Written by Ewan Anderson
28 May 2024
Flexible Working Scotland
Flexible Working Scotland
We chatted with Lynn Houmdi, the founder of Flexible Working Scotland and Senior Manager for Learning Leadership at the Challenges Group.
Flexible working has been a topic of discussion for years now. Following the pandemic, it was supercharged, but it seems that many workplaces are still not getting it quite right. Some employers misrepresent what they offer, and others have pulled the offer during the employment process. However, it does seem that the majority offer flexibility in their working patterns.
However, Lynn's Flexible Working Scotland group now has 15,000 members and an active discussion group, which suggests that we are still not getting it right and that it is crucial to keep challenging the process.
Take a listen to the latest episode; the transcript is below.
Flexible Working Scotland Transcript
Ewan Anderson (00:06):
Hi, and welcome back to the Recruitment and Beyond podcast. You'll notice today I'm without my partner in crime, Natalie, she is off sick. So today we're going to talk about flexible working and why we're still battling with the concept of flexible working and how we can help businesses and employees to find the right organizations to work with that can fit with their lifestyle. So we're joined today by Lynn Hudy, who is the senior manager for learning leadership at the Challenges Group, but she also runs the Flexible Working Scotland community, which is based on Facebook. So hi Lynn. Welcome along.
Lynn Houmdi (00:41):
Thank you for having me. Great to be here.Ewan Anderson (00:44):
Good. Do you want to tell us a little bit about flexible work in Scotland, the community that you've developed there and what you guys are there to do, what you're there to talk about and how you're there to support people?Lynn Houmdi (00:57):
Yeah, sure. So Flexible Work in Scotland is a community of about 15,000 people now across Scotland. It's hosted on Facebook and the members are there to work flexibly, recruit flexibly, and advocate for greater flexibility and equality in the workplace. I set it up in April, 2021, and it's something that at the moment I run voluntarily in my spare time. And I suppose I have a number of reasons why I set it up, one of which was to build a pipeline to making work. Work, which is a suite of programs I run for the challenges group. Another was to help people who aren't eligible for making work, work programs, but also I want to normalize some concepts I suppose. So I want to reassure people that they're not looking for a unicorn if they're looking for flexible work. I want to normalize the idea that not everyone's careers kind of climb ever upwards like a ladder, particularly women. And I want to help people feel that they're not alone. Often people think that their circumstances are very particular to them and that maybe they're the only one who's struggling to find flexible work or work that works around their other commitments. And I want to try and I suppose galvanize people to try and change some of those more systemic barriers and not feel that these are issues with them personally, I suppose.Ewan Anderson (02:53):
So I mean 2020 happened and flexible working was kind of thrust upon us. And we've talking about this for a while. Natalie and I have discussed this. So what is it about flexible working? Why are we not still getting it right? Why is there still a need for an organization like yours to get involved and to help people who are presumably feeling the way that you've mentioned it?Lynn Houmdi (03:16):
Yeah, so I think first of all, I think change is never linear and not everybody's going to jump on the bandwagon. At the same time, I also think that a lack of flexible working, it works in one of two ways. Either it traps people out of the workplace because they can't find the working patterns or the working locations that work for them, but it also traps people in jobs. And I hear for example, quite a lot from women who've returned after maternity leave. They get the flexible working they want, but then they can't find a job to progress into when they feel ready because there isn't another flexible job. And so what that means is a lot of the lived experience that could educate employers about the struggles that people are facing in creating what I would call a work-life blend. I don't call it a work-life balance. I think if you talk about balance, if work's on the up, then life's on the down or vice versa,(04:30):
A more holistic approach. If people are not in the workplace having conversations about the struggles that they face in creating their work life blend, then there's less impetus for decision makers in workplaces to start changing the ways they do things. And for example, I think we see it in a lot of, there's a lot of polemic in the newspapers about everybody back to the office or back to the office Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. And a lot of that I see, and this is maybe a controversial thing to say, but a lot of it's driven by people who do not have the lived experience that their employees have of trying to juggle childcare, trying to juggle medical appointments, trying to care for elderly parents or grandparents trying to cope with living in Scotland, for example, trying to enter a labor market that's completely unfamiliar. And I mean, I saw just recently A CEO, I won't name him, who was calling everybody back to the office who had four kids, and it just made me wonder who was looking after them because if he's in the office, it's not him.
