Evolving Expectations

Have you ever found yourself daydreaming about a job that lets you work in your own way, at your own pace? Well, today, we're introducing you to Beth Carter, the Head of Growth at Flexa, a company that's revolutionizing the job market by giving verified businesses a platform to showcase just how the flexible ways of working they can offer potential employees. Beth opens up about her intriguing childhood aspiration of being a "dog historian" and her voyage from a stifling finance job to the dynamic world of start-ups. She also shares some pearls of wisdom about the shifting expectations of job seekers and the critical importance of flexible work environments in promoting diversity and transforming business practices.

We take some time to explore the early stages of Beth's career before looking at what it's like to be a growth coach in a start-up versus a corporate setting and the unique aspects of both. Beth also gives us a sneak peek into the evolution of the startup landscape, especially in the post-pandemic era.

During our conversation Beth also sheds light on the concept of the Flex score, a unique system designed by Flexa to assess just how flexible the businesses looking to promote themselves on their platform really are.  Beth explains the role of employee surveys and the need for role-modeling and autonomy in flexible work cultures and we wrap up the conversation by taking a look at the future of work, discussing the evolving role of HR, the rise of passive job searching, and the importance of establishing healthy boundaries in a flexible work environment. So, settle in and get ready for an enlightening conversation on the future of work and how companies like Flexa are shaping it.

You can find the Flexa website here www.flexa.careers

Flexa Lifestyle Quiz for Jobseekers - https://flexa.careers/lifestyle-quiz

Flexa benchmarking quiz for clients - https://flexa.careers/quiz?utm_source=beth 

Period conscious webinar - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z13vYhaEkzo

The JobsWorth website is here www.jobs-worth.com

Follow me on LinkedIn; https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnhawker/

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Contact me using hello@jobs-worth.com

Chapters

• 0:00 Flexibility in the Workplace
• 10:50 Role of Growth Coach in Companies
• 19:26 Flexor
• 30:05 Registering and Scoring Flexibility
• 37:15 Data-Driven Approach to Assessing Flexible Work
• 49:14 HR's Evolution and Future of Work
• 55:43 Flexor Platform and Passive Searching Benefits
• 59:30 Flexibility and Boundaries
• 1:06:00 Mum's Closing Question

Transcript

John Hawker: 0:00

Jobs Worth, season one, episode 11, evolving Expectations. Welcome to episode 11 of Jobs Worth. My guest for this episode is Beth Carter, head of growth at Flexa, the employer brand platform for flexible companies. Flexa currently has over 1.7 million users, all searching for businesses offering opportunities that align with how they want to work, not just what they do. Flexa already boasts some pretty impressive clients that have chosen to endure the rigorous process of becoming flexified something we'll look at in closer detail later on and showcase the environments they're able to offer to prospective employees, with filters ranging from dog-friendly offices, compressed hours, remote first setups and work from anywhere schemes.

John Hawker: 0:53

I'll be speaking to Beth about just how important flexibility is for people when searching for a new role, how it can promote diversity in teams and why the way businesses are hiring is changing. I'll also be finding out a little more about her earlier career and what led her to join Flexa earlier this year. So, without further ado, let me introduce you to one of a small army of people at Flexa, on a mission to showcase the organisations that really are walking the walk when it comes to offering flexible working. Beth Carter, beth, thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate you taking the time.

Beth Carter: 1:25

Of course, nice to be here.

John Hawker: 1:26

I don't know if you've listened and I won't hold it against you if you haven't. I don't know if you've listened to any of the previous episodes I've done, but there is an opening tradition on this podcast and I always start with a question when you were younger, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Beth Carter: 1:39

It's slightly embarrassing because I wanted to be a dog historian.

John Hawker: 1:44

Wow, that's a curveball.

Beth Carter: 1:47

And by that I mean a dog. That was a historian, not somebody who studied dog history.

John Hawker: 1:54

Okay, that is more of a curveball than the initial statement. You're going to have to explain that a little further for anyone listening.

