Call centre firm workers will get same pay for fewer hours

HUNDREDS of call centre employees will work fewer hours for the same pay, as the sector’s biggest UK company is to trial switching to a four-day week.

Simply Business workers, which employs more than 500 people and sells insurance to small businesses and landlords, said it will launch a pilot for the reduced hours later this year.

This could mean up to 250 employees working in its high-pressure call centre in Northampton getting an extra day off every week from September.

“Working in our contact centre is really hard,” Debs Holland, the general manager of the Simply Business call centre, said. “You have very little autonomy. In the rest of the business, people have significant flexibility.”

It comes amid an increasing shift towards flexitime and reduced hours for British employees.

Earlier this year, the Wellcome Trust, an independent science and health research charity based in London, announced it was piloting a fourday week but abandoned the plan soon after, admitting it would be “too operationally complex to implement”.

Last month, BNY Mellon bank’s UK staff were told that working from home does not work and that they would have to be at their desks in normal office hours unless otherwise agreed.

Lesley Giles, director of the Work Foundation, said that there are “challenges” around flexi-working.

“We found differences between what managers were saying and what the workers were saying. The technology didn’t live up to the promise.”