Ewan Anderson (05:45):
Yeah. Well, yeah, exactly. I mean, what sort of feedback are you getting from potential employees then? Is that the sort of thing you've mentioned that they're just the challenge then to find another flexible role? Is that the sort of feedback you're getting? Because you've talked quite a bit on the group and obviously on your website about returners, people who are coming back from a career break potentially need to balance up caring and various other responsibilities, whether that's childcare or older adults, pulled parents and so on. What's the sort of feedback you're getting from people that again has created the need for your group?Lynn Houmdi (06:23):
Well, first of all, I would say two things. It's not all on the employers, and it's not only about moms, but when it is about parents, the lack of accessible childcare is a big consideration. And obviously that's not something that employers can easily solve, but what I'm hearing from candidates and prospective employees is that they don't know who is offering the flexible work. And so they don't know how to approach employers. So for example, they might see a job ad that's advertised as full-time. They think it's the perfect job for them, but they could only really do it if it was four days or a compressed working week and they don't know how to start that conversation. Or maybe they don't even dare to start it. I hear from candidates that some employers and recruiters are offering flexible or hybrid working, but once the candidate is invested in applying for that job and going through the recruitment process, it becomes clear that there is no flexibility. So I would call that flex washing. I think some perhaps less scrupulous agencies are looking to boost their candidate database, but it's a waste of time for everybody.Ewan Anderson (07:52):
Absolutely.Lynn Houmdi (07:54):
The other thing I hear is less from prospective candidates and people who are in jobs, they feel perhaps if they were working during the pandemic that they were trusted to get on with their work, that they were productive getting on with their work. And then we hear about these kind of U-turns, and one job ad I saw, I think put it really well, they said, we are not running daycare for adults. We trust you to do your best work at the time and the location that suits you best. And of course there's business needs, and I understand not every job can be as flexible as some office-based jobs, for example. But I think it comes down to employers trust their staff with their bottom line, with their reputation, with their relationship management, with their finances, and ultimately with their business sustainability. So employees should be recruiting people that they can also trust to know how and when they can contribute their best work. And people want to be treated like adults. They don't necessarily want to do 300 days work a week a year from a beach in Bali. They just want to be able to go to the hospital with their granny or go to their kid's sports day and not be treated like they haven't done a full shift, for example.Ewan Anderson (09:26):
Yeah, it's really interesting that we've talked about this quite a bit, the concept of flexible working. What does flexible working actually mean? And it is exactly as you've mentioned there. It's not about working from a beach in ballet or working from wherever. It's about the flexibility to work your day around your work or your life around your work or whatever it might be. And actually, people aren't asking for the world here. They're just asking for a wee bit of flexibility and knowing fine, well that you're trusted as an employee to come back and get that work done. I mean, ultimately we talk about it quite a bit here. It's about outputs, it's about what's the result. And actually if you can get that output done, that result, whatever it might be, then where's the issue? But also being able to bring your personality yourself to work.(10:15):
And I suppose a lot of this comes back again, we've talked about this on the podcast a bit, is it comes back to the culture you set at the start. So you mentioned there about recruiters and other businesses, maybe not, or what did you call it, flex washing. There's certainly occasions where people say, yeah, we are flexible, but this is what we're looking for. And actually one of the number one reasons people either leave a job or look for another role is flexibility. That's a key work benefit that people are really looking for now. And obviously that increased as we came out of lockdown. So what is it then? What are the barriers you maybe come up against or what do people say the companies are using as an excuse to say, look, we just can't offer that. What are your members saying to you that they find is a reason to not give flexible work?
