Flexible working is a hot topic at the moment. Despite all of the recent publicity around companies moving to four day weeks and other flexible initiatives, the reality is that flexibility is nowhere near the norm in working life.
I feel very strongly that there needs to be a fundamental change in the way we think about work. Too often, mental health and productivity are impacted by ways of working that are no longer relevant to the world in which we now live.
My guest this week is someone who feels the same way. Anna Whitehouse is the founder of Mother Pukka, a digital community for people who happen to be parents. Anna is also the driving force behind Flex Appeal, a campaign which is lobbying both government and employers to drive a shift in thinking about flexible working.
In the interview, we discuss:
- What is Flex Appeal?
- The huge benefits to employers of embracing flexible working
- The need from a fundamental shift in the way we think about work
- Evidencing increased productivity
- Agile Working and Job Pairing
- Leaving loudly
- Why recruiting and HR should embrace transparency to promote flexible working
Anna also talks about the future of Flex Appeal and shares her advice to individuals on the best way to persuade employers to let them work flexibly.
Subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast is provided by Smart Recruiters, the hiring success company. Smart Recruiters offers enterprise grade recruiting software designed for hiring success. Move beyond applicant tracking with a modern platform that provides everything you need to attract, select and hire the best talent. From candidate relationship management to programmatic job advertising, recruitment, marketing, collaborative hiring and embedded artificial intelligence experience. A talent acquisition suite with intuitive user experience that candidates, hiring managers and recruiters all love. Leading brands like Bosch, IKEA, LinkedIn and visa use Smart Recruiters to future proof talent acquisition and expand their businesses globally. Visit smartrecruiters.com to find out how you can achieve hiring success as well.
Matt Alder [00:01:14]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 210 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Flexible working is a hot topic at the moment, but despite the volume of publicity around companies moving to a four day week or embracing flexible working in other ways, flexibility is still a long way away from being the norm. I personally feel very strongly that there needs to be a fundamental change in the way that we think about work. Too often mental health and productivity are being impacted by ways of working that are no longer relevant to the world we now live in. My guest this week is someone who feels the same way. Anna Whitehouse is founder of Mother Pukka, a digital community for people who happen to be parents. And Anna is also the driving force behind Flex Appeal, a campaign which is lobbying both government and employers to drive a shift in thinking around flexible working. Hi Anna and welcome to the podcast. Could you just introduce yourself and for the few people who may not have heard of you, tell us what you do.
Anna Whitehouse [00:02:28]:
Yeah, of course. I’m Anna Whitehouse, the founder of Mother Pukka. I have to say that quite carefully, which is a platform for people who happen to be parents. And we launched Flex Appeal, a campaign for flexible working, to push for flexible working for everyone. And you can see any more at www. I was going to say www.motherpukka.co.uk you don’t need the www.no.
Matt Alder [00:02:54]:
Fair enough. But it’s good. It’s a good kind of old school thing to say, isn’t it?
Anna Whitehouse [00:02:57]:
Yeah, yeah. Like it.
Matt Alder [00:02:59]:
So Flex Appeal is kind of why we’re talking. Tell us a little bit more about Flex Appeal. Where did the idea come from and what’s the motivation behind it?
Anna Whitehouse [00:03:09]:
Yeah, so I was working sort of nine to five, five days a week in London. I. I’m Dutch and I was living in Amsterdam before that in a very, very different environment where everybody left on time, which, you know, within their contracted hours. Can you, can you imagine it? And so I came back to London and was quite confronted by this kind of sort of people strapped to their sort of rickety officer chairs under sort of strip lighting from 9 to 5 and beyond. And I was on the tube coming to pick up my daughter from nursery and somebody got their briefcase sort of trapped in the tube door and it put me 12 minutes late for nursery pickup. And then I was charged a pound a minute after six and sat on one of those tiny primary colored chairs meant for an infant and told off. And I just thought combination of. I knew it worked elsewhere, like in Amsterdam. I didn’t feel it was working. And I’d apologized for the past hour to various people for leaving a meeting, for, you know, being late to nursery pickup. And I thought, this isn’t my fault. I think the system is broken. And that was the point where I think I had enough anger and frustration to really launch Flex Appeal and challenge a system that was inflexible and ultimately leading to bigger sort of gaps in gender, pay gap. And I felt there were a lot of solutions out there that weren’t being implemented. So that’s where it began, really.
