Hello everyone! We have a team member in a part time role, two days a week. They are also an actor and as such need to change hours/have time off sometimes for extended periods (last time was 5 weeks) and at short notice. This has been fine up until recently but we now need to find a solution that works for us both and develop a revised contract. Our HR consultant gave really black and white options (including asking them to resign!) which we aren’t keen on - does anyone else have experience of developing a really flexible contract that works for both parties? Thank you!
Hi @EmmaW -
Thanks for sharing - ‘contracts’ and ‘flexibility’ are always a hard pairing! Solidarity!
I don’t know if this feels relevant or not, but we’ve recently published our own freelancer contract, which tries to build in flexibility by using the contract itself as a bit of a wider ‘container’ for our work with someone (how we want to work together, broader terms that would apply to any work together, etc), while keeping a lot of the details of the work to additional emails, that can be sorted out in a more ad hoc way.
It doesn’t necessarily address the disruption that someone needing to leave work for a longer period on short-notice would create, but I guess it builds in more planned breaks or chances to question the role someone is doing more regularly, in case things might be on the horizon?
Keen to hear what you end up doing, as it’s never easy, but so important in orgs where we know folks are working part-time and/or shorter-contracts and inevitably have other commitments.
Hey Liam - thanks so much for the link to that contract. This is very relevant as another thing I’ve been struggling with our freelance team contracting.
Many thanks