Teresa Exelby joins ‘Hive In Session’!

Our Chief People Officer, Teresa Exelby is delighted to join HR specialists, Hive, in the latest episode of their podcast – ‘Hive In Session’.

Hosted by Ben Lind, Hive In Session explores a variety of topics to provide best practice for HR professionals. This week, our Chief People Officer, Teresa Exelby, joined Ben to discuss our charity’s exciting move to a four-day working week.

During the podcast, Teresa offers insight into our charity’s implementation of a four-day working week, advice for other organisations, and the benefits of a flexible approach for colleagues.

Our move to flexible working sees our charity become the first social care provider in the UK to introduce the four-day week. This has been introduced across our Support Function teams initially, including departments such as Finance, HR and Quality, but the aim is that this will be rolled out further later in the year, with our operational teams having the chance to take part in the scheme too.

These flexible working measures come in response to feedback from our Support Function colleagues. In a series of recent surveys, 82% of colleagues felt positive about the move towards a 4-day working week and 81% expressed a desire to reduce the numbers of days in the office post-pandemic.

Teresa Exelby, Chief People Officer at Community Integrated Care said: “As we progressed through the pandemic our ways of working shifted so very significantly. The sense of wellbeing and need to balance life and work is increasingly important as [our colleagues] faced a whole set of other stresses and strains that the pandemic brought on.”

She continued, “We knew we had two important impetuses to change our ways of working. One – knowing that we could, and we could still be productive. Two – knowing that we had to, to protect our workforce going forward. We know it’s a journey and that it’s going to take some time to get there, but it’s worth it.”

Watch the full podcast episode and find out more, here.