Will post up the script when I get time.
It's long-But worth a watch!
So I'll talk predominantly about delivery where I work. But the ideas would apply more widely across the pipeline, nearly flexible hours is a proposal which is trying to match the core hours that we work up and down over the year to better reflect the way that workload varies across the seasons. That I think we'd all recognize. You mentioned about annualized hours. So the difference with the proposal that we're making annualized hours, your hours might fluctuate, and your pay would fluctuate with those hours, what we're proposing is that you would have different hours according to the workload demand through the year, but we'd maintain a consistent level of pay across the 52 weeks of the year for your basic pay. So I think that's an important thing to understand.
I think we all understand that workload varies and clearly, in the summer, the workloads lighter, and Christmas in the heat the workloads heavier. And a flexi our system would enable us to compete with other players in the market, what our competitors tend to do is they might have a zero hours contract or a payment or parcel or payment with a stock model. And what that means is that they adapt perfectly with variations in volume through the year.
To repeat what Grant said, we're not wanting to become a gig economy player. So what we're trying to do is find a way in which we can have an employed workforce on better than market terms, but still be flexible and adaptable, so that we're efficient and cost efficient. And we're able to give customers parcels at competitive prices.
So if I go a little bit into how, and as I say this will be focused upon delivery for now,
The idea was a that we worked shorter hours on our four routes, in the lighter periods, so in the summer, and longer in the peak periods in the autumn in the run up towards Christmas. So over the year, you'd be working the same basic hours as you do now. But instead of those being flat across the year, they would adapt probably into three blocks. And during those three blocks, your weekly hours will be adjusted into a low average and a high amount of hours
As a guideline that might vary between something like 32 hours in a light period, might go up to around 44 hours a week. But what we'd want to do is to reflect the changes in workload between those different between those different periods. So we understand that, you know, this has implications for people in terms of how you organize your life, we're not talking about a complete free for all in terms of attendance, we're still talking about scheduled days of attendance. And with the varying the hours that you perform over the week, we'd be looking to give you notice, and then as an indication of that, it might be four to 10 weeks notice of the schedules. So hopefully, that'll give you some reassurance that there'd be an ability to plan for your forthcoming attendances.
Something that's important to cover off is that we're looking to enhance the commit to deliver principle, whereby if you're allocated some work for a route on a day, we would want that work to be completed. So if we look at our competitors, they wouldn't cut off and return to the Depo. With some work outstanding. What we're looking for within the really flexible hours approach is to have that ability to flex on the day outside of those scheduled hours. So that if there are variations from day to day, we complete that work. And if we go over the scheduled time, we bank those hours. And if we're under the schedule time, likewise, we can bank those hours and we've looked to make the payments between the business and the employee over a period whereby ours can be paid back at a later time.
So one concern people might have is that we're trying to raise overtime and there would absolutely still be an opportunity to have overtime where this is required over and above the core work levels. So an example of that might be to cover absence or that type of thing working on days off that type of
Coverage and overtime that you do now. So the Flexi hours are really trying to iron out the variations from day to day on core routes. So that over the year from
Making use of every paid for hour.
So hopefully you can see from this, we're trying to be flexible, we're trying to be agile. We're trying to compete against other parcel operators.
But try and do it in our own way, which offers the best in the market terms and conditions. So what we're also trying to do with this is to reduce our dependency on lapsing into production. So with the shorter attendances, like periods and longer attendances at heavy periods, there should be more stability of the route that you're expected to cover. And the shorter long hours, we'll have that for the time that's going to take on a given day. So at the moment where we try to use lapsing and absorptions do that. Obviously, that means picking up paths or someone else's route and there's a time taken to get to perform that piece of work. So one aspect of this proposal is that we shouldn't lead so much lapsing and absorption and that might be something that people welcome. So that's the summary again
