The Daily Telegraph

Flexible working must be for everyone – not just parents

More of us are choosing to go part-time or ditch rigid office hours – and it’s not all about the little ones, finds Rosa Silverman

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The old nine-to-five, five-day-a-week routine is, if not dead and buried then at least falling out of favour. Almost two thirds (63 per cent) of full-time employees work flexibly today, according to experts Timewise; data from the Office for National Statistics also shows that 26 per cent of UK employees work part-time.

But cultural attitudes towards flexible and part-time working still have to catch up. While the broad perception may be that it’s the preserve of mothers with childcare responsibi­lities, this is quite far from the reality – and, it’s been suggested, not all that helpful for women.

Timewise research found that childcare was, in fact, not the most common reason given for working flexibly or choosing part-time work: only 35 per cent of part-timers who would prefer to continue working part-time cite caring responsibi­lities as their reason, compared with 36 per cent stating general convenienc­e, 40 per cent wanting to enjoy leisure time or study and 48 per cent looking for the catch-all “work/life balance”.

Sarah Ellis from south-west London is among the growing portion of the workforce whose reasons for going part-time had nothing to do with motherhood. She was 32 and had not yet had children when she asked to reduce her hours from five days a week to four in her role as head of marketing strategy at Sainsbury’s three years ago. Her reason? She wanted to devote the fifth day of the working week to her side project, a start-up called Amazing If, which helps people access training and coaching to boost their careers.

Since 2014, all employees have had the legal right to request flexible working. Ellis was not without trepidatio­n when she made her case to her company. “I was going for an internal promotion at the time, and I worried there was going to be a perception that I would rather be working on my own business and was only at Sainsbury’s because I had to be,” she says. “I did a whole Powerpoint presentati­on on why it was a good thing, explaining how it was complement­ary, not competitiv­e.”

She had managed to show about two of her slides before her boss was convinced. “She said: ‘Sarah, I get this. This is about you having another outlet, and it’s part of who you are. It can only be a good thing for everyone.’”

That was three years ago; since Ellis, now a 35-year-old mother of one and managing director at a creative agency, changed her way of working to devote time to a separate enterprise, she believes the idea has caught on. “I felt I was going out on a limb, but once I did it two or three people asked to work part-time. One of them wanted to do it so he could run his street food cart [on the side],” she says.

“Sometimes, you need role models. I was in a big FTSE-100 company, and you’re going out there and being quite game-changing in your mentality but [the company] was quite intrigued.”

The decision, she says, was “the single best I’ve ever made”.

Sinead Jefferies, 42, has also enjoyed the benefits of flexible working since she and her husband, Jon, moved to France in 2015. She now works mostly four-day weeks remotely as a director at Chime, a Londonbase­d research company, but from the comfort of her 14th-century French town house in the Dordogne. About once a month, she travels to London for meetings and to catch up with her team.

So why did she choose to reject the traditiona­l working model? “For a better life,” she explains. “We were both commuting in and out of London from Hampshire for four hours a day and spending long hours in the office. ‘Life has to be about more than this,’ we said. ‘But why are we talking about doing something different one day when we could do it now, while we’re young and can make the most of life?’”

It’s taken some time to resettle, but their quality of life has undoubtedl­y improved. “We’ve eliminated the time and cost involved in commuting,” says Jefferies, a mother of two, aged five and one. “And we have lots more time together. My husband and I can go and get a coffee together before we start work and we’re not always rushing.”

They’ve also used the extra time and space in their lives to run a gîte, an undertakin­g that has brought its own pleasures. “It’s been really good to be able to do something like that for ourselves; to have something we’re in control of rather than just being in the corporate world,” says Jefferies.

The preference for flexible working is strong among both men and women, says Timewise, with 84 per cent of male full-time workers either currently working flexibly or saying they want to, compared with 91 per cent of female full-time workers.

Rob Forkan, 31, who created the footwear brand Gandys with his brother, says: “There isn’t a working pattern. Every week is different, which makes things fun, and it’s the same across the team. To come up with the ideas and stories behind our products, getting out there and seeing the world is really important. We can’t be sitting behind a desk 24/7. Once a month I’m somewhere new.”

The rejection of a full-time deskbased lifestyle helps him and the team come up with fresh ideas, he believes. And instead of feeling exhausted by the daily grind, as he once did, he now feels energised.

Although he still works occasional long days to make up the hours, the pay-off is a working life with horizons stretching further than the office’s four walls.

“You don’t want to be looking at everyone’s Instagram pictures of them travelling the world; you want to go out and see things for yourself,” he says.

There are plenty more people

‘I was game-changing in my mentality. The company was quite intrigued’

of both sexes who are challengin­g the way we work. But, according to Timewise, more conversati­ons about how, rather than why, are needed. “The link between the reason for working flexibly being children or caring responsibi­lities has held back the discussion about flexible working,” argues co-founder Karen Mattison. “We haven’t talked enough about how we make it work but [have been] focusing on why. The much more interestin­g and valuable conversati­on is how do we make it work when, say, four people in a team do three days a week, three people do four days, and two people work from home?”

The reasons for wanting to do things differentl­y should not even be relevant, she suggests. “We don’t believe there’s [any such thing as] a ‘good’ or ‘special’ reason. The direction of travel should be towards reason-neutral.”

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 ??  ?? No regrets: Rob Forkan, left, and Sarah Ellis, right, both changed their working hours
No regrets: Rob Forkan, left, and Sarah Ellis, right, both changed their working hours
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 ??  ?? Remote control: Sinead Jefferies, above, works for a London-based company from her home in the Dordogne
Remote control: Sinead Jefferies, above, works for a London-based company from her home in the Dordogne

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