if you have a good flexible / family friendly employer, who do you work for?

[burpies]

Just want to know which employers are actually flexible? My current employer has the family friendly policy / flexible working on its job page but in reality they're not. When I got the job I asked if I could work 8-4 and got a straight no!

It's got me thinking which employers actually are and aren't just giving lip service.

Is the NHS? Local authority? Private sector?

University extremely flexible and family friendly although driven by local management so varies by department.

Local authority- as long as I do my hours it really doesn't matter when I do them. I have some days where I might clock in at 7.30, click out for an hour or so several times a day , have an extended lunch break, maybe do an extra hour in the evenings. With having three children, it really is the most flexible job I could wish for

Small business within financial services, I'm part time, chose my own hours. Became home based during lockdown and they're happy for me to continue with that.

I can swap work days to accommodate school commitments, medical appointments, unwell children. In the school holidays I can compress my hours and will often work 12 hour days to make childcare for the rest of the week easier.

I had to take a pay cut with this job, but it was worth every penny.

It's a total shift from the 10 years I spent working for a FTSE250 where even the slightest adjustment request to my regular working pattern was met with horror.

University - aside from my teaching hours, I have complete flexibility. I moved from industry before we had children. I think if I'd stayed where I was I'd have had to drop to part-time by now.

Local authority I have set days I work but start and finish times up to me and in reality if I needed time off on one of my set days i could make that up on a non working day or at the weekend. They also do flexi. But it very much depends on your manager attitude previous managers have allowed less flexibility. My current manager doesnt care as long as the work gets done.

National charity.

My role is incredibly flexible. However, if you worked in one of the services then probably not so much. Certain hours need to be covered then.

They also expect that in the case of childcare, both parents are utilised

This is the key, all employees, not just parents, have a right to flexible working and fathers being expected, by their employer, their partner and society, to do half of pick ups, drop offs, sick days etc, and a decent chunk of parental leave, not just the minimum 2 weeks, but say 3 months. Also reduce presenteeism culture and travel for the sake of it. Hopefully the latter will be a silver lining that emerges from the great black cloud that is COVID-19.

So employers don't see it as an issue when employing women and you are less likely to get into the situation where the mother decides she has no choice but to give up work because she can't make all the running around and covering sick days work as well as her job so gets a reputation for not being committed while fathers get to concentrate solely on work and put the hours in, so they get ahead and if it comes to the stage where the family can't cope, it's almost always the woman who decides to give up work because the children's father earns more, because he's not been the one who's damaged his career due to being a parent.

Civil service - extremely flexible (but only in the right department and role)

Definitely agree with this caveat. I'm a civil servant but in a department that offers a commercial service. There is flexibility, but it does also requires long days (12-14 hours) at least a once or twice a month (in normal times anyway) and quite a bit of travel, depending on what projects we are undertaking and certainly within the first few years of the role, due to lots of training courses and spending time working at our various different sites. Definitely cannot be done as regular set hours and being at home every night, so would need a supportive partner for childcare purposes.

Plus anyone working on COVID-19 response or to a lesser degree, Brexit could be working on a 24/7 rota and extended hours above the normal 37.5 pw.

Investment banking but I work for a German bank and they are a lot more family focused and it shows in the foreign branches as well.

Also, our branch manager has primary age children and despite a SAHM as wife he is very involved with them, doing school runs, blocking dates as soon as the school announces events and he is absolutely happy for us to do it as well if work can be re-arranged.

The only thing they don’t copy is the German maternity pay policies.

I work with medical writers (am not one myself) and lots of them work part time hours. They’re quite hard to recruit so they can get the flexibility. Worth considering for those with science degrees!

I used to work for a charity and people would ask what you were doing if you were in the office any later than 5pm. Also lots of holidays and TOIL.
My boss once revealed that when he “worked from home” he was actually just answering emails from his phone and didn’t take his laptop with him. He also got away with not making a single penny in over 3 years of working there (we were in the fundraising team)

On the other hand, I worked my ass off having come from a 14 hour a day corporate job and made close to a million pounds in my first year. Asked for a promotion or payrise (I think I wanted £2.5k extra) and was denied until I resigned and they wanted to keep me

So the flexibility and holiday is offset with zero career progression and shit salaries. However that was just my charity albeit a very big well known one.

