CASE STUDIES: Harrison Grierson

Flexibility to recruit and retain skilled people in a tough market

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Harrison Grierson is a multidisciplinary consultancy offering engineering, surveying, planning and resource management services. It has offices throughout New Zealand and a Brisbane office. It employs approximately 330 people. Due to strong business growth, approximately 50 new employees were recruited in 2004 and another 50 in 2005.

Harrison Grierson’s key employment issue is recruiting and retaining talented individuals in a fiercely competitive market. A third of its workforce is women, many of whom need flexibility to meet family commitments. A number of its older staff also want flexibility as they move towards retirement while younger staff sometimes want long periods of leave to study or travel.

Harrison Grierson’s flexible working arrangements have evolved out of individual requests and include:

• Flexible starting and finishing times
• Part-time work at all levels
• Unpaid leave (up to 12 months)
• Option to buy back a week of leave
• Technology to work from home (long or short term)

By far the most popular arrangements are flexible starting and finishing times and reduced working hours. These are mainly used by people with family commitments.

While the flexible working provisions have emerged out of individual requests, they are now being formulated into a draft policy which only needs senior management approval before it becomes available at induction, in the company manual and on the company intranet. The draft policy details the benefits of flexible working, the process for considering requests and the likely outcomes.

The new policy will help ensure a consistent approach to flexible arrangements, although every request needs to be considered on its own merits. Harrison Grierson says a template policy would have helped in developing the flexible working policy.

People make their requests for flexible working arrangements to their manager who usually meets with the HR team to discuss the proposal and try and ensure consistency across the company.

Managers are occasionally unwilling to offer flexibility, usually because they are unsure how it will work in their team, but questions can be resolved by a trial period to see how the arrangement suits the individual, the manager and the team. Harrison Grierson has found that people who want to work reduced or flexible hours “will go to the ends of the earth to make it work”.

Harrison Grierson maintains a flexible attitude to flexibility, working alongside staff as their circumstances change. The HR team claims the administrative work associated with changing people’s working arrangements several times is minimal compared to the benefits of retaining skilled people.

As a result of the flexible working arrangements and other work-life initiatives, Harrison Grierson had an increase in female employees from 2000 to 2005. The majority of women who take parental leave return to work at Harrison Grierson, and graduates are staying at Harrison Grierson six months longer than in the past.