Beth Carter: 2:01

I can also give you a sensible answer, but there was a TV show when I was a kid called Wishbone, which was you basically followed this little dog back through history and got to go on trips with him, and so I wanted to be a dog historian for a long time. Well then, more relevant, I think I really wanted to be in business. There was something that I'd either seen in family I mean both of my parents' teachers, but extended family who worked in sort of this kind of obscure concept of business that looked really glamorous and cool and I had these ideas of myself like working in a massive corporate office and wearing a pencil skirt and getting dressed up for work every day. That was really appealing to me as a teenager, and I did that for about three months and realized it was not for me whatsoever and that squashed that dream in an internship. But yeah, it was so appealing to me as a teenager. I really don't know why.

John Hawker: 3:07

Okay, so we've got one quite traditional answer and we've got one that I've obviously never heard before. So a dog historian. I generally thought we're about to talk about someone that studies history of dogs, but you wanted to be a dog who was a historian, so that's. I think we'll stick with that answer. I might cut the other one out. Beth, I think the point you make about this impression that you had of what the working in business might feel like, or the reality of that experience might be, is something that's come up a lot on this podcast when I'm speaking to people. You've got all these influences around you and it's only by doing it do you realize that the reality is not something that aligns with your goals or ambitions, or you're particularly inspired by what did you do, if you don't mind me asking. So it was an internship, did you say.

Beth Carter: 3:54

Yeah, I did a sales internship at a massive FMCG company and there are a couple of things that put me off. Both actually were interactions with other people. So the first one was, you know, I was doing archaeology and anthropology at university. I wasn't didn't have business studies.

Beth Carter: 4:17

I didn't have that kind of skill set at all and I went to learn that and we were sat in this massive sales meeting. The whole floor is in this meeting. We have all these presentations, forecasts and PNLs and all this stuff and I sat there absolutely clueless, not knowing a thing that was going on, and I didn't say anything in the meeting because I was probably 18 or 19 is quite intimidating. And we came out of the meeting and I asked one of the grads, who was sort of two or three years into the grad program, was one of these big companies that had a traditional grad program. And I asked him you know, is there any way that you could spend 15, 20 minutes with me now? And I'd really love to go over the all of the numbers and the spreadsheets that we looked at in the meeting because I didn't really understand it and and I'd like to. And he laughed and looked at the other people that he was with and turned back to me and said never admit you don't understand the numbers. And I was like, first of all, this is how the financial crisis happened. Secondly, like what a horrific thing to say to somebody who's you know and at the time I didn't realize it. It was only afterwards, when I spoke to, you know, my cousins and my aunts and people who I really respect, who are a bit older than me and had more experience, and they said absolutely do not listen to them, always ask questions like this really important that you don't lose that.

Beth Carter: 5:45

And I found that attitude really off putting.

Beth Carter: 5:48

And the other thing that I found off putting was I ran out of work one day.

Beth Carter: 5:53

I'd kind of finished all the things that I was given to do, which was really boring stuff, to be honest, like workout, discounting and you know kind of stuff that I'm not a salesperson at all, right and I asked for more work for again from another person you know a few, a few kind of years more senior than me and the in the grad team.

Beth Carter: 6:12

And she said the trick isn't to be busy, it's to look like you've got a lot to do. And I was like what, what kind of an environment is this? And you know, I am also, you know, massively touring the entire corporate world with that one experience and I probably should give it another go at some point in my career, but it it just I was so excited about going into that world and I thought that I would learn loads, and actually what I was faced with was a very hierarchical, very traditional structure that had so many problems, where people looked busy instead of actually did impactful work, and I realized that none of that, none of that, worked for me and very quickly found myself in the startup world.

John Hawker: 7:00

After that, Well, I think, as first initial experiences go, if anything's going to put you off the the traditional corporate world or traditional way of working, that's going to be it.

John Hawker: 7:10

That is a perfect example of a toxic environment that you'll being told by people at both ends of the spectrum earlier on so that grad level resource. Don't admit that you don't know anything. And then, at the other end of it, look like you're always busy even though you're not busy. These are two complete red flags In my opinion, and obviously it sounds like in yours too completely understandable. So you that was your first experience in the corporate world. I was looking back for your LinkedIn profile I'm so glad that most of my guests are on LinkedIn because it helps with research and it seems like growth played a big part, or growth paid a big part, in your remit and responsibilities and all of your roles from about 2018. So can you tell us a bit about how you moved into your first head of growth role and then bring us up to how you came to join flexor? If you can give us a potted history, bring us up to up to date.

