The hidden complexity of working patterns, and how Charlie can help
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Flexible and non-traditional working patterns are here to stay. With the introduction of new flexible working laws giving employees access to make requests from day one, it’s more likely than ever that you’ll be dealing with a mix of working patterns.
Big businesses have HR teams and legacy software to manage complex shifts, but in a small business the idea of keeping track of everything can feel overwhelming. You want to be more inclusive and offer flexible options, but how do you make sure you don’t miss anything?
Managing different working patterns doesn’t have to be complicated. Charlie can help you get clear, stay organised, and empower your team members to work more flexibly.
The challenges of different working patterns
Lots of small business owners are happy to support flexible working and create a more inclusive work environment, but it doesn’t come without its challenges.
When we speak to CEOs and leaders, their concerns include:
- Calculating leave entitlement correctly
- Getting salary or payroll information wrong
- Dealing with under or overstaffing
- Team communication in a hybrid or remote environment
- Following the law around flexible working requests
Let’s look at an example. Sophie wants to grow her marketing agency by adding Jamie to her team. She currently has four employees working a standard 9-5, but Jamie is requesting to work part time. Sophie is happy with this arrangement, but she’s worried that she’ll get all the calculations wrong when it comes to salary, time off, and bank holidays.
The fix: Sophie can adjust Jamie’s working hours and pattern within Charlie, and their holiday entitlement and other calculations will be done automatically. No need to worry about percentages or figures.
In another scenario, Alex has hired Josh as a coordinator within their events business. Josh has made a flexible working request for 3 days a week, but he doesn’t mind which days. Alex is concerned about keeping track of days worked and managing staffing levels.
The fix: Alex can use Charlie’s working days feature to easily see when Josh and other team members are scheduled to work. Alex can identify any potential clashes or days where there won’t be enough people in the office at a glance and work proactively to manage workloads.
With the right software, you can turn your concerns around keeping track of schedules into a practical way forward. Features like team calendars, automatic leave calculations, and customisable holidays enable you to grow your team in the way that works for you — without the admin headache.
Sophie Hanman, Customer Happiness Manager @ London Nootropics
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“Before Charlie, it was something people had to think about and taking holidays almost became another job on the to-do list. It’s now so seamless we don’t even have to think about it.”
How Charlie is designed for flexibility
The expectation of the standard Monday to Friday, 9-5 is gone. When you can design your business to operate the way you want, you need a platform that can keep up. Here’s how Charlie can work with your flexible approach to business, not against it.
Bring clarity to your working week
The typical work week might start on a Monday, but yours doesn’t have to. In Charlie, you can customise your company working week so it accurately reflects when you’re open for business. As well as your company working days, you can adjust an individual’s own working days — a must-have for part-time workers.
Changing your working days affects holiday allowance calculations for new hires and part time team members. Entitlements will be calculated automatically, so you can feel confident knowing you won’t need to worry over how to handle bank holiday Mondays ever again.
Why this matters: Everyone knows what to expect, and there’s no confusion over when they’re required to work.
See where everyone is working from at all times
Charlie is designed to work for your business, whether you’re office-based, hybrid, or remote. Keep track of not only who is working that day but also where they’re based, to make communication and planning easier.
In Charlie, you can easily see at a glance who is working today (or a date in the future) and where they’re working from. Create your own work locations and see team members grouped by where they are — whether that’s the name of your various offices, different cities, or different countries.
Why this matters: Transparency over location and working days improves communication, collaboration, compliance, and security.
Simplify work from home requests
Working from home isn’t just popular, it’s a valuable way to support a better work-life balance and make your organisation more inclusive. When you’re trying to attract talented team members, the ability to work from home can help win them over — but you also need an easy way to make it work in practice.
With Charlie, you can set the system up so team members can request to work from home. You can then either have managers approve requests or set them to auto-accept, depending on your policy. It’s easy to adjust this at any time if your approach to working from home changes.
Why this matters: There’s more visibility over when people are in the office or not, which improves collaboration and communication.
Personalise your bank holiday policies
There are lots of reasons why someone might work on a public holiday. You might have an office in a country with different holidays, or someone might choose to work that day in lieu of time off elsewhere.
