Women in Financial Services
Making Flexible Working Work for You
Tina.Freed / 16 Jul 2015
New research from Ernst & Young reveals that 8.7 million people in the UK want flexible working, while 82 per cent of managers believe that flexible working benefits their business. Survey after survey shows that a good work/life balance is now more important than pay for increasing numbers of candidates and job satisfaction.
The firm discovered that £8.5 billion could be added to the UK from flexible working, through more productive use of available flexible working hours. The research revealed that two out of three firms say that flexible working helps motivation, commitment and employee relations.
“This way of working is not exclusive to parents who are juggling the commitments of home and work life. It is open to anyone and everyone: the runner in training for a marathon, the aspiring part time author, carers, volunteers or anyone else who needs to balance their work and personal commitments.” Says Lynn Rattigan, Chief Operating Officer, EY.
Embrace flexibility as part of your business culture, embed it into your structure, and don’t pay lip service to it. Manage by output, not input. The emphasis is about giving 100% and being productive in the hours you are working and not the number of hours you work or are ‘present’.
You may have other responsibilities in your life (don’t we all!), want work to work for your life, want more out of your life, be transitioning from one phase of your career or life to another, or you may be looking for another type of working life. It’s worth exploring what you need to do to make this happen and showing your employer how it could work, emphasising the benefits and being clear about what you want. After all, content employees make productive employees. It’s give and take. You have a right to request.
E2W has been harnessing flexible working for over ten years to the benefit of our extraordinary people, our clients and our community. In setting up E2W, it was essential to find out why our people wanted to work flexibly. Flexibility means different things to different people: for some it means being able to work from home when they need to, for some it’s fitting four days into three, for others it’s being able to move or juggle their working hours in a day to fit around their other commitments.
From E2W’s perspective, we deliver outstanding service to our clients in a different way, using innovative thinking and agile processes. In turn, the flexible agile working environment encourages a ‘can do’ attitude, increases productivity and cultivates people who are committed to and ambassadors for our vision. We empower our people to make their own decisions and focus on outputs. We understand that requirements change as people’s careers and life evolve.
If there is one thing that sets E2W apart, it is our people. Our entire business model revolves around extraordinary individuals: people with 5-15 years’ experience at financial institutions such as investment banks, asset managers, hedge funds, insurance companies, pension funds, amongst others.
Our people join us for flexible agile working that enables a positive work-life balance, a return to their chosen career and/or career progression. Our people have incredible insight into the financial sector; placing them in a unique position to provide valuable and targeted assistance to our clients.
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