Matt Alder [00:04:40]:
And tell us a little bit more about the campaign. I mean, how long has it been running? What have you been doing to get this topic talked about?
Anna Whitehouse [00:04:48]:
Yeah, so it really, just to start from the beginning, really, in terms of where we are with things. I put my flexible working request in and it was denied for these business reasons, which was it would open the floodgates to everybody else within the company wanting flexible working. So that’s really where the campaign began, where I wanted to question, well, why can’t we open the floodgates? It doesn’t feel like there’s a business reason there. It just feels like fear. And that was when it started, which was in, I think it was January 2015, so a couple of years ago. And it started very much as a social change campaign, which was to shift mindsets around flexible working. Even for my own father, who was kind of a bit unsure about what I was doing, he was like, but it’s really frustrating when people aren’t there. I was like, yeah, okay, we need to change the whole narrative around this. It’s a kind of fundamental change in the fabric of how we work. You know, we’re not the 9 to 5 was launched in the industrial revolution. We’re now 2019. Things need to Shift. And I think. So that’s where it began. But then obviously there’s two parts to it. The lobbying of government, which is where we had the 10 minute flexible working Bill go into Parliament a couple of months ago. And then there is the social change exercise, which is going into companies finding out where the bright spots are of positive change and also where the issues are. So it’s trying to sort of bring the two together in a way that changes working world, if not for our generation, but for my own children’s generation. So that’s where we sit at the moment. And I could tell you a little bit more about the future of flex appeal, but maybe that fits at the end.
Matt Alder [00:06:37]:
Yeah, absolutely. Let’s come back to that. I mean, I think the floodgate thing is interesting because I’ve kind of heard that time and time again and it’s something that as a, as a family we’ve heard in terms of they want to be more flexible about some of the ways that members of my, of my, of my family work. So to me it seems ridiculous to have to ask you this question, but I think it’s a really important, really important for employers to get their heads around what are the benefits to employers of flexible working or being more flexible with their employees.
Anna Whitehouse [00:07:06]:
So I think this has been the heart of what we’ve been doing, is that once my flexible working request was denied for the fear of opening those floodgates, I started looking into it and was like, I don’t understand how businesses aren’t doing this because this isn’t about humans, this isn’t about mummies wanting to see more of their Weetabix matted children. This is about business. This is good for business. I think McKinsey said that by 2030, flexible working will have contributed to increase in 148 billion pounds toward the UK economy. This isn’t about people. It’s a really nice side benefit that it benefits human working lives. But it’s the financial side of it that I was surprised about. One of the best examples was pursuit marketing in Glasgow. They went down to a four day week and they said to their employees, okay, we’re just going to say to you, you can have Fridays off if you can make everything else work around that. It’s called the 180, 100 rule. So 100% input, 80% time and then 100% output. So it’s essentially doing less, fewer days, same pay, and still reaching those same levels of productivity. In two years, pursuit marketing had doubled turnover. People were empowered. People wanted to make it work. You know, if you know you’re going to see your loved ones on a Friday or can go to that exercise class, or as this incredible woman at Virgin Media said, she’s called Ann and she just puts down on a Friday that Ann is at the va. You know, she’s transparent about her world of, of life outside of work. You inspire your workforce to work harder for you. And I think it doesn’t even have to come from a human level. BT made global savings of 100 million in a year simply by releasing their footprint, their sort of physical footprint. They reduced office space. So it can be for various reasons, but it’s ultimately about money. And that’s the bit that I think has been lost in the conversation. People feel, oh, God, it’s something I have to do for my employee. No, no, no, something you have to do for business, for the bottom line. And, you know, you don’t need me to say this anymore. Just look online, it’s everywhere. Companies are making it work. It’s just how. Now, coming back to your initial question, companies need to know how to do it, they want to do it, they know they should do it, they know it’s good for business. But how?