Lynn Houmdi (11:11):
Yeah, just before I talk about that, just wanted to come back to the point you made there about flexibility being a reason people leave according to statistics compiled by an organization called Flexibility Works who work exclusively in Scotland, 67% of Scottish workers have some level of flexibility. And I personally would include part-time, even if it's not that flexible in that definition, because sometimes that's all people need, 18% would like flexibility. So that's 85% of Scottish workers who have flexibility or want it. That's huge. And flexibility works also found that two in five Scottish workers can't work at all without flexibility. So from a recruitment and retention perspective, flexibility is absolutely huge. That's key. And in terms of reasons that employers give for not offering it, I think there's some outdated ideas of productivity, which comes back to your point about outputs. There's this idea, I kind of think of it like a mother hen.(12:34):
There are some managers who feel the need to have the people around, and that gives a sense that those people are doing something, but I wonder, are they really doing something or are they just keeping their seat warm? I mean, it's classic presenteeism. Absolutely. There are obviously some industries and some sectors where it's very difficult to be very flexible, but I think often what we often hear about is water cooler moments and serendipity and collaboration. And I would agree absolutely that there is a place for that. And some of that is best done Face-to-face in the same location. However, I've personally worked for remote first organizations where they've found ways to replicate that, but they've done it very intentionally in a virtual kind of setting. So I would say it's not impossible to do that virtually. And I mean there are big multinational companies that must have been doing this for many, many years before the pandemic, but I think you need to be intentional about it.
(13:49):
And I think what we're seeing now is kind of, there are some organizations and employers who think, oh, well the pandemic was a bit of a blip. Let's just get back to how it was before the pandemic. And there were some who were seeing the pandemic almost as an opportunity. I mean, I don't say that flippantly because the pandemic caused a lot of distress and heartache for a lot of people, but an opportunity to do things differently and an opportunity to be very intentional about why you would be all in one place and why you don't need to be all in one place. And I think the classic example is when an employer says everybody in Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then everybody goes in and still sits on Zoom having video calls, we don't need to be in our employer's office to do that. So if we're all going to come in, let's do something together, let's spend time together. And so I think some of the excuses are valid. You couldn't provide health and social care virtually. You couldn't deliver somebody's shopping virtually, but some of them I think are based on a lack of imagination. And I think the other thing to say is that one size doesn't fit all. So it is complicated,
(15:20):
But it involves having open conversations and communications with staff. And some employees have embraced that and some haven't.
Ewan Anderson (15:33):
Yeah, I think that's a really good point actually, is the open, honest communication. But I suppose that's what I was going to go and ask is the things that companies can look at to try and do to try and implement this. But just to go back there slightly, you touched on this step, is it that people just having not done it, they find it challenging to find a way to combine, say two part-time roles, or they find it difficult to combine the output of two people doing the same job. Is that the difficulty to get their head around that as employers, to really understand how to make that work best? Is that part of the issue? And then to that point, they then think, I'll just have somebody full time and save myself the hassle, whereas actually if you were to do that, you might get the combined creativity of two people there. You're maybe looking at it as an easy solution when actually your business could benefit from two people sharing the role.Lynn Houmdi (16:32):
Absolutely. I mean, I think job design is absolutely critical. I mean, your colleagues will see this in recruitment, but I suspect what often happens is somebody leaves a post and that job spec is kind of recycled and put back out again. But if the person who did the post was perhaps older so their kids were grown up or unencumbered in terms of any other commitments, they will have approached that job very differently to somebody who has non-negotiable commitments outside of work. And potentially in some cases, that employer would've done quite well because the person was probably doing more hours than they were paid for and probably had the time to put a lot more into the job than somebody else. But that doesn't mean that somebody else is lazy. It just means that the job needs to potentially be redesigned before it's put out there. Again, on the point about sharing a job or a particular role, job share arrangements are not easy.(17:58):
A lot of people in flexible work in Scotland are very attracted by the idea. But I absolutely appreciate from a recruitment perspective, they're very difficult. And a lot of the successful job shares that I've seen have actually been two people who've been in an organization together. Perhaps they're in a different stage of life and they come together to make a job share partnership, but to recruit two unknown people to do a job share from an employer's perspective, I think is quite tricky. But you could absolutely just split a job in half and recruit two part-time people. So I think there needs to be a bit more imagination, and as you say, you could benefit from two very different, but complimentary members of staff rather than trying to squeeze one person or to find all the skills you need in one candidate
