Following intervention from Unite in AXA, flexitime will be reintroduced in Retail Motor Claims from 1st June following its suspension without our knowledge.

Further flexitime will be rolled out in Household Claims once staff resourcing issues have been resolved.

Thanks to our new Claims rep in Tunbridge Wells, Gary Summers, for bringing the matter to our attention.

At the start of the pandemic flexitime was suspended in Commercial Lines. Since then we have engaged with the business in an effort to see the reintroduction of it in some form as soon as was practical. Following on from our survey last year, which raised a number of concerns around the suspension, a working party (which included several union reps) was set up by AXA to look into flexible working in Commercial Lines, with a view to how this could work in the forthcoming smart working environment.

This working party gathered feedback from commercial staff across all grades and departments and has now produced a set of proposed principles for flexible working for Commercial going forward, which incorporates flexitime (now called banked hours) as an option giving employees access to different flexible working options, including the ability to work flexibly within the working day/ week and the ability to bank hours where there is a business need for additional hours to be worked. These guidelines are different from the old rather prescriptive flexitime charter rules and see a number of improvements but also see some changes that some people may feel impact them negatively.

The flexible working principles have now been published so employees can read and understand the proposed changes and we are encouraging you to provide feedback to your local union rep to be fed back into the working party about any major concerns you might possibly have with the new guidelines.

The principles are of course a compromise of many different viewpoints on the subject and whilst not everyone is going to be pleased with some of the proposed changes, the improvements from current rules hopefully demonstrate that whilst the end result is a compromise it is a definite improvement to the ongoing suspension of flexitime.