Matt Alder [00:09:46]:
And I suppose that leads on to my next question in terms of what this looks like in practice. So you kind of gave us that great example of the Glasgow business with their four day week. What other examples have you seen of it working?
Anna Whitehouse [00:10:00]:
Well, I think, unfortunately, the minute that you start talking about a flexible working policy, it immediately becomes inflexible. That is the issue. This isn’t about, you know, ticking boxes, this isn’t about saving face, isn’t about a PR exercise. This is about a fundamental shift in the fabric of our working world. This is about. It’s not sort of flexible working shouldn’t be a bonus ball or a nice to have. It is something that needs to shift the entire way we work. And I think that’s something that can really only work when there’s trust at the heart of it. And these words to any cynical business person, you know, including my dad, who has given me a lot of pushback on this, he’s from a sort of different generation. These words, flexible working, gender, pay gap, you know, diversity and inclusion, they put people in a sense of, I should be doing this for my employee. Whereas this, again, coming back to why we’re driving this, you need to do this for your business. And that is where, you know, we’re sort of facing issues. Because the minute you have flexible working policy it becomes inflexible. You need to think, how can I empower my employees to work harder for me? And that’s something Coutts bank has done brilliantly. You need a disruptor within your company. You need somebody willing to put their head above the parapet. And that is something James Clary at Coutts bank did. He asked his 40 strong team, how do you. How do you want to work better? How can we help you work better for us? That was the question he asked. And he asked, what is the rub in your day? So is it nursery run? Is it, you know, you have to give your father a cottage pie on a Tuesday because he has Alzheimer’s and that helps create some structure to his week. What are the human things around this working world that we’re all sitting in? He asked his 40 strong team that. He gave them 10 minutes each. It wasn’t a huge amount of time out of his day. And then he left them to fill in the gaps, you know, around who could cover what. And he empowered them to work together and that shifted everything. Within three months, productivity was up 30%. So when you ask how to do this and how companies can get on board, trust your employees, think how you want to work. Is it by being owned by company or is it by empowering somebody to think for themselves, to be an entrepreneur within that company? It’s all about mindset and measuring it. Then, you know, you can’t argue with the fact Pursuit marketing doubled turnover in two years. You can’t argue with the fact that BT made global savings of 100 million in a year since implementing flexible working. These are not lofty human reasons. These aren’t just little things you can do for employees. This isn’t just a little perk. This is about business and making more money. This is about the bottom line. And that’s the only way we’re going to get through to companies is not about flexible working policies, it’s about what is good for business. And that is to strip that back and ask, how can I help my employees work in a better way for our business?
Matt Alder [00:13:13]:
During the time that you’ve been running this campaign, what surprised you the most? What’s been the most surprising thing?
Anna Whitehouse [00:13:20]:
I think it would come from my own dad. He. We had lunch the other day and he was quite critical of what I was doing initially. He’s sort of old school, kind of legal world. And he sat down at lunch and said, what I don’t understand is why we call it job sharing, why don’t we call it job pairing? You know, pairing two brilliant minds together, the company’s getting more out of that, not less. And when you start looking at case studies around job shares, for example, they’re an entirely positive thing. And yet companies, again, see it as a bit of a burden, like, oh, God, I can’t do a job share because that’s double the amount of admin almost. And I think it was seeing my, the surprise was in seeing a slightly archaic mindset from my own dad turn slowly over the years and come back to me with the issues he sees at the top. You know, maybe we should be calling it agile working, not flexible working. You know, the agile seems lighter, something that’s better for business. Maybe, you know, it should be job pairing, not job sharing. Flexible working. Isn’t this burden that companies need to do, or it feels like a thing at the end of, you know, a list of things to do on their, on their list. It’s, it’s something that should come quite naturally and they can try and experiment with and see where it works and, you know, try and create some consistency across business. Because often we hear it works in one department within a company and then doesn’t in another. But why aren’t you communicating? Why aren’t those two managers sharing examples of why it’s working and where it’s not working and help each other to actually make it work? So the surprises come from actually hearing solutions from those who were my biggest.
