Framing flexible working
One of the failures of the UK labour market is the difficulty many women face when returning to work after having children or having taken other career breaks. All of us know people who have struggled with this - even if you don’t know that you know them.
Things are getting slowly better and the growing provision of flexible working options, be it relating to hours, location or whatever, is removing some of the barriers.1 This is an area where my general suspicion of ‘win win’ argumentation takes a back seat as it is clear that there are a lot of skilled female workers who want work, and a lot of companies that could benefit from employing them.
But it is not as simple as ‘provision of flexible working = improved female participation in the labour market’. Even when employers advertise flexible working in job ads they may not do so in a way that appeals to female workers. The potential problems have been demonstrated in an interesting recent piece of research.
To test how differences in describing flexible working affected the response of female applicants, the Behavioural Insights Team (what used to be known as the ‘Nudge unit’) conducted research in partnership with the National Careers Institute (NCI) in the Australian Department of Employment and Workplace Relations. The study simulated the experience for women of responding to online job ads.
Here’s the description of the study:
We conducted an online trial with 460 current and recent women returners that simulated their experience of searching for available roles on an online job board, such as Seek.?
Women returners repeatedly chose from pairs of job ad summaries, which looked similar except for the way that flexible work was framed.?
We tested six different flexible work framings:
And here are the results:
Job ads that included specific information about what flexible work meant and included company endorsement of work/life balance significantly outperformed job ads that included a basic flexible work statement (“we offer flexible work”).?
Women returners were three times more likely to choose the specific, culture-related framing over the basic one.?
Notably, we also found that including a ‘request’ statement (“flexible work being available on request”) was just as off-putting to female applicants as having no flexible work statement at all.?
The whole thing is interesting. Like much ‘behavioural’ stuff I’ve read over the years, some of it borders on common sense / half-decent comms, but then busy people/organisations sometimes do get this basic stuff wrong.2
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But it’s the last sentence that caught my attention. Again, not necessarily surprising but taps straight into the power (im)balance at work. Many people do not feel confident individually in asking their employer for anything above what is the normal offer. This inevitably means that the group of workers asking for flexible working is significantly smaller than the group that wants it.
Aside from the specific point about job advertisements this obviously points to the need for collective responses to such issues, rather than putting the onus on individual workers to ask their employer for something. It must be particularly hard for someone re-entering the world of work to have to ask for something. It does not surprise me at all that many women would find this very off-putting.
Expanding the point, this is why I am a bit sceptical of initiatives that give workers the ‘right to request’ something - be it flexible working, a contract reflecting regular hours or whatever. I think the extent to which workers will exercise such rights will vary greatly by the culture of a company.
As an example, both Wetherspoons and MacDonalds (in the UK) have in the past offered workers on zero-hour contracts the right to a regular hour contract. The results seem to have been very different.
Wetherspoons now states:
Of hourly paid staff, 97% (96.8%) are employed on a guaranteed-hour contract. A minority of employees prefers the flexibility of a contract with no minimum hours.
And here’s what MacDonalds’s says:
We announced in April 2017 that all of our 120,000 plus employees will be offered the choice of a flexible or fixed contract offering minimum guaranteed hours, and since then, we've been working through a process of training with our franchisees and restaurants. The majority of our people chose to stay on their existing flexible contracts, valuing the ability to work around their other commitments.
Clearly it’s possible that differences in the work and in the workforce of each company explain much of this, but the gap is really notable. My reading is that, as the evidence from the jobs ads study suggests, it would be a huge mistake to assume that if people are not asking for something that means they don’t want it.
This has obvious implications for the Government’s push to revamp employment rights in the UK. They will be under intense pressure - for example on zero-hours contracts - to soften their approach and I would expect some interest groups to push for a ‘right to request’ approach. I could see this being a very ineffective policy approach in some sectors of the economy, and, as noted above, would run the risk of drawing the conclusion in future that workers not exercising such a right don’t want guaranteed hours.
Finally, to bring it back to the original study, it's very interesting that the researchers focused on female applicants. I would not be at all surprised to see differences in how different groups respond to job ads. If so it strikes me that the framing of terms and conditions in job ads could be inadvertently pushing away (or, more pointedly, discriminating against) certain groups of people that companies want to attract. This seems like something people in Responsible Investment might want to take a look at - both in terms of investee companies and their own policies and practices.
1 A really basic headline point to take from behavioural research is that if you want people to do something, make it as easy as possible, and if you don’t want people to do something make it harder. Again it sounds like a truism, but it’s actually quite enlightening. For example, I sometimes see maddening arguments in support of voter ID along the lines of “we make people provide ID to buy cigarettes and alcohol but not to allow them to vote - why?” It’s because we want as many people as possible to participate in voting and therefore should make it as easy as possible (obvs there is a cost/benefit element too, but voter fraud is very rare). The same does not go for smoking and drinking. But unfortunately we’ve lost that argument in the UK.
2 I also would not dismiss the possibility of a minority of employers wanting to be seen to offer something but not really wanting people to take up the offer.