A three-year, best practice program to support flexible working in the NSW Government has paid off in recent months, as a significant proportion of the workforce moved to remote working almost overnight during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Flexible working is about rethinking where, when and how work can be done, in a way that maintains or improves service delivery for the citizens of NSW. The NSW Government has a policy commitment that all roles in the government sector can be flexible on an ‘if not, why not’ basis.
The Flexible Working team at the NSW Public Service Commission has created a set of world-leading materials to help managers and employees discuss flexible working, use team-based design to trial arrangements that work, and extend flexible working to teams where it would have been unthinkable a few years ago. They’ve also piloted innovative new platforms to match potential job sharers, and role design tools to support part-time and transition to retirement. The resources are recognised as best practice and were recently featured in The Australian.
By joining the trials and using the tools, teams across the NSW Government sector have found forms of flexibility they had not previously considered, and reported significant improvements in engagement and wellbeing while ensuring productivity.
An employee involved in one pilot said “I have been working from my mother’s house, which is a long drive from my house. Working out of the office has allowed me to spend more time with her, as you know she has limited time left and it has really left her feeling reinvigorated and wanting to see the silver lining in the cloud.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the team has built on these resources and relationships. They ran sector-wide webinars on how to work flexibly, attracting close to 2000 attendees, created new resources to help employees in office-based jobs adjust their roles to manage at-home commitments and created a Flexible Working support LinkedIn group for NSW Government staff that now has over 300 members.
One organisation that has benefited from this approach is Transport for NSW, who in recent years worked with the Flexible Working team to design and improve its flexible working offerings. When COVID-19 hit, they used the PSC’s templates to create new, more targeted resources to support their staff.
“The direction they supplied was such a big help,” Sam Wood, Senior Manager, Future Workplaces, Transport for NSW said. “Over the last month or two the PSC flexibility resources have been really helpful and been used by us.”
View the full range of flexible working resources, tools and guides to get started now.