Background:

Legal Practise, Norton Rose, realised it had to be able to cut people costs in response to changing demand, but wanted to minimise redundancies and retain skilled staff.

Approach:

Staff surveys were undertaken, and show that 96% of staff support the scheme to offer flexible options that keep people working. As a result, more than 600 employees signed up to either work a four-day week or take a sabbatical in return for reduced pay.

What happened:

In March 2009 Norton Rose announced their flexible scheme, which allows management to put staff onto either a four-day week at 85% of base salary, or a sabbatical of between four and 12 weeks at 30% of base salary.

HR director Lak Purewal said of the scheme in February 2010: “The [four-day week] scheme has helped us to see flexible working in practice and we consequently expect to see more applications [for part-time working]. As workloads increase we’ll be looking at flexible working schemes more and more. the ­individual and ensuring we retain talent.”