3.2b Different Ways of Working Practice Questions

Text 2 — Varley Heating Ltd

Varley Heating Ltd installs and services gas boilers in homes across Yorkshire. The business was started by Priya Varley and now employs 24 engineers. The engineers work whilst mobile: they drive company vans from their own homes directly to each customer and record every job on a tablet. The business rents one small office and storage unit, where six administrators take bookings and order spare parts. Three of the administrators work full-time and three have flexible working hours.

Demand is highest in winter, when boilers are most likely to break down. To cope with the extra work, Varley Heating Ltd hires self-employed engineers on short contracts between October and March. Priya believes that customers judge the business mainly on how quickly an engineer arrives at their home.

Jobs completed by Varley Heating Ltd

Quarter	Boiler installations	Service and repair jobs
January–March	310	1 240
April–June	180	420
July–September	165	360
October–December	295	1 180

Larchway Claims Ltd

Larchway Claims Ltd handles insurance claims for 30 insurance companies. It employs 180 claims handlers at a two-floor office in Stockport, where they deal with customers by phone and email. When storms cause a sudden rise in claims, Larchway takes on extra staff on temporary contracts for a few weeks at a time.

Director Helen Marsh is considering allowing claims handlers to work from home for three days a week. A staff survey found that 64% of claims handlers would like to work from home, and that many spend over an hour travelling to work each day. If they did, Helen could give up one floor of the office.

New claims handlers learn the claims system by sitting next to an experienced colleague for their first month. Team leaders worry that this would be harder if staff were at home.

Table 1: Larchway's office costs per year

Cost	Whole office (two floors)	One floor only
Rent	£240 000	£130 000
Heating, lighting and cleaning	£60 000	£34 000

Grindell Coffee plc

Grindell Coffee plc runs 240 coffee shops in the UK and Ireland and employs 4 000 people. Most baristas are employed part-time on flexible hours contracts, so each shop can put extra staff on duty during the busy morning rush and send staff home when the shop is quiet in the afternoon.

Shop managers and assistant managers work full-time on permanent contracts. Shop managers write the weekly rota, train new baristas and are responsible for meeting their shop's sales targets.

Some baristas have complained that their hours change at short notice, and shop managers say that it is hard to keep experienced baristas.

Table 1: Grindell Coffee employees by region

Region	Full-time employees	Part-time employees
North of England	300	700
Midlands	250	600
South of England	450	1 000
Ireland	200	500
Total	1 200	2 800

Torvane Robotics plc

Torvane Robotics plc designs and builds robots that move stock around warehouses. It sells to customers in 14 countries and employs 1 500 people, 900 of whom are software and design engineers. Its head office is in Bristol.

Until three years ago every engineer worked in the Bristol office. Torvane now allows engineers to work from home for up to four days a week. It bought laptops and paid for home broadband for 700 engineers at a cost of £1.4 million, and closed one of its three Bristol office buildings, saving £2.3 million a year.

The head of people, Anya Clarke, says working from home has allowed Torvane to recruit engineers from across Europe who were not willing to move to Bristol. However, team leaders report that new engineers take much longer to learn Torvane's software, and that far fewer new product ideas have come out of the design teams. Torvane's main rival launched two new warehouse robots last year. Torvane launched none.

Table 1: Employees who want to work from home

Department	Percentage of employees
Software engineering	86%
Design	71%
Sales	64%
Finance	58%
Manufacturing	22%