How respecting employees flexible boundaries improved performance at Exclaimer

You talked about a shift from being busy to always available? So what impact has that had on employee wellbeing and performance in real terms? Is it making a difference?

People are just saturated in information and so if this isn't just the workplace that it means that we've have to be really thoughtful about how we communicate with people, how we engage with people.

I'm not a massive fan of saying, ‘right, this is our policy on our work’, because everybody's different. People are at different levels. So we've started a process of talking about boundaries, setting your own boundaries. People being made aware of those boundaries, and to respect those boundaries.

I'll give you a really good example - going on holiday. Some people, when they go on holiday, they just want to switch off. I don't know if you have the latest iPhone but, it has this functionality where you can set your own preferences around what you see on your phone. We thought that was super interesting. So you can turn, literally, make invisible your work email, your work Slack channel, everything that's work related for a period of time.

But what was really interesting was that we all wrote down our boundaries and shared them back to the group, and they were all completely different, like mine. I actually don't mind interruptions on the weekends.

Do you think there's an element of internal, personal pressure that people are putting on themselves? You feel that if some people are doing it, I should probably be available as well.

For me, there has to be a foundation of culture, you know, a bit like a garden. The soil needs to be fertile for any of these things to really work. But if you've got a toxic culture, where we say you don't have to share emails, but we judge you for it anyway.

I think it's hard for workers to sometimes work out whether it’s genuine sentiment, or whether it’s something that leaders feel they should be doing, and that's an element of trust, isn't it?

It is. I think what you said slightly earlier was actually really interesting, that people put pressure on themselves. So I've had conversations with people where I know they've worked till 11 o'clock at night, or they've worked weekends, and we've had to have a clarifying conversation that I've said, in no way have I asked that of you or required that of you. You're doing that yourself.

So we had to have a breakout session where we set our boundaries and they're all different. So one person actually prefers to check in a couple of times while they're on holiday, so they don't have a massive wave of stuff when they return. That's their choice. I went on holiday, and I moved all my apps to the back, and I did not look at a single work communication. I said, look, if the place that's burning to the ground. You've got my WhatsApp, just message me. But other than that, I don't want to think about it. My brain needs to rest.

So let's talk about the Xflex initiative. What was the thinking behind that? Why did you bring that in? What were the challenges around it, and what sort of buy-in did you need from the leadership to get that going?

Yeah, I actually did it in my previous organization, and it was born from us trialing the four day week.

I use Jenga as an analogy of the four day week. You can end up pulling the blocks out all in one place if it’s a four day week and it’s no Friday. Although some people would rotate on that day, we would have a skeletal support for customers, and it really destabilized things.

And then some people really were still very much drawn in and had to work five days. And then some just kind of went, I'm out, and turned everything off and disappeared. And it created an Us and Them situation and created some destabilization, and customer service suffered as a result.

I thought, why don't we take the time, break it up into different size chunks, give it to people and say, you take it when you want, and the outcome of that meant that time was taken very thinly across the week and the month and the year, and so you didn't notice it and and it was really Interesting.

At Exclaimer, we do five whole days, six half days and 15 hours, and you can take them at short notice, so it's little and often between holiday and it's great.

Tell us about that difference in terms of productivity. What were you monitoring?

Our business performance went up, and there were a multitude of reasons. I talked about culture and there was definitely a culture that was more productive.

People are happier, more in control, psychologically safe. People really want to do well for the business. They feel very attached to the business. They also had ownership. They had shares in the business. The sick levels went down and attrition went down.

When you don't have people leaving and you don't have that nine month gap between someone leaving and someone starting, sales started to go through the roof. So sometimes these things have that knock on effect to other things. It's very rarely direct. There's lots of factors. Subtle things that are really hard to measure. But attrition levels, sickness levels, are big ones, and the gap between somebody leaving and somebody starting and being trained up. Productivity from that had a big impact on our success as a business, which is really interesting I think.

How do you balance that with the urgency and the pace of what's required? Is there a little bit of pressure from leadership to make sure that there's a continuation there?

Really interestingly, we've just done a values exercise, because we want to refresh our values, and we we did a session where we personified Exclaimer, and we talked about it as if it were a person.

And one of the biggest more negative traits around the business was around kind of being slightly chaotic and a bit disorganized.

So, we thought if we just make people's lives easier, smoother, slicker, better organized, the work is still the work, we’ve still got to deliver this stuff, but our duty as an organization is to make that simple.

I think if you give people the opportunity, the flexibility, to deal with those things which might be going in the background in their lives and they know they don't have to be thinking about that while they're working, they can be more focused on the task in hand.

Yeah. And, if something blows up in their personal lives, they know they're able to just go without any guilt, just take that time out and sort things out, or do what they need to do.

And also, we have Mental Health First Aiders that we're training up at the moment. It will be built into our leadership training.

I've seen the signs of poor mental health early, right? A lot of people think men's poor mental health looks like poor performance. That's the danger of it. And I think a lot of people probably don't pass probation, get fired, whatever it is because their poor mental health looks like poor performance, but in actual fact, they want to do a really good job. They want to stay but they're just struggling, and they need support. So it's spotting the signs early, asking people, are they okay? Simple things that managers can do.

Where do you go next with this? You mentioned your Mental Health First Aiders. So is that an external training thing, how does that work?

I think people have a lot more interaction with their managers, so that touch point is really critical. But to be able to go and talk to somebody completely unrelated to your team or function and just offload is lovely. But we also have lots of different avenues. People can go down for therapy as well. I think that we have to be ready to be able to provide what people need.

It's so important that we're here to catch people when they fall. And if what we provide isn't sufficient, well then you tell us what you want. It's that important.

I guess, off the back of the success of this, it would be unusual if you didn't have other things that you might want to add to the to the mix. Is there a wish list for you?

There’s something I did at my last company. Mental health and physical health are interlinked. You can't separate the two. And it's funny how we talk about mental health and physical health as somehow completely separate to one another.

I had a very personal interest in the gut microbiome and the link between that and mental health and actually just your whole physical self.

So it's not just looking at mental health as a separate thing. We just did a big steps challenge to get people up away from their desks and moving around. I think if you eat well, you sleep well, you exercise, even if you have mental health challenges, that's going to put you in the best possible position to deal with those things, and in some cases, it might even eradicate them completely.

Companies have snacks and people are going to hate me for this. I just saw an email come up and it says, there’s Cokes in the fridge and snacks. And it's like, sweeties, yeah! Things that people love.

And I was thinking, actually, if we look at this more holistically, should we be providing those kind of highly processed foods for people saying, oh, your mental health and your physical well-being are important, but here's loads of sweets and fizzy drinks? It's a contradiction. But at the same time, you know, the average age is probably late 20s, early 30s and I don't want to be a total killjoy,

But there are loads of healthy things that we could provide that are also delicious. So I think it's just actually not contradicting yourself when you go out with these messages and try to be more holistic.