Matt Alder [00:15:04]:
Critics, the companies that are embracing this. What would your advice be to their HR and recruitment teams in terms of how they promote it, how they, how they, how they talk about it? You know, we’ve, we’ve said that perhaps it shouldn’t be called flexible working. And there are, there’s a much sort of broader way of thinking about it. How should the companies who are actually getting it right be talking about it and promoting it to the widest possible audience?
Anna Whitehouse [00:15:31]:
Well, I think one good example is Deloitte has on their website case studies under just a tab under Work at Deloitte case studies. I think there’s about 20 on there of different types of flexible working setups and they call agile working. Actually coming back to the sort of definitions. And I think that from the offset, somebody coming into that company as a potential employee from a recruitment site or seeing a job ad already is empowered with, for example, there’s a guy who does three days at Deloitte and two days community service, takes away the fact that it’s for parents, is empowered to go into that interview right from the start, which is what we’re fighting for with the 10 minute bill and say, right, okay, so Frank did this. Could I work this way? It seems it works in this department and you start the conversation early instead of waiting for that awkward moment where you come to discuss terms and conditions and salary and how it’s going to work and then being told, no, no, it’s not going to work. Working flexibly, you actually can go in empowered with information. So I think companies can be more transparent about how they work. PepsiCo In New Zealand, a guy called Robert Reatbrook, he said, look, companies don’t need to have a huge overhaul of their HR policy. It doesn’t need to be this big thing. It could be something as simple as leaving loudly, encouraging your employees to leave loudly. So say when you’re leaving at 4pm to go and pick up your child, hi, yeah, I’m off. I’m going to go and pick up, you know, Archie from nursery or from school or I’m going to sports day or, you know, if you feel comfortable saying I’ve got a doctor’s appointment, like, make it clear that there is not this shame in working and living. And I think that costs nothing. The leaving loudly policy, they called it a policy because he’s like, HR need it to be a policy, but it’s really just communication. And I think you ask, to answer your question, it doesn’t need to be a big PR exercise, but be transparent, be clear about what you are doing, shine a light on, like I said, what we’re trying to do on a bigger scale. Shine a light on where it’s working, where you have seen a different, where you’ve seen the change from, hey, encourage people to leave loudly. Oh, and we happen to have made more money or productivity’s gone up. It’s almost like a side benefit to encouraging people to, well, to encouraging businesses to be more human.
Matt Alder [00:18:02]:
So what would your advice be to individuals who are wanting to persuade their employer to give them, to give them more flexibility about the way they work?
Anna Whitehouse [00:18:11]:
I think companies are in a state of flux at the moment. Huge transition. We’re in a very transitional phase and the Equality and Human Rights Commission has pinpointed flexible working as the primary way to close the gender pay gap. So I think there are very few companies without a gender pay gap and that is again coming back to transparency. There’s nowhere for companies to hide increasingly from this lack of inclusion and diversity at the top and companies want to close that gap. So I think, you know, a hard line would be to wield the gender pay gap to your advantage. You know, if you are being, as a, let’s say where the, where the bottleneck comes is as a female who’s just had a baby, for example, find a way through, because ultimately you want to close that gender pay gap, so wield it to your advantage. Secondly, it has to be about the business. You know, this isn’t just a little nice to have. It has to be for business, the business’s benefit. So never lose sight of that. Don’t wait until you’re so frustrated, like I got to, so frustrated with the lack of flexible working within your company that you are almost kind of sitting there in a heap going, I need this make. You know, I’m broken. Don’t wait until you’re broken. Preempt that and go in with the most powerful PowerPoint, whatever you want to do, but go in with the business reasons, which is what James Clary at Coutts bank did. He was like, look, I did this so that my secretary could become engaged to her boyfriend. I wanted to do it for human reasons. But ultimately, these are the facts. These are the figures. You have to lead with facts and figures and say, look, let’s not do it permanently. If you’re nervous as an employer about implementing flexible working for me, why don’t we trial it? Why don’t we give it three months and measure it? And at the end of that, there’s nobody who’s going to fail in that sense. There’s nobody who’s going to not make that work. So I think it’s about wielding those facts, figures, gender pay gap, every single thing you have in your flexible working arsenal and then making it work and changing the narrative within that company for everybody after you. And it’s being brave, like James Clary was. He’s changed things within his company. People said he’d gone rogue. People had said that he was a disruptor. Well, yeah, disrupt. You’re in a position to do that. And I think companies now are increasingly in a position where they have to shift, and that’s the power.
