Putting HR and flexible working policies into practice… at long last
Using the example of flexible working and recent research on its application (or lack of), IES Associate Duncan Brown argues that HR functions are overly focused on policy drafting and procedural niceties, such that these policies’ goals are often not delivered into practice. As IES highlighted 25 years ago, we know why these policy-into-practice gaps exist. And with our research to hand, we know how to close them.
My youngest Genny was always eager to grow up and get on with life. When she started reading books, she would read a page or two and then skip to the end, impatient to know what had happened.
HR could do with a few more people like Genny, impatient for outcomes and results. The recent Employment Rights Act and forthcoming Equality (Race and Disability) Bill appear to have further reinforced the HR function’s over-emphasis on legislative compliance through detailed, intricately-specified HR policies. I have helped clients this year to update their policies and procedures on a range of areas, from sexual harassment, through employee/trade union involvement and consultation, to ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting.
While this focus has done much to strengthen the function’s influence in organisations (representing a ‘powerful, bloated, ultra-woke (productivity-damaging) bureaucratic beast’, if you believe the Daily Telegraph), it has also encouraged worsening of the function’s traditional Achilles’ heel, a lack of emphasis on policy implementation and effectiveness.
I concluded this from an excellent couple of days last week updating myself on the latest HR research from some of our top academics. Wednesday was King’s Business School’s annual research conference from the Department of HRM. And the day before a University of Greenwich Centre for Research in Employment and Work seminar, expertly choreographed by Dr Graham Symon, on the UK’s employment market. Great week!
Amidst all the excellent research material, this common thread of a serious gulf between stated HR policy, and enacted impact and results, was depressingly prominent.
The continuing disability employment gap
Professor Kim Hoque at King’s highlighted this gap most clearly, frustrated at the UK’s lack of progress in addressing the shortfall in employment rates (and pay) between disabled people and the rest of the working-age population, of 29% according to the ONS’s latest data. Disabled people are twice as likely to be unemployed and three times as likely to be economically inactive. This is worse than the EU average and has flatlined for the last decade, despite a range of government and employer initiatives designed to support disabled people into and in employment.
These initiatives include the 2021 National Disability Strategy and most prominently, the Disability Confident Employer accreditation scheme, designed to recognise ‘good practice’ employers. Kim’s research presented to a parliamentary enquiry last year concluded ‘Disability Confident has not been effective in improving either employer practices or disabled people’s employment outcomes’.
The King’s team found that 82% of large employers have policies promoting disability employment, with most Disability Confident accredited. Yet the average number of practices they operate supporting this, averaged just 1.15 per employer. In particular, ‘the flexible working practices that can be essential to obtain and remain in employment are virtually non-existent for new entrants to the organisation’. Somewhat less than the ‘39 steps’ he recommends employers take to create the ‘FlexPlus working’ required to achieve greater disability inclusion.
Homeworking, for example, is a key practice supporting disability employment. Yet Hoque’s evidence to the inquiry showed only 0.5% of UK job adverts mention that they are amenable to fully remote working, and 2.75% that the job can be carried out on a hybrid office/home basis. Employers apparently want the policy accreditation and recognition but are much less willing to put the investment and graft into actually making the policy work in practice, and deliver the intended outcome of employing more disabled people.
The continuing gender gap
Professor Heejung Chung, Director of the King’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, similarly highlighted the gendered application and impact of flexible and remote working policies, particularly since Covid. Her book publicising the findings is aptly titled, ‘The Flexibility Paradox’.
The good news is that flexible working is enabling more women to stay in work for longer and to work longer hours, particularly after children. The bad news is the ‘motherhood penalty’ has been shifted rather than removed. While male flexible workers report greater job satisfaction, less stress and work/family conflict, women see no improvements in stress levels and experience higher work/family conflict. This is primarily because they are spending more time on their family/childcare responsibilities, as well as work for their employer.
‘The reward for greater autonomy’ Heejung concludes, ‘is more of everything’, a phenomenon she generously titles ‘self-exploitation’. Your (male) IES blogger regards it as more to do with male leaders and the values they promote in their corporate cultures. It may be a subtler approach to return-to-office mandates, but the outcome is the same: defeating the objective of greater equality for women (and the disabled) which these employers all profess to. My IES colleague Meenakshi Krishnan’s recent webinar on women in senior leadership, Still climbing: Why women aren’t advancing, drew similar conclusions, highlighting the ‘stubbornly slow’ pace of recent progress.
Many of us are frustrated at this lack of progress, a frustration magnified by the fact that this research also highlights ‘what works’ in closing HR policy/practice gaps. Closing a HRD research-into-practice gap is certainly one important means of achieving this that underpins IES’s mission and explains why the exchanges at last week’s CREW and KBS meetings are so important.
The requirements for employers to put HR policies into practice were well-summarised in IES’s study on Making values a reality. Corporate values are a notorious area for the dreaded ‘say/do’ gap in the minds of many employees. Reviewing examples from organisations which have demonstrably embedded their values successfully, a related IES blog concludes:
‘Established values need to be grown using a collaborative, evidence-based approach and nurtured regularly to ensure the climate allows them to blossom. Encourage the values to branch through everything you do within your organisation, weaving their vines through your people, practices and processes.’ A bit more then than a policy pronouncement or government policy accreditation.
HR and flexible working policies: from intent to impact
Recent developments have encouraged HR functions’ traditional focus on drafting policies and procedures, with even less attention devoted to their implementation. This phenomenon is not new. My much-missed former IES colleague Stephen Bevan addressed it 25 years ago in his review of ‘Reward strategies: Ten common mistakes’.
He christened this ‘policy: practice, rhetoric: reality gap’, a divide which has, if anything, worsened over the intervening period. The means of closing these gaps he observed have equal resonance today, including: have clear success criteria and measures; base policies on research-evidence; ensure leadership buy-in and line manager support; employ extensive employee communications; and seek improvement-in-practice, rather than perfection-on-paper.
Stephen would have reinforced the continuing importance today of some HR horticultural-hard-work, embedding those ‘vines’ throughout all of your processes and practices, with appropriate IES applied research support, alongside HR’s newer policy-drafting AI systems.
Any views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Institute as a whole.