Yesterday, Lloyds announced that it plans to move all MaPAs to shift working from January 2024.
The Bank states that there is a demand it cannot currently meet outside the usual Monday to Friday 9a.m. to 5p.m. bandwidth and it wants to increase availability for evenings and weekends.
In addition to this, branch based MaPAs will be asked to increase their time spent speaking to customers virtually.
This move is part of a broad swathe of changes in Lloyds (including trying to decompress peoples’ compressed hour contracts and forcing people to work from offices) and we have started to get calls from members concerned about what these changes mean for them and asking whether the Bank can enforce such changes.
As I said to members on home working and compressed hours, we can’t offer a ‘one-size fits all’ answer to these questions because everything depends on a person’s individual circumstances.
Next Steps For Members
1. If you have any concerns please contact us so that we can advise you on your case. The sooner you get us involved, the sooner we can help.
2. Locate your employment contract; if you don’t have a copy please ask for a copy from the Bank. If you need assistance with that, please do give us a call.
3. Think carefully about your working arrangements and what you can and cannot do and why.
4. If you’ve got any evidence that supports your inability to work the new hours, make sure you locate that now, so it’s ready when you need it.
Don’t Take Things At Face Value
To be blunt, members sometimes behave with considerable naivete, accepting assurances from line managers that those line managers will not put in writing or accepting ambiguously worded Bank documents that new management teams later disown. In that way, what people see as their contractual rights are diluted or removed by stealth. There is no point claiming after the event that you were misled unless you have written evidence to prove your assertion!
Our message is a clear one: employers have a responsibility to organise their businesses effectively and efficiently and organisations can’t stand still. Change is therefore a constant feature of organisational life, but what is critical is how organisations conceive, implement and manage change.
Our job here is to ensure Lloyds stays the right side of the ethical/employment law line and to do that we need your active involvement now, not in January when push will have already come to shove.