EZI Buy (Employer)

Partnership approach increases flexibility at EziBuy

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EziBuy is Australasia’s largest fashion and home catalogue company. It is a privately owned company which was established in Palmerston North in 1978. EziBuy employs around 650 staff, working in its contact centre, distribution centre, retail outlets and administrative offices. Its workforce is predominantly female and about half the employees belong to a union.

As EziBuy has grown, its business has become more complex and it has faced increasing competition for staff. It faces particular challenges in offering flexibility to contact centre and retail staff.

In 2005, EziBuy became one of the pilot organisations in the Department of Labour’s Workplace Project which is endeavouring to develop tailored work-life solutions for New Zealand employers. At that time it offered a number of flexible work arrangements including:

• Part-time work
• Flexible starting and finishing times in some business areas
• The ability to use sick leave to look after family members
• Shift times set up to appeal to particular groups eg. parents, students

However, these initiatives were not consistently communicated or managed across the organisation, and EziBuy saw the Workplace Project as an opportunity to take a systematic approach to work-life balance in order to improve recruitment and retention, and help manage overtime and workloads.

The pilot project commenced with the formation of a working group which includes representatives from staff, management and the one union to which staff belong. This group used staff surveys, focus groups and interviews with management to identify work-life balance issues from employee and business perspectives.

As a result, a number of initiatives were offered across the business including the ability to swap shifts in the contact centre, and staggered shifts in the retail outlets to give staff more certainty around their hours and to better meet the needs of customers.

EziBuy believes the pilot is working well due to:

• Management commitment
• Good communication
• Initiatives being offered across the organisation, but tailored to individual work groups 
• An enthusiastic partnership approach to developing and implementing initiatives
• Acknowledgement from everyone that initiatives needed to work for the business and employees

The next stage is to incorporate work-life balance messages in EziBy’s induction process and to promote as part of the Well Being Programme and EziTalk Newsletter. . EziBuy is also exploring how it can include work-life balance measures in its performance management programme.