Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council’s IT department has introduced flexible working practices for its remote support worker team to boost motivation, but plans to broaden the initiative to other staff.

The council, which employs 15,000 personnel and caters to the needs of 250,000 citizens in south Yorkshire, implemented an optional flexible working strategy about two years ago. The initiative includes home working and the option to work a flexible four-day week or nine-day fortnight.

In October last year the IT department, which employs 119 staff, decided to introduce a further three-month homeworking pilot with its remote support worker team of six people, which undertakes second line support for the service desk and fixes PC problems remotely.

‘It is not a particularly appealing role, so when we went through the organisation and said how and where could we apply flexible working, one of the bases was that if people could do it from home, perhaps it would not seem such a bad job,’ says head of information systems Paul Briddock.

‘This turned it around from being a bit of a mundane role to being one of the highlights, and the satisfaction and morale change was amazing.’

Before implementing the initiative last spring, however, the IT department worked closely with the human resources (HR) department to set policies, and document thoroughly how procedures would work and how communication between staff and management would take place. Affected staff also had a series of meetings with HR to discuss the potential impact of the move.

‘You have to ensure that people still feel part of the community and are not totally isolated; you have to explore how you deal with meetings and travel expenses and you have to do health and safety checks as you cannot allow people to work off the kitchen table – the room has to meet BSE standards,’ says Briddock.

Moreover, because the focus of the work shifted to becoming more output-based, it was also necessary to undertake a performance management exercise both before and after implementation. The aim was to obtain a baseline of how many jobs, and what type of job, staff handled daily to measure effectiveness. The move resulted in a 12 per cent increase in productivity and the reduction of the team size to five.

But Briddock warns other IT leaders considering such a move that they will need the acceptance of the workforce, and agreement that they are willing to be employed in that way. ‘If you give them freedom and flexibility, you need to be assured that they are getting through the workload, and everyone has to accept that,’ he says.

Briddock is also looking at introducing automatic call distribution to enable his 30 desktop technicians to pick up jobs from home or when working at one of the council’s 100 sites, and is exploring how to measure the performance of the software development team.

‘This is now about technology, which is there and proven and works,’ he says. ‘It is about how people react and accept this that is the key to making it a success.’