Ewan Anderson (19:06):
And your website touches on this is actually when somebody does leave a role, it's about thinking that person has perhaps been there for a while. What does that job really need? What does it look like now? Has the job evolved? Has the person taken it as far as it can go, and do we actually need something else? And actually reassessing that role every time rather than necessarily just, yep, we need that person, get them back in. Let's go. Let's get somebody else into the exactly same role and do the same again. I think it's taken that time to really assess these roles and understand where the value to the organization is, isn't it?Lynn Houmdi (19:44):
Definitely. And not just sort of assuming, I think to some extent that the pandemic shifted the power dynamic slightly between employers and employees, and I think we're not there yet, but employers who are sort of further along the curve on this realize that just because somebody has something outside of work that takes up their time, that doesn't mean they're less committed. In fact, they might be more committed because they found the employer who enables them to bring their authentic self to work, who doesn't make them pretend that they're not a mom or that they're not neurodivergent or disabled or whatever it might be. And that person will thrive in that organization and probably be more committed because it fits in that work-life blend. And I had a real issue with, there was a whole media discussion about quiet quitting when people were only doing their contracted hours. And my question was always, well, yeah, it's give and take. Sometimes when it's busy you need to do a bit more, but why are employers expecting people to do more than their contracted hours?Ewan Anderson (21:13):
And again, your site and this quite interesting, the skills that you'll pick up, whether you've taken some time out or you've had a family and you've now had to think about things like managing time, managing budgets are all great skills you can bring back into the workplace. And actually, you're absolutely right. When there's a deadline, I have to go and pick up my kids at three o'clock or whatever it might be, I need to get all that work done and it will be done. Whereas before there was maybe a mala to say, well, look, I've got till five or six, or I'll do a bit of work later on. Actually, these skills, these life skills that are picked up as part of that whole process, whether it is caring or childcare or whatever it might be, they're really valuable and they add value to that role. And you're absolutely right, you can then become not more committed, but almost more effective and more efficient in what you need to do. And I think it's dismissing that at your peril as an employer.Lynn Houmdi (22:07):
Yeah, it's that old ad age of if you want something done, give it to a busy person. A lot of making work, we are working with women returners, we're supporting women who are unemployed and underemployed, and the ones who are unemployed, I mean, all that means is that nobody's paying them for their time. It doesn't mean they're sitting around twiddling their thumbs. And one of the things that we get them to do is really to think about how they're going to fit work in to their lives, which are already full and busy, and what they're going to have to maybe delegate to a partner or what they're going to have to not do or subcontract out or whatever it might be. And exactly as you say, and there's research by Microsoft that backs this up, parents are really efficient in the workplace, and we're not only talking about parents, but on making work work. About 80% of the women we work with are moms. They need to get stuff done. Yeah.Ewan Anderson (23:14):
Well, this is it. So actually, do you want to tell us a little bit about the making work work programs that you're running?Lynn Houmdi (23:19):
Yeah, yeah, sure. So back even before the Pandemic, actually, I had come into contact with the challenges group through some work I did in a whole other area related to unemployment. And we got talking about really informed by my lived experience. So I had my son in my early forties, and it had never ever occurred to me until that point how on earth to get back to work after a career break. I was at the point where I thought, well, I'd like to kind of get on a more structured career track. I mean, I didn't completely stop working at all. I took a voluntary redundancy from the civil service, and after that was doing bits and pieces of freelancing and traveling. I lived abroad for a while, so I'd never been completely out, but I wanted to kind of get back into something more structured.(24:21):
And I just thought, hang on, how do people do this? How can I go for an interview or apply for a job even not knowing if I've got childcare, but how do I know what childcare I need if I haven't got a job? And I actually just shelved it on the two difficult pile, went back to university. And while I was there, I started researching all these kind of themes around flexible working and career breaks and women's career experiences. And I kind of took that research to the Challenges group, which is a group of social businesses. Were based here in Edinburgh, but we operate globally and we developed making work, work together. So I brought my lived experience and my research around women's careers together with their longstanding reputation as a training provider and a partner of the Chartered Management Institute. And we developed making work, work.
