Trust is the Flexibility Strategy

The smallest Driver child, channelling all of us with transition week overwhelm, at another "End of Year" performance. I promise he enjoyed it when it started....

Last week was transition week in our house. Three kids, currently at two schools; from September, three different schools. Last week alone meant three separate pick-ups and drop-offs, across three different places, on top of an end-of-term calendar that's somehow gotten fuller every year: an informal parent visit afternoon landing on exactly the same day as my middle daughter's final ever primary school performance, sports day with its raffle and its home clothes day, costumes to find, new classroom "social stories" to read through before September. Two parents, both running our own businesses full time, with no third parent to absorb the overflow.

Primary school asks more of parents than secondary does, week to week. But this time of year, the volume ramps up for every parent, whatever age or stage their kids are at. It's not a complaint, it's just the reality of this fortnight for a huge number of working parents. UK research bears this out: a large share of working parents report that school disruptions get in the way of their ability to work, and that flexible working, adjusted hours, home working, compressed weeks, is what makes the juggle survivable rather than something that breaks people.

Here's the thing I keep coming back to, though: none of that flexibility means anything without trust underneath it.

Trust is the actual policy

Not the wording in the handbook. Not the process for requesting a late start. The belief, genuinely held, that the person you've hired will do the work you've hired them to do, even if the when and where look different this particular fortnight than they did in February. Everything else, the forms, the toolkits, the approval chains, is just scaffolding around that one belief. If the belief isn't there, the scaffolding doesn't hold anything up.

I've seen the dividend this pays first-hand. A friend of mine, a director at a large organisation, used to specifically request that women returning from maternity leave join his team. Not despite the flexibility they'd need, because of it. He was clear-eyed that it paid off: in loyalty, in discretionary effort, in people who stayed and went further because the team had gone further for them first.

CIPD's evidence review on the business case for flexible working backs this up directly: employees who work flexibly report higher job satisfaction and commitment, and are more likely to go the extra mile and stay loyal to their employer, than those who don't. Higher engagement linked to flexible working is also associated with sharply reduced staff turnover (CIPD, Flexible working: the business case).

So what does trusting your people actually look like in practice, at the organisational level and in the day-to-day of line management? Some thoughts on both.

For organisations

• Write policy around outcomes, not hours. If a role can be measured by what gets delivered rather than when someone was logged on, build your flexible working policy around that measure, not attendance.

• Make flexibility the default assumption, not the exception people have to justify. A policy that exists but requires a business case every time someone wants to use it isn't really flexible, it's conditional.

• Audit who's actually using flexible working, and who's afraid to. If it's disproportionately used by senior staff, or avoided by anyone worried it'll be read as less committed, that's a culture problem no policy document fixes on its own.

• Resource cover properly during predictable pinch points, end of term, school holidays, so flexibility for one person doesn't just become extra pressure on a colleague.

For line managers

• Ask what's going on before you ask where someone is. A five-minute conversation about what a fortnight looks like for someone does more than any policy clause.

• Model it yourself. If you never take advantage of flexibility, your team will assume it's not really safe to either, whatever the handbook says.

• Judge the work, not the visibility. Someone logging off at 3pm to do school pick-up and finishing a task at 8pm that evening has done the job. Noticing the 3pm gap and not the 8pm output is exactly the kind of presenteeism thinking flexible working is meant to replace.

• Say the quiet part out loud. "I trust you to manage this" is a sentence worth actually saying to your team, not just implying through an unenforced policy.

If you're navigating your own version of transition week, whatever that looks like for you, I hope someone's extending you that trust too.

Trish Driver is the founder of A New Normal Ltd, a people, culture and inclusion consultancy. If your organisation's flexible working policy needs more than good intentions behind it, get in touch for a free, no-obligation conversation.