9 A shorter week: thinking about long-term planning
This course has been designed to allow you to consider your organisational needs to assist with planning for change. The Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 requires public bodies to think about the long-term impact of their decisions. To assist with long term (and all planning) they have created a toolkit using the Three Horizons framework [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] . Dr Louisa Petchey – Senior Policy Specialist, Public Health Wales – who was involved in the creation of the toolkit, explains how using it can help with long-term planning and thinking about the future.
Download this video clip.Video player: hyb_1_2022_sept133_three_horizons_toolkit_compressed.mp4
Transcript
LOUISA PETCHEY
I'm Dr. Louisa Petchey. I'm a senior policy specialist at Public Health Wales, and part of my role involves working in partnership with the Future Generations Commissioner's Office, where we work together to try and help public bodies embed the long-term way of working in their thinking and planning as part of their duty under the Well-being of Future Generations Act.
So the partnership that Public Health Wales has with the Future Generations Commissioner's Office started towards the end of 2018 and was the result of the Commissioner recognising that the long-term way of working was one of the five ways of working under the Act that public bodies were finding the hardest to embed.
So we agreed to have a shared role between Public Health Wales and the Office that would dedicate some of their time to thinking about Futures as a approach for embedding that long-term way of working into public bodies, so building awareness, skills, and confidence, really, for public bodies in starting to use these techniques and approaches in their day-to-day work.
We first started to use the Three Horizons Model internally to help the Commissioner and her team think through what their vision was for a lot of her priority policy areas, so topics like housing or planning or transport. And as we were working through this internally, we started to realise that this was exactly the same thinking journey that we wanted public bodies to be able to go on as well.
So we were really keen to start sharing the Three Horizons methodology with them too. So that's part of why we started developing the toolkit to provide them with the information they needed to be able to think about what is the ultimate goal that they're trying to work towards, what is the current situation, and how can they make sure that keeping that long-term goal in mind, their short-term decisions that they have to make are making it easier for them to reach that long-term goal rather than harder.
And also, one of the things that's really important in the Act is involvement. It's one of the five ways of working. And we wanted to share with them our experience of how using the Three Horizons in a participatory way is a fantastic way to get your stakeholders and citizens thinking about the future and using that involvement way of working so that you can start checking to see whether people have the same vision as you, whether you're working towards the same goal, and whether they have the same ideas as to what the best way of making that journey is.
So we were really keen to try and push the fact that thinking long term can also help you with your involvement as well. The Well-being of Future Generations Act requires public bodies in Wales to embed five ways of working in the way that they go about their work. One of these is the long-term way of working.
And a short time into the Commissioner's role as a Future Generations Commissioner, she realised that of all the five ways of working, the one that public bodies were really struggling with the most was the long-term way of working. They just couldn't get a handle on what that actually involved doing.
That's when we came together and identified Futures and Futures techniques and approaches as a practical way that we could support public bodies to think long term. What we really liked about the Three Horizons Model was just how quick and easy it was to understand.
After a very quick five-minute introduction to the model, you can dive straight into having really rich discussions. And then once you've hooked people in, you can build on that iteratively. And after each conversation, go a little bit deeper until you've got a really comprehensive picture. But you've got people over that threshold and starting to think about the long-term without having it as a scary, big project.
The other thing that we really liked about it provided us with a shortcut language to talk about really complicated topics and issues that we shared. So in particular, the idea of an H2 plus and an H2 minus innovation very quickly allows people to understand whether you're talking about something which is a stepping stone to genuine transformational change or just a sticking plaster that's going to keep the current system ticking over but isn't really going to be helping you reach your long-term goal.
One of the great things about the Three Horizons Model is it gives you a structured way to talk to your team or your stakeholders and reach a shared understanding of what your long-term goal is, what is your vision.
Because once you've got that in place, it becomes much easier to think about what you're going to do in order to reach that goal, and you can use the language of the Three Horizons Model to understand, in a shared way, what are the sticking plasters that are just holding things together versus what are the actual, truly transformational ideas that are going to help you reach that long-term goal together.
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As we continue to evolve our approaches to work, and our expectations for work-life balance change, there have been calls to consider a shorter working week.
Read the article and watch the video below of Sophie Howe, the Future Generations Commissioner for the Welsh Government, to consider the implications of a shorter working week and continued remote working.
Future Generations Commissioner calls for Shorter Working Week trial
Download this video clip.Video player: hyb_1_2022_sept134_shorter_week_30percente_from_home_compressed.mp4
Transcript
SOPHIE HOWE
So the way in which we work is fundamentally changing. And yet the hours we work haven’t changed in the last 100 years. And what we can see is that we are now increasingly working alongside technology. And many of the kind of basic tasks that we might have been doing previously can now be automated. And really, we need to be thinking about how do we reimagine the working week with these new developments?