(25:25):
And until now, the model is absolutely applicable to other kind of groups. But until now, we've worked with women returners, so women who've had a career break of six months or more and are facing challenges to get back into meaningful work. So when we're working with underemployed women, that means they've gone back to work, but they're not working at the level or at the skills level or the earning potential that they could be. That's very typical for women. They end up in part-time, low paid jobs that have very little to do with their skills and experience. But we're also working with women who are at the point that they come onto the program unemployed. The longest career break we've worked with was 17 years. That was a woman who had a child or children with additional support needs. So she didn't feel she could go back to work until they were through school.
(26:27):
And we've helped on mainstream making work, work programs. We've helped over 200 women so far. And basically the program consists of group peer led training and with a wraparound service of one-to-one masterclasses and events networking opportunities. And we also support the women by signposting them to other organizations that could be of use to them. But one of, I would say what we're doing is we're not turning the women into different people. We're helping build their confidence and their networks, which are absolutely critical at that stage, particularly because most of them don't want to or can't do what they did previously.
(27:20):
So they're also switching careers. And we're also helping them build a peer support network. So one of the most consistent bits of feedback we get is that women, after they've completed the program, which normally lasts about eight weeks, A, they feel like they're not alone. They realize there are other women facing similar challenges, and B, they've developed a really close knit cheerleading team, really. And sometimes friendships, but women they can turn to often they'll create, we create a teams channel for them, but often they'll create a WhatsApp chat and they're in touch with each other and they help each other out as they progress onto the next steps. And we have really good results. So we have about 80% in employability jargon, positive destinations, so going into work, setting up their own businesses, volunteering as a sort of stepping stone, going into training or education or actively applying. Then with the support flexible work in Scotland, because that acts as the jobs board for making work work.
Ewan Anderson (28:39):
That's brilliant. That is brilliant. And you know, said something just a while ago there just about very often they come back and they can't do the career that they were doing before. And that, I mean, that's hugely frustrating, I would assume. But again, it'll be that transition. It'll take us a while. My last question was going to go on and say, what does success look like for flexible work in Scotland? Presumably the point where you're not needed anymore, but is it that women can, well, not just women, but anybody can take a career break, go away and come back and still get back into do where their skills lie, where their education may have, where that was eventually they can come back and do whatever it was that they were doing before. Is that essentially where we want to get to with flexible working Scotland?Lynn Houmdi (29:26):
Not necessarily, I would say because for a lot of the women we work with, their career break is a time of reflection. It's often a time when their attitudes and their values change. We spend a lot of time talking about how, so 51% of the women we work with are over 45, so they've got a lot of career experience behind 'em. We work typically with women with management experience or aspirations. That can be any kind of management. It doesn't have to be managing big teams, but we spend quite a bit of time reflecting on our career aims and goals when we were younger, when we left school or university and their career aims and goals at that point in their life. And they look very different. And that's partly because the economy has changed a lot, the workplace has changed, the labor market has changed, but it's also because their values have changed and they often want to apply themselves to something that they have some experience of, and they think they can offer those skills that they've gained in the earlier part of their career to really make a difference.(30:50):
So around 50% of the women who come through the program end up working in the third sector, another 10% end up working in the public sector. And of those who go into the private sector, they're often working in smaller businesses. So SMEs where they are able to do a variety of things, there's just enough challenge and they're bringing the breadth of their experience to bear. And so we're spending a lot of time talking about transferable skills because if I take one example, we have had women who have been lawyers. One woman was completely put off the legal profession because she'd made a flexible working request after her second child. This was a while ago. So the legislation's changed since then and it was refused. And she could not envisage how she could possibly continue to be a lawyer after she came through the program, she went away and did something else.
