have been reluctant to agree these contracts. Those taking part in the self-rostering trial have also reported high levels of management interference in the determination of rosters and a sense that little autonomy has been gained. Finally, there is a sense of ‘us and them’ in respect of home-working and flexitime between those based in head and regional offices and those based in stores.

Questions 

1. Flex Co. devises policies centrally at head office but devolves the responsibility for their implementation to store managers, whose priorities may conflict with the policy imperatives.

To what extent will it ever be possible to ensure robust policy implementation in this organisation structure?

2. What tensions can you identify between flexibility that meets employer need and that which meets employee need? To what extent is it likely to be possible to reconcile these tensions?

Which will take precedence?

3. What are the difficulties inherent in offering different flexibility options to different groups of employees? Is it better to have a ‘one size fits all’ approach?