Be Flexible First 3.

In November 2020, WACL launched the Flexible First Toolkit. Flexible working brings benefits for women, business and society. It provides better conditions for women to stay in work longer and more consistently over their working life –adapting working patterns to changing demands at home. Staying in work longer means that they can progress, earn more and ultimately compete more fairly with male peers.

For business, the case is clear – flexible working helps them retain great female talent at all levels of their organisation. It helps businesses to be more resilient to changes in the talent market and it marks them out as a progressive employer.

Covid marked a radical change in the perception of flexible working and paved the way for more people to work in a way which suits their lives. But there is more to do in making more roles flexible and in building a positive perception of flexibility as good for business as well as good for people.

The Flexible Working Toolkit laid out the case for making flexible working the default for most roles and offered simple steps to help businesses to embed flexibility in their processes and culture. It explores different types of flexibility (part-time, home working etc) and includes a checklist for organisations to evaluate their commitment to making work #flexiblefirst.

To move away from measuring our work in hours to focus instead on impact. Thinking about how to accurately measure and account for this is still developing but it could prove transformative: presenteeism (even presenteeism in the most flexible sense) is impacted by women’s shouldering an unfair share of the domestic burden.

Flexibility is one of our most powerful tools; it is particularly powerful for returning parents, people with care responsibilities, those living with a disability, experiencing ill health (mental and physical) and who for a range of reasons are inhibited by fixed hours or location. The way in which we worked during the pandemic proves that many businesses are able to operate in a much less rigid way than they previously thought was necessary. It is true that home-working against that backdrop brought its own challenges (not least from the absence of schools and childcare) but it did make a powerful case for flexibility and many organisations have not returned to mandatory office-basing since.