Whatever the reason, with Charlie you have the option to add different public holiday dates or turn bank holidays on or off per office. You can also decide whether they’re deductible or non-deductible, depending on which makes the most sense for your working patterns.
Why this matters: Make your system more inclusive and simplify public holiday management for offices in different locations.
How CharlieHR handles your working pattern challenges
Charlie is able to cope with complex working patterns and flexible ways of working, but what does that look like in reality? Here’s how you can handle some of the most common challenges.
“How much time off should this person get?”
Calculating time off can be a nightmare if you’re dealing with different working patterns, schedules, and hours — especially if you’re doing it all manually.
The fix: Charlie automatically calculates pro-rata leave based on a person’s working pattern, with no need to make manual adjustments or deal with calculations. If someone’s working pattern changes, their allowance updates to match.
With Charlie you can define a unique working pattern per employee, with options including: 3-day weeks, 4-day weeks, alternating weeks, daily variations, half days, 0.5 FTE, etc.
“I can’t tell who’s actually working today”
When you have people working various shifts and patterns, you need one place where you can see who is working, who isn’t, and what the schedule looks like. Without this, communication is harder and it’s easy to get confused.
The fix: Working patterns feed directly into the team calendar, so you always have an accurate picture of who’s available and when.
The team calendar allows you to see: working days and hours, patterns that don’t follow a typical Monday-Friday, whether someone’s working in the office or from home.
“Public holidays are a mess with part time and shift workers”
Public holidays can create a real source of tension, especially if someone has to work one and feels like they’re missing out. If you’re juggling shift workers and part-timers, this interruption to the normal routine can be challenging.
The fix: Charlie applies public holiday rules based on each person’s working pattern. If a public holiday falls on a non-working day it won’t be counted, and if someone’s shift pattern changes their holiday entitlement will automatically update.
Charlie allows you to customise public holidays by: assigning different holiday calendars to different locations, allowing you to remove them from the total count to make them more flexible to match your own bank holiday policy.
“Changing a working pattern throws everything out of sync”
Some software just isn’t equipped to deal with in-year changes or hiring team members on unusual shift patterns, so when you do the system can’t cope with it. Charlie was designed for flexibility, so it can easily support the way you work.
The fix: Edit your working patterns at any time and the system will automatically adjust time off calendars, leave balances, entitlements, and records — and all with a full audit trail.
Enabling this level of flexibility means you can: onboard part-time workers, transition employees from one pattern to another, or scale your business across roles and countries.
“Someone’s working abroad, how do we manage that?”
You’ve approved a request to work remotely abroad for a period of time, but now you need to make sure your system keeps up. Traditional HR systems struggle to cope with temporary adjustments, but with Charlie it’s easy to make changes.
The fix: Support temporary or permanent remote workers by adjusting public holiday calendars and clearly displaying location and availability, improving communication and the overall work experience.
Charlie’s flexibility means you can: make a one-month stay in Portugal possible, accommodate a three-month journey through South America, or support a long-term relocation to Asia.
“I have freelancers that I want to track”
Any good HR system will allow you to track your employees’ time and working patterns, but most aren’t equipped to handle contractors or freelancers. If your business relies on external help, you can keep track of their time with you in Charlie too.
The fix: Add freelancers or contractors as team members, and add their contract dates and working days so you know when they’ll be working with you.
By adding your freelancers into Charlie you can: see all contributors to a project in one place, understand how long they’ll be with you for, and increase transparency.
Flexible isn’t complicated with Charlie
Dealing with complicated shifts and working patterns can be confusing, but with the right software you can let go of the admin burden and place your trust in technology. Charlie helps you save time, improve accuracy, and stay compliant when it comes to flexible working.
Book a demo with our friendly team to see just how easy it is to turn those hours of manual calculations into a few clicks.
Written by:
Jenny Tattum
Jenny is a Senior Product Manager at CharlieHR. She has years of experience with product planning and development, and user research too – she put together this guide by collecting data and information on competitors so we could improve our product and tailor it to small business owners.
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