So with this changing nature of work, there are opportunities for us to think about how we could also be supporting our own well-being by working fewer hours, for example. Studies across the world in different countries, in different organisations, seem to suggest that when people work fewer hours, far from productivity reducing, productivity actually increases. COVID was a massive disruptor in terms of changing the way that we worked practically overnight. And what we’ve seen during that homeworking period is that yes, that has brought about some challenges. But also it brings about a huge number of opportunities for people to be able to better balance their work and home lives.
Working from home, therefore, the Welsh Government continues to have a 30% target for people working from home. And that can bring a whole range of benefits, from reducing the carbon emissions from travelling back and forth to work to being within a community and part of a community, being able to shop locally, to be able to perhaps volunteer and look after your neighbours and your communities, to better be able to balance perhaps caring responsibilities, for example. And so I think that a target of 30% of people continuing to work from home absolutely is a sensible one and aligns with our seven well-being goals.
We also know that we’ve got some big challenges coming at us in the future, a really worrying trajectory in terms of poor mental health, particularly amongst young people, and also some real challenges coming towards us in terms of how we will meet the needs of care for an aging population. So this is why, combined with the technological advances that we’re seeing in the working world these days, which are only going to increase, and those bigger societal challenges around well-being, around being able to care, and a range of other things, that’s why I think it’s important for us to be thinking about the opportunities which could benefit a range of our well-being goals.
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Activity 29: Trialling a shorter working week
Timing: 15 minutes
Draw on the course and your understanding of your organisation to write a short summary of what you would need to consider to trial a shorter working week, a commitment to continued hybrid or remote only working, and the impact on your employees and students.
Once you have done this, you may wish to use the Three Horizon toolkit to work with others to develop your thinking of shorter working weeks, or another planning issue you may have outside the time allocated for studying this course.
You can develop your understanding further of planning for the future by studying the Hybrid working: planning course which explains the Three Horizons Framework and other frameworks for planning in more detail. You can find this course in the Supporting hybrid working in Wales collection.
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Discussion
Planning for long term hybrid working and considering shorter working weeks, you may have thought about some the organisational impact this might have, the wellbeing of your employees and practicalities.
In the video below Natasha Davies, Policy and Research Lead from Chwarae Tegprovides insights for organisations to consider.
Download this video clip.Video player: hyb_1_2022_sept136_requirements_for_remote_working_natasha_davies.mp4
Transcript
NATASHA DAVIES
If we’re going to have a massive shift to more remote working, which does seem inevitable, and it certainly-- it’s the goal of the Welsh Government here to have 30% of the workforce moving to working away from the office as the norm. We’re going to have to think about the infrastructure that’s in place to support that at a very basic level to all parts of Wales. For example, where we’ve got very large rural parts of the country. Does everybody have access to good high-speed broadband? Not at the moment. So that needs to be fixed as a matter of urgency.
Is there good mobile phone coverage? Because we’re not always at our desks in the home office. Or we might be reliant upon-- if we’re out and about, on our phones. And again, the coverage isn’t great in terms of mobile phone signal.
But I think it also stretches into decisions house building, for example. Are we building properties that, as standard, have space for a home office? More of an issue, I think, in urban areas, but we have a large number, for example in Cardiff, of HMOs, where people literally have a bedroom or studio flats or one-bed flats. And the reality is that working from home most of the time with a desk in the corner of your living room or your bedroom is not good. It’s not good. It’s not healthy from a physical perspective or from a mental health perspective.
So I think as we have this vision for how the world of work is going to look in the future, we need a recognition from government at all levels-- UK, Welsh, local-- about what needs to be in place to support that. How far that’s going to need to reach into issues outside of workplace practice and policy. It’s good to see the investment here in Wales with co-working hubs. I think for rural areas that can be really valuable. It gives people an option to work somewhere that isn’t home if home isn’t their preferred place or isn’t a suitable place for them to be able to work.
It can prevent people from having to commute for long distances, which obviously, has good impact from a climate change perspective reducing the amount of cars on the road. But I think there needs to be a much bigger discussion about the wider implications of a more dispersed and remote working norm. And those conversations have started, but I think they probably need to happen at a much quicker pace to make sure that we’re not putting people in a situation that doesn’t really work for them-- where they might not have the space at home, they might not have the access to the broadband that’s needed-- to be able to take up new opportunities.
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