A law firm in England has introduced a flexible working policy that will enable staff to compress ten days’ work into nine, so that they can take the tenth day off.

Sean Sanders, managing partner at Thackray Williams, told the Law Society Gazette of England and Wales that the firm was aware that the market for employees was very competitive.

“We wanted to stand out, and we were trying to think of an initiative that would help people with their work-life balance,” he said.

Extra 50 minutes

The ‘you day’ policy will apply to full-time staff. Managers will monitor output rather than input, and trust their staff, in deciding whether they can take advantage of the benefit.

Sanders said: “We have already got lots of flexible working, and 20% of our staff work part-time. But our new initiative is designed to effectively make everyone work flexibly, or allow them to work flexibly.

“We're allowing people to compress their hours. They know how many hours they are contracted to do. If you get those hours done over a nine-day period, you can have a day as a ‘you day’ – a day for you.” he added.

It is estimated that staff will need to work about 50 minutes extra per day to qualify for the ‘you day’.

‘Trusting people’

“For fee-earners, we have not changed their targets, or the chargeable hours we expect from them. We expect output to be the same,” Sanders stated.

The Gazette says that a similar model was introduced last year when the firm temporarily needed to cut salaries to survive the pandemic.

Full salaries were restored within a couple of months at Thackray Williams, which operates in London and the south-east of England.

“But we could see from that, that trusting people and allowing people to do the job, they got it done. It did not have any effect on output whatsoever,” said Sanders.