(31:55):
And she is actually working back in law now because now things have moved on. She was able to find an employer who was able to give her the flexibility she needed that she didn't have maybe a decade ago. But often the other experience that some women have had is that they've had very big jobs that have taken a lot of time at a certain level in an organization, and they cannot see how they can operate at that level on a part-time basis. And that would be my kind of challenge to employers. Why is it that in a lot of organizations, the more senior you become, the more available you need to be, the more you need to be able to travel at the drop of a hat, and the less, almost, it's not for all, but almost you have less autonomy over your time. And it's not like though, a lot of our women could easily operate in that sort of senior management space, but we see it with the gender pay gap.
(33:09):
There are not enough women at the top of organizations and it's because the jobs are not designed in a way that they can do. So I wouldn't say that the women, it's hard to say whether what the push and what the pull is, but I wouldn't say that the women always want to go back into the kinds of organizations they worked in before. Maybe if those organizations or those employers or sectors were more accommodating, they would. But still, I think there would be a certain number who would be thinking, well, I've gained all this experience and these skills and now I want of a better phrase, give something back.
Ewan Anderson (34:02):
Yeah. Because interestingly, part of this, or part of the discussions that we've had have highlighted the fact that some people who are going in and maybe doing part-time roles or flexible roles feel that there's quite often not the opportunity for progression as well, that they might get overlooked for that in favor of someone who full-time does all the hours. I'm hoping that that stigma is obviously starting to dissipate a bit, but do you find that as well, that people, that's some of the feedback that, well, I'm maybe getting overlooked because I'm part-time, or maybe that's a fear of people going part-time or flexible working?Lynn Houmdi (34:42):
I think there's a almost a conspiracy between the reality and the perception of reality. So I think what holds a lot of the women who come on making work back is that they anticipate that there aren't the flexible or part-time roles that they want. And in some cases that is true. And so it kind of holds them back from even taking a step forward. And what I always say is, you only need one job. You don't need a number of them ideally. And so we're helping them to find the employers who really get it. And in some ways, I suppose in some ways I try to reframe things because often they're reading the press and they're saying, oh, everybody at Google's got to go back to the office. Or Elon Musk says that flexible workings, whatever it was, he said it was an aberration or something, well fine. So you don't go and work there and you don't go and work there. So let's find the employer that gets it Often, that is in the third sector, often the third sector is less well paid. So again, the challenge would be to the sectors that can afford higher salaries to really think about part-time. But I mean, what is a fractional COO if they're not a part-timer?Ewan Anderson (36:16):
Yeah,Lynn Houmdi (36:17):
So there's ways of framing this whole conversation that suddenly appeal to certain people and use the language that certain people can understand. I think for a lot of people, part-time might make them think of retail or hospitality, whereas fractional doesn't make you think of that at all. No,Ewan Anderson (36:44):
No. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I think it's finding the right organization for you. And we talk a lot about this. We talk a lot to employers about their employer brand and how that's reflected in the market. And actually, you don't have to be evident to everybody. Your organization can be whatever it wants to be based on the organization you want to create. So actually, you're right. We don't all need to go work for X or Twitter or we don't need to go and all work for Google where they all come back. You can create the atmosphere and the structure you want within your organization. And I think that's quite critical to businesses to ensure that they don't try and be something they're not or promise something that they can't. And they will then attract the right staff to come and work for 'em.(37:30):
And staff, like you say, who will probably be more committed because you've shown commitment in them, you've shown trust in them that they can work flexibly and still get the job done, and that's exactly what you're trying to create. So I think you're right. I think it comes from both sides. It's about employers creating the working environment that will inspire their staff and encourage the staff and allow their staff to be themselves and for employees to say, I'm going to go and find that company. I'm not going to just stick with, I have to do this because the industry tells me that I'm going to go and find those other opportunities and other employers that'll let me flourish. So yeah,
Lynn Houmdi (38:06):