Teeny tiny scientific company here, moved to permanent WFH, super flexible, start after school run and can nip out to pick them up. Holidays whenever I like and no problem with anything else either really!

Absolutely love it but as is the nature with a tiny company, always the threat of do we have enough money, how long can we continue? If something is too good to be true, it probably is. This is. But it's lasted me 5 years so far!

I am a nurse in the NHS. It is getting better. We work 13hr day shifts and 12hr night shifts and there is no changing that, but colleagues who have recently returned from maternity leave have been able to negotiate working set days. 5 years ago when I had my youngest that was not possible, I had 1 set day off but could be working any day/ night except that 1 with no pattern each week, so you need childcare available for 6 days a week even though you would only be working 3 shifts. We have to request specific days off (we can request 4 each month) 3 months in advance, which is a problem if school/ nursery don't tell you of events you should attend that far in advance. At least every other year we work Christmas. The NHS does have family friendly/ flexible working policies, so it might be better if you don't do a shift-working, frontline clinical job.
DH works in IT for a university. That is very flexible. Now he is WFH obviously, but before covid he basically just went in at whatever time his first meeting of the day was. If he had to pick DC up from school at 3.30, that was fine, he just didn't schedule any meetings after 3 on those days. If there is nothing hugely important going on, he can take annual leave/ a day off at no notice, and, even before covid, could do a lot of his work from home even though he didn't officially have set working from home days like some of his colleagues, which made it a lot easier for him to deal with ill children, random short-notice school closures etc (we tend to alternate taking time off with ill children). He gets nearly 2 weeks off over Christmas when I am not allowed to take annual leave and at Easter as the university shuts down, which helps with the school holiday childcare. I couldn't do the job I do without him having such a flexible job.

University here too

Shame my local university never has jobs. In fact the small local college has more jobs!

@speakout

I can work any hours I like. I can stop work in the middle of the working day if I don't want to work anymore. I can work weekends or not as I choose. I can work for a few hours early in the morning. I can take as many holidays as I like. I can work in my yoga pants.

Self employed.
I can do a yoga session in the middle of my working day.
I have no boss.
I have no commute.

This is me, apart from the yoga in the middle of the day. I'm also not self employed but work for a small family run company in the financial sector. I love my job and love how flexible it is.

Small private allied healthcare company (less than 15 people). I’m contracted for a certain amount of hours but generally can work them in any pattern I want. Very easy to shift my working days and hours around, plus I can do some of the admin side from home.

I work for a university. I think it is in part because my university happens to be a very progressive one and it's just part of their ethos and they want to look good and all - but it's also because it's very rare in academia for anyone to work 5 days a week 9-5 in the office. Even people without dc who I work with, work flexibly, work from home at least 1-2 days a week, set their own hours, etc. On Fridays, it's a ghost town because no one comes in on Friday.

Small private business, very flexible, we all work round each others needs and so long as the work gets done it to doesn't matter too much when. There are a few fixed points in the week but even those can be flexed in an emergency.

Myself.

Ultimate flexibility. Would never go back to working for anyone else.

Local Authority. So flexible it is unbelievable... but I don't take advantage and always offer to do extra if its needed. I suppose its give and take.

I work in the private sector. Family run company, the MDs care very much about their employees. I'm part time, contracted to do 24 hours and as long as the work gets done I can choose when I do them. I work 4 days a week so I can chop and change my day off if I want to attend any school events like plays.

NHS

I would say it depends on what kind of boss you get, micro managers and ineffectual bosses can give you very little or no flexibility at all even if you are in a flexi scheme.

I have worked for both NHS and universities and the both were incredibly flexible or incredibly inflexible depending on who was the manager or how much they were on the ball (those who know what is going on rather than panicking about loosing control are the ones who allow more flexibility).

And obviously, it also depends on how much work you can advance/delay before without missing deadlines.

It is a word

The local authority.

However my boss is very flexible but other teams doing same job different location fare worse I'm told.