When you think of flexible working, what kind of employee demographic comes to mind? Working parents? Likely primarily mothers? If so, you wouldn’t be alone. Historically, flexible working has very much been seen as the domain of those employees with childcare responsibilities to work around. With the majority of primary carers still being mums rather than dads, it is easy to see how flexible working can have been dismissed by organisations as something which is required by the few, not the many.
For some time now, there’s been a concerning trend which has been emerging. It’s apparent whenever you scroll through LinkedIn, read industry articles which talk about how the brightest and the best got to where they are today, or even have a conversation with friends about how their organisations work.
The current inclement weather may have been a pertinent reminder too late for some organisations that they perhaps haven’t planned for such an eventuality. With the typically mild climate we enjoy, weather which has the potential to impact on business operations is generally few and far between.
We seem to talk a lot about goal setting. Short term goals, long term goals, team goals, individual goals. It appears that as organisations and senior leaders, we’ve finally cottoned on to the fact that the way to enable people to succeed is to give them something to aim at.