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Unpaid overtime UK Protime

Employers must rethink workforce management to drive productivity

3 minutes
Timeregistration Culture News

It sounds counterintuitive, but the UK won’t be able to work its way out of a productivity crisis. Far from boosting bottom line performance, new research shows an engrained overwork culture is creating employee burnout and disengagement, undermining retention, and performance.

Market research: Unpaid Overtime
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Blog Unpaid Overtime UK Protime

By contrast, several of our European cousins - Denmark, Belgium, Norway, France - rank among the top ten most productive countries in the world, while also working the lowest number of hours.  What these countries have in common is a deeply held cultural belief in wider society that work, and home life are of equal importance to employees.

Socio-economic changes are shifting cultural attitudes in the UK toward a healthier respect for work-life balance and this is having a seismic effect on employee expectations and engagement with work. 

Faced with the prospect of a 100-year life, working longer, drawing a pension later, Gen Z is acutely aware of the need to pace their working lives and expect to have a healthy life outside of work.

Meanwhile, parents of young children want to share childcare and work responsibilities equally.  Both men and women expect their employer to support them to manage work around care responsibilities.  In the face of a childcare crisis and eyewatering housing costs this has become a non-negotiable.

Similarly, employers are struggling to entice over 50’s back to the workforce unless they offer flexibility this demographic wants to enjoy life and manage care responsibilities of elder or sick relatives.

Blog Unpaid Overtime UK Protime

Together these expectations define the workforce of the future which employers must accommodate to remain competitive.  To ensure their approach to workforce management drives, rather than hinders, high performing teams, talent retention and reputation as an attractive employer. Money alone won’t keep your staff, yes, they want a competitive salary but highly prize life outside of work and are prepared to change jobs to get the flexibility they want.

While leaders understand it makes good business sense to keep staff happy, greater work flexibility must be managed with business delivery.  That means, managers must support employees to work flexibly while ensuring productivity doesn’t dip.  And for employees to understand they have a critical role to play helping their manager evidence performance and productivity gains to leaders.

For this approach to work leaders must equip managers with the right tools to  manage employee expectations of flexibility with business delivery.   To co-ordinate work across a team of people likely to be working in different locations, at different hours.  To field a full team while juggling employee requests for parental leave, flexibility and holidays.

As well as the ability to analyse working patterns, work hours, holiday and compare this data with key performance goals.

For managers, HR, and Finance to work closely together identify peaks and troughs in workforce supply and demand and forward plan to mitigate staffing costs.

For employees to help their manager to help provide them with greater flexibility by engaging with time and attendance software.  Recording this data provides employees with greater autonomy to plan working hours, book holiday and have a constructive, data-led conversation with their manager about workload.

Unpaid overtime UK Protime

In our experience, the first step to rethink workforce management, begins with gathering key stakeholders together, including staff representatives to ask how you can work together to create the right environment that drives high performing teams. The output from this discussion can be used to design workforce management software that supports your business goals, and that managers will use because it removes the admin and guess work from their role.

E.book: The True Cost of Overtime
How overwork impacts employee performance and how you can fix it
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