FOI 2019-125 – Flexible Working
?>Date Answered: 14 October 2019
This request asked:
1. What are the flexible working policies the Serious Fraud Office offers its employees?
2. From January 1 2014 to date, how many employees at the Serious Fraud Office work flexibly? Please provide a yearly breakdown.
3. From January 1 2014 to date, how many employees at the Serious Fraud Office work part-time? Please provide a yearly breakdown.
Our response:
1. The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) offers two types of flexible working policies to its employees: full-time flexible working and part-time flexible working. Full-time options are Flexi-time (Flexible Working Hours), Compressed Hours, Full Time Flexible, and Saturday Working. Parttime options are Reduced Hours, Job-Share, Part Year Working, and Annualised Hours. Employees can also make use of Homeworking as well as a combination of the above arrangements.
The SFO runs a Flexible Working sub-group to ensure that the key principles of the flexible working policy are promoted within the office.
2. There is no standard report for staff working patterns and, as a result, historical records relating to this type of data are not held centrally. Therefore there is no way to identify information dating back to 2014 discerning how many people worked full-time while also making use of the SFO flexible working patterns.
Our systems do not enable us to run historical reports on the numbers of people working full time while making use of a formalised non-standard work pattern. We are only able to run a report on the current date. We ran a report on 10th October 2019 and on that date I can confirm that 57 individuals were working full time while making use of a non-standard working pattern.
3. The table below outlines how many SFO employees have been working part-time over the last six years. Please note that as the number of part-time working arrangements varies throughout the year, this data can only be presented as snapshots of how many employees are recorded as part-time staff on any particular day. Please also note that part-time staff should be understood as any employee undertaking part-time flexible working which includes reduced hours, job-share, part year working, and annualised hours.
Date – SFO employees working part-time
31 March 2014 – 27
31 March 2015 – 34
31 March 2016 – 36
31 March 2017 – 32
31 March 2018 – 34
31 March 2019 – 40