Beth Carter: 8:05

Yeah, definitely, we kind of started with. So I ran a business just out of university with a friend and that is such a great learning experience because you kind of have to do absolutely everything, and so I had a couple of years of experience of trying to get a business off the ground and figuring out everything under the sun that goes with that. And when I left there I kind of thought, oh, I'll take a bit of time off, and I got recommended to do some consulting for a company called Go Squad the really great founder called James Gill and I went in to help them with content marketing. I always loved writing. We'd done a lot of content in the business that I was in and I went in a couple of days a week and started to learn about that and learn how to consult. Essentially, I'd never done that before and I really, really enjoyed it. I liked working in small teams and I liked working with startups and I picked up a few other contracts, mainly doing content marketing.

Beth Carter: 9:11

And while I was working with Go Squad we I came across a program run by Matt Lerner and Nopadon and they run a program which is called System, which I now coach on but hadn't heard of at all at that time and myself and the GoSquared team, we all went on to this program together and that was a kind of a 10 week accelerator program where they taught you everything about growing a startup start-up growth. I hadn't really even heard about what that was before. I just completely took to it, really loved it. Loved this idea of following the customer journey and understanding from a real customer centric perspective how businesses should go. It's all about delivering as much value as you can to someone.

Beth Carter: 10:04

Growing revenue is very easy if you're offering someone value. Taking money from someone's actually the easy part. It's delivering them something of value. That's difficult and I really got into this and I stayed and I worked with GoSquared for a couple of years after that and moved into this head of growth role, which was quite lucky timing, I think, because there weren't many people around doing growth at that time. It was still this very Silicon Valley venture capital kind of thing. Now it's becoming a bit more common, although I would say that a lot of people still don't understand what growth as a function is.

John Hawker: 10:46

Could you then, Beth just to interject really quickly give people a better description of what that growth role is, Because I have got that down as a question and I don't know if you can give that as a concise answer. I'm sure it's broad and varied, and when you see head of growth, God, there's so many things that come to mind, but can you give us more insight?

Beth Carter: 11:03

Yeah, definitely. So there's lots of different types of heads of growth, right Like I really specialize in fairly early stages of a company. So from first idea through to sort of series A, you will get heads of growth that are specializing in series D companies. It's a very, very different situation very large companies but for me and what I do, my role is really to go into a business and tie everything together and look at how silos have been created where marketing are doing something over here but they're not talking to product and they're not talking to sales and you get all of this disjointed happening in the middle of it, and that's really difficult for startups, because your only job as a startup is to move and build as quickly as possible and learn as much as you possibly can about your customers and how you deliver them value. That's really what I'm there to do.

Beth Carter: 12:01

So it's a combination of marketing, of product, of commercial thinking, of data and knitting the entire business around common objectives, of look at our business, which are the bits that are the most painful, that aren't growing in the way we want them to be, and how do we dig down into them and make it, make it move.

Beth Carter: 12:23

There's this concept.

Beth Carter: 12:24

I'm going to mispronounce it, but the Pareto principle, which is the 80% of your results, will come from 20% of the things that you choose to do. And when I go into a business I am sort of ruthlessly looking for those that 20%, so that we can focus our limited resource and limited time into the right place. So in a given week I might be interviewing customers, I might be running product experiments, marketing experiments, I could be writing content, I could be doing paid ads, I could be doing a whole remit of things. And that's why I really love it, because, from what I've done so far, the closest thing to being a founder of a business without actually having to found the company, because you get to kind of put yourself in all of the different nooks and crannies and I'm quite a nosy person. Naturally I like knowing things, I like learning and sort of knowing what's going on everywhere, and so it's perfect. I get to go and dig in to all these bits that don't look like they're part of my remit but actually they could be. Hopefully that's helpful.

John Hawker: 13:35

It's a really insightful answer. I'm sitting here nodding along when you were saying that it's the closest you can get to being a founder without actually founding a company. I have no visions to scale what I do, but wearing those multiple hats every single day is something that I actually enjoy. I mean, there are days when it stresses me out and I wish I could clone myself and there'd be more of me to help. But having that versatility and variety in your day I find really motivational. So I can imagine when you're doing that.

John Hawker: 14:06

But then looking at more the holistic view and then how you can support other people in that business and the business in general to grow and focus on the areas that sometimes people want to stick their head in the sand and you have to highlight it. And I think there's probably a lot around change management that you have to do. The psychology of OK, this is an area that we need to try and improve upon or productivity could be better in this. In this area, it's understanding the psychology of people. Does that play a part in what you're doing?