Absolutely. And I think the pandemic really threw workplace culture into the spotlight, and I completely appreciate that. It's really difficult, especially in big organizations, and I think we're seeing a lot of big companies struggle with that now. But also I think the leadership need to step up and own their role in setting culture, be very clear in the role of the different kind of tiers of management in promoting and maintaining culture. And one of the, I mentioned that at challenges, we work with the Chartered Management Institute, they did some research last year and they found that over 80% of people are promoted into managerial positions without any formal training. And I just think if somebody's not a particularly confident manager when everybody's sat around them from nine till five Monday to Friday, then it's not really surprising that they feel even less confident when everybody's in at different times and in different locations. And so I think there's a responsibility on the part of leadership teams to think, as you say, really carefully about culture, but also really carefully about who in their organizations is responsible for maintaining that culture. And it doesn't happen just because people happen to be within two inches of each other. It needs to be constantly worked on. And it's not easy, but it's absolutely worthwhile because as you say, it's that belonging piece that means people will go the extra mile.Ewan Anderson (40:06):
And we talk about that in the previous episodes about accidental managers, people who have ended up in managerial roles because they've reached a level of seniority or they've reached a period in their career where it's expected that the next step up is a managerial role when they're not a manager. And that's no fault of their own, but it's also the organization has to take responsibility to say, it's so important that managerial training, because that becomes their job, not the technical side of whatever it was they did. It's now about managing people, which is a completely different skill. And I think it's really important that companies, they take a look at that properly and make sure that they're bringing in the right people to deliver that, because that is the culture of your organization. It comes from leadership, it comes from people delivering on these cultures, your vision, your values. If you don't have the right managers in place, you will struggle to do that and your company will suffer. So no, absolutely,Lynn Houmdi (41:02):
Absolutely. No, definitely. I completely agree with that. And I realize you didn't answer your question about what would the world look like if my work wasn't necessary.Ewan Anderson (41:16):
Don't worry. I mean, bit, it's a difficult question to answer, but what you've answered there is absolutely perfect. So ILynn Houmdi (41:23):
Think also, I think that for me, if flexible working was kind of mainstreamed, it would mean that it was clear in all job ads was and what wasn't on the table. So nobody would be wasting their time on either side. Everybody would be able to contribute when and where they can offer their best work. And that looks very different for different people. And just that last point, managers would be equipped to manage all of that, and then I can go and start some other business idea there. Were probably, yeah, I think with the people that I'm working with, they often need a little bit of support for the parents. They need the childcare, but they need the flexible jobs to be available. So if the flexible jobs are available, ultimately they'll need a bit less support. But it's a kind of, I see it as a sort of triangle that those three things need to be in place and employers really need to step up because a lot of employers are doing it. They're just not telling anyone.Ewan Anderson (42:38):
Yeah, absolutely. And actually you touched on that, that people are not communicating this well enough. They're not putting it out there to say, we have these, and it's a real benefit. I mean, hopefully it no longer becomes a benefit that separates companies, but it is at the moment, a benefit that will separate companies, and people need to really highlight the fact that they offer that. And people do still see it as a real benefit. I appreciate a lot of people see it as a necessity, but it's a benefit at the moment and such it should be promoted as such. And you've got to tell people,Lynn Houmdi (43:13):
And it's a benefit to the employer because we know we all read those reports by McKinsey that tell us about the quantifiable benefits of a diverse workforce. And flexible working is a major driver of diversity because if you start from the premise that not everybody contributes their best work in the same way, then you need to be able to offer people different ways to engage with work. And that, as I said previously, it's not just about moms, it's about neurodivergent people, it's about disabled people, it's about people with health conditions, people with caring responsibilities. I mean, my generation we're the sandwich generation, we're carrying up the way and down the way.(44:05):
But it's also about, there's some interesting research from the US about black and minority ethnic workers. Anybody who doesn't necessarily feel like they fit in a dominant workplace culture is probably wanting to spend a little bit of time to just refresh and regroup outside of that culture. And hybrid working can facilitate that. And I think once employers start asking, whether it's through a staff survey, whether it's through line management conversations, whatever it is, once they start asking and permitting people to have these conversations, it will uncover all of these different ways in which people can contribute better. And that might be because of what's going on at home, it might be because of their own personal health circumstances. It might be something else. But to treat everybody as if we're all the same is doing everybody a disservice, but ultimately it's undermining profitability and productivity.