Matt Alder [00:20:47]:
So, final question. What’s next for Flex appeal and how can people get involved?
Anna Whitehouse [00:20:52]:
Great. So coming back to what we said earlier, we’ve really been on a campaign to highlight why this has to happen, why I’m so frustrated with the fact that there are reams of stats, reams of research, huge, huge toolkits from the cipd, you know, saying this works and this is the way to do it. But actually now we want to just hold the hand between the employer and the employee build a bridge between the two on the how and go more for the heart side of it, the mind side. The mindset has to be there. I mean, you can’t argue with the facts. They all exist. This has to happen. It will happen. It’s going to change very quickly and you’re going to be the company that simply doesn’t recruit the right talent. You’re going to lose talent if you don’t move quickly enough. So, you know, the business reasons are there. But for flex appeal, we are going to be lobbying, continue to lobby government to make change happen, to make flexible working available across all businesses by default in that initial. So the onus is on the employer to prove it won’t work. And again, I think we came to the conclusion that I think if you worked on an oil rig, that would be the only job that maybe couldn’t be flexible in any way, shape or form. But every other company can offer some element of flexibility. And the other side of it is that, you know, legislation isn’t going to change quickly. That’s going to be minimum 10 years before we see any change there. The other side is mindset changing. So we’re going to be implementing a flexible working social change project that we’re hoping to get stakeholders involved in, key players in the flexible working world who are making it work to help us shine. It’s called Bright Spot Focus, which will be shining a light on the companies that are getting it right, how they’re getting it right, the mistakes they made, the frustrations they have just opening up the reality of flexible working so that there is a footprint for other companies to follow, whether you’re a small to medium enterprise or whether you’re a multi million pound business, just to give the framework for other companies to follow. Because I think a lot of companies want to, they know they have to, they have nowhere to hide now, but they’re really struggling on the how and that’s really the next focus. So it’s going to be launched in two weeks and it’s going to be a 30 week plan, a 30 year plan with the intention to have changed the sort of fabric of our working world. When our two daughters hit the same brick wall that I hit and hopefully that it won’t be quite so there won’t be so much of a door shut in their face, they will actually be able to continue through on their career because I can’t sit here encouraging them to do well in their GCSEs, to do well in their A levels, to keep Working, working, working to have an employer shut the door in their face simply because they chose to procreate or chose to work and live in a different way. So that’s really the focus for Flex Appeal.
Matt Alder [00:24:01]:
Fantastic. And how can employers get involved?
Anna Whitehouse [00:24:04]:
So if so, the big change is going to be in two weeks. So we have a tab on our website called Flex. It’s Motherpucker. Co UK Flex. We will be uploading information on how companies can get involved, how they can invest in the project that we’re now working on, how they can help change the fabric of our working world. And we’re going to be shining a light on those companies. So anybody that wants to see who’s doing it right, who’s getting it right, it’s going to be that Flex tab where things are going to go. But alsootherpucker on Instagram, which is where we’re going to be sharing a lot of the human stories and interviews with business leaders who are getting it right.
Matt Alder [00:24:48]:
Anna, thank you very much for talking to me. My thanks to Anna Whitehouse. If you don’t already follow Mother Pukka on Instagram, I would strongly recommend it. And if you’re an employer, please get involved in Flex Appeal. It’s really, really important. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for recruiting future in your App Store. If you’re a Spotify or Pandora user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com. on that site, you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
