Fair Work - economic inactivity: flexible working project report

1. Progress and Learning with Scottish Leather Group (SLG)

Scottish Leather Group are a family-owned business (Bridge of Weir, Muirhead and Lang).They use sustainably sourced hides to create leather solutions for aviation, automotive, bus, coach, and rail sectors, as well as furniture design, consumer electronics and luxury goods. They employ 555 permanent employees and circa 100 agency/temporary workers across 3 locations in Renfrewshire. Their main leather manufacturing sites are in semi rural locations and their main employee recruitment comes from the surrounding local areas. While income levels vary in this area, a proportion of households rely on relatively modest and often fixed earnings, making access to fair, secure and flexible employment particularly relevant to supporting economic participation and household wellbeing.

SLG engaged consistently and proactively throughout the project, using the programme to build internal capability and embed sustainable change.

Early Engagement and Visibility

At the start of the project, we:

• Organised and co-hosted a Ministerial visit by Richard Lochhead MSP, Minister for Business and Employment to cement the company’s commitment
• to Fair Work. This was an additional piece of work to support the Fair Work Team’s commitment to raising the profile of the funding within government.
• Supported the official launch of the Scottish Government funding Secured strong national and sector-specific media coverage

This helped raise the profile of flexible working in manufacturing and reinforced leadership commitment within SLG as well as being able to practically demonstrate the government’s approach to Fair Work with employers.

Manager Training: Co-Creation and Embedding

At the start of the operational part of the project, we had several meetings with key senior stakeholders in the business to establish what they were already doing well and what areas may need further development. Following this, it was established that a key focus of the project for SLG was strengthening manager capability around flexible working to help them be more effective and consistent in their approach. The various outcomes of the work with SLG included:

• A re-communication of the existing flexible practice within SLG so that the approach was even clearer across the business for all workers, highlighting the organisation’s commitment to Fair Work and flexible working. This included reminding the staff of a recent reduction in hours for all workers.
• We re-established that it was the frontline workers who has less access to flexibility, so it was discussed and agreed what was possible and what may not be possible in these roles to build on the existing practice within the business.
• On this basis, we then co-designed a practical manager training session with operational and frontline managers which could then be used to support and roll out the approach to flexible working amongst frontline workers.
• We identified a series of case study examples from across the workforce to be included in the training. Several examples and scenarios we found for the training were for internal use for the purposes of the training as relevant to the working practices at SLG. In addition, we identified that there were various examples that could be used externally for learning purposes, so we created two video case studies- one from the employer perspective and one from an employee. These will help other companies to better understand the art of the possible within manufacturing and engineering. These have already been shared at a Flexibility Works employer event and will be re-shared across our socials when most appropriate to do so.
• The co-designed training session was delivered as a pilot to operational managers by Flexibility Works, with a strong emphasis on how to facilitate and roll out the training internally The content was refined collaboratively Feedback was captured and shared with the Flexibility Works team to update the training. This has been finalised and is now back with the SLG team to use and roll out as appropriate in accordance with their training schedule.
• Our approach to co-design the training and a ‘train the trainer’ model ensures the learning remains embedded within the organisation and can continue beyond the funded period.

Sharing Learning More Widely

To support wider dissemination:

• Flexibility Works (2026) Ep 3: Can flexible working really work in manufacturing? Podcast. Featuring Mark Cowan, HR Director, Scottish Leather Group. Available at: https://flexibilityworks.podbean.com/e/ep-3-can-flexible-working-really-work-in-manufacturing/
• SLG staff members contributed to a series of video case studies, launched alongside our Flex for Life research and scheduled for continued sharing throughout 2026

These activities help normalise flexible working in manufacturing contexts and extend project impact well beyond the participating organisations.