Manager's guide to workstyle personalisation

Where your team members can work will depend on their workstyle. There are a few things to remember when discussing workstyle personalisation with your team:

• the employee's contracted place of work does not change. They can still work from their Essex County Council (ECC) location if they want or need to
• if they can work from home on a regular basis, you should make sure their home is properly set-up for remote working. To help with this you should work with the employee to complete a wo​rking from home checklist (DOC, 68 KB) 
• to explore how the whole team can perform at its best in a hybrid way (with a mixture of site-based and remote working), refer to the manager's guide on hybrid working
• if you employee requests to work from abroad, refer to the guidance on temporarily working from overseas

Plan for your team to attend the workplace

If your team includes staff who work remotely, they will work from multiple locations. There will probably be times when they will need to attend their ECC workplace. This might for certain activities, to attend 'in-person' meetings or to use specialist equipment.

Before you agree any workplace personalisation with your employee, you should:

• work with them to set clear expectations about when and why they'll be expected to attend the workplace
• check that the employee does not make inflexible personal arrangements which mean they can only attend the workplace on set days
• make sure they're aware that all arrangements must be flexible to allow for urgent or changing business needs
• remind them that travel between their home to their contractual ECC workplace at the start and end of their working day counts as their commute, so ECC will not reimburse employees for any travel costs for this journey
• advise them that any time that it takes to commute to the workplace does not count towards working hours