Beth Carter: 14:35

There's a lot of people stuff, something I talk a lot about in my coaching. So I coach on system, the growth program I mentioned earlier, and something I've said multiple times. The other coaches is. You know, most businesses that come to us have the same kind of technical problems. Right, they've got a top of funnel problem, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel, retention, like not enough traffic or not enough conversions. The technical problems are all very, very similar. What's different every time, and what I love about about being a growth coach, is that the people are different in the team and the people who you're selling to are different.

Beth Carter: 15:16

Some of the most powerful work we do in system as a growth coach is to go in and really help a team deeply understand their customers emotionally, socially, what their goals are, what their aims are, but also to help teams understand each other, and it gives me so much joy when I see people in coaching calls having these vulnerable, difficult conversations and kind of getting out of their own way and each other's way and, on your point, around the wearing multiple hats as well. I think that ultimately, that was what was the misfit between me and the corporate world and I think that it's something that people who are making that decision of small businesses, startups, corporations don't think about enough. And in a massive enterprise, your role gets narrower and narrower because there's 10,000 of you and everybody has a very specific piece of the puzzle to do. That suits some people and if that's the kind of person that you are, amazing, go for that. Go and become a really detailed individual contributor who absolutely knows everything that is to know about that one area.

Beth Carter: 16:31

That's just not who I am or how my brain works. I don't have that focus. I don't have that depth of analytical brain to want to get that tight into the details. I prefer being able to have a wider view and jumping between lots of different things. That has been such a shaper of my career, not only just as a head of growth, but also when I'm investing and when I'm coaching. A lot of it is about exposing myself to as many different things as possible.

John Hawker: 17:03

It's a really good point and a big part of this podcast is about trying to inspire people, maybe educate people on what they could be doing, what options are available to them, and I think for a lot of people earlier part in their career, we're all driven in a way to aim for what you did, which is the corporate world. It's changed a lot now. I think so many different doors have opened to people. But I still don't think for people at college maybe once you get to university there's a lot of people banging the drum for startups. It still feels like this very new wave school of thought to go into a startup with too much risk associated with it.

John Hawker: 17:37

But we've all seen especially if the pandemic highlighted anything this risk associated in any industry of companies of any size. So it's a really good point you make, beth, and thank you. I know I took you off on a complete tangent there, but it's really good to shine a light on that for anyone that's listening that is really considering what they want to do next. I work with a lot of grads and the conversation is always oh, you know, the thought of a startup or a scaling business is just too risky. I'm probably looking for a bit more stability. Well, you only need to take a look at the papers every weekend to see how much risk is out there in more established organizations. So it's a really good point that you've made.

John Hawker: 18:13

So thank you for that. I'm going to bring you back to the point that you made about 10 minutes ago now, so I'm sorry. Where you said about moving into that head of growth role but from a timing perspective. That was a kind of again a newer type of position out there. So let's get back onto the chronology, if that's okay, of where you were then and back to that flexor road.

Beth Carter: 18:33

Yeah. So then I was working as a sort of consulting head of growth so it wasn't full time anywhere. I was doing kind of two days a week one place, two days another and I got offered a full time role at an investment platform called Tillit and Felicia the founder still a really good friend of mine. She's brilliant, very, very determined and intelligent and I really rate her a lot. I rate her very highly and she heard about me through the course that I teach on and we went for coffee or lunch, I don't remember, and she asked if I would consider going and working with them for a bit. So that was the first sort of five day a week head of growth role that I had, which was really interesting to do.

Beth Carter: 19:26

I ultimately left there to join flexor for a few reasons. I was invested in flexor as an investor, so that was a real pull, and I also struggled with the regulation of the finance industry. I think working in finance made me realize that I'm a bit of a do stuff and ask for forgiveness later kind of person which just does not work in the world of finance, and I found that quite hard to do my best work in that kind of a situation, no matter how hard. Felicia tried to give me as much free rein as she could and she did a very good job of that, but there's always going to be that, as there should be in finance, compliance need. That again just didn't work with my brain. I'd been an investor in flexor for a couple of years by this point.

Beth Carter: 20:20

This is kind of back earlier this year and I was actually helping the founders find a head of growth. They were talking to different people looking at, you know, is it someone with a marketing background? Is it, you know? Is it someone with a growth background? Who are we looking for? And we'd had lots of conversations about it. Molly and Morris are some of my closest friends and to be sat in the pub having pints and talking about this role that they're trying to hire for. And eventually Molly sent me a voice note that was saying it's Molly and I have been friends for 10 years. We've known each other since we were 19. So, no, 12 years now.

Beth Carter: 21:01

And she sent me a voice note saying you know, I've really figured out why, why it's been so hard for us to hire a head of growth and it's because we keep comparing everyone to you and we would rather have you. If there's any way, you'd be up for it. And you know, let's take, let's take our time and let's talk about it. You know we're friends and so obviously that's a consideration and you're an investor and that's a consideration and all of these different things. But you know, if you're open to the conversation, let's. Let's have the conversation, and so we did.

Beth Carter: 21:32

We probably spoke about it over the course of sort of five or six weeks and I think for me, I got to the point where I just knew that if I got a message from Molly saying you've taken too long, we found someone else and we've hired them, I would be really gutted that it wasn't me that got to go and do that, and that was the thing that really sealed it for me. I could. I could feel how disappointed I'd be if somebody else took the job.

John Hawker: 22:02

That's a good bit of advice actually for anyone. That's kind of weighing up opportunities. You have to almost put yourself in your future self and say what would play out the scenarios and what would it be like if that opportunity just wasn't there anymore. That's really good, and what a lovely compliment for Molly to have texted you and said that. And I know you're, I know you're friends. But for for Molly to have made that decision, there has to be a really lovely feeling associated with that and they yeah, you're right, I think it's it's naive to think there aren't considerations around. You've known each other for over 10 years. You've invested in the business and I was that kind of work in that setup, but all you could have arguments both ways. But I'm waiting for you to say the rest is history, beth. But now you've been with them for is it nine months now?

Beth Carter: 22:45

Yeah, I joined them much yeah.

John Hawker: 22:48

I mean the way that I see flexor and the brand continuing to expand has been incredible in that time. So let's, talk about, about flexor, obviously Tell us about the vision behind flexor. So what? What are flexor doing and what is flexor's role in, I guess, the future of, or shaping the future of, work? Can you tell us a bit about that?

Beth Carter: 23:12

Yeah, definitely. So I think that the the kind of core belief that underlies flexor's existence is that there needs to be more transparency in the hiring process, and this all came from. Molly actually has an autoimmune condition, which means that sometimes she finds it difficult to get into the office or, you know, she might like her hands will swell up, her feet will swell up and she might find it really hard to even walk into an office. And she was working at another company a long time ago now and asked if she could work flexibly and they kind of, you know, umbed an art about it and sent her out of the room. And then a week later they fired her and she was in this position of being like God. Just for making a flexible working request, I've been fired. She was an investment banking, not a notoriously flexible industry, and so they she starts looking for another job and is completely impossible to understand anything about their working environment or their approach to flexible working.

Beth Carter: 24:20

Before you were at the final stages of an interview, and that's insane, because for Molly, who has an autoimmune condition, that would make it make the job an automatic. No, but the fact that she has to go through three stages of a process or, in some cases, people who are accepting jobs and then, on the first day of their work, having to make flexible working requests. It just makes no sense. And so, at the very beginning, there was this belief that it's insane that you cannot find a company to work for based on how you want to work, not just because of your lifestyle choices or lifestyle needs, but also because of you know. You know when you're most productive or you know how you can do your best work. And that was impossible to do.

Beth Carter: 25:08

And so Molly Morris and Tim, the three co-founders, kind of set off on this mission to really extend the hiring process upwards. So if you think about a marketing funnel, right, you've got kind of brand awareness. And then top of funnel, you know people are kind of coming a bit closer towards you all the way through to buying a product. Marketing has become very similar to that. So right at the top of your funnel, your hiring funnel, you've got brand awareness, employer branding, just actually where you really set the stage for the lower down tiers, right, you can hire diverse people if you're not being noticed by them at the top of the funnel.

Beth Carter: 25:50

It's completely impossible. It just doesn't work like that.

Beth Carter: 25:52

So on Flexa, we have all of these companies who come in and they get verified, which is a really important part of it, because the other issue when LinkedIn have some stats on this that I'm not even going to try and guess because I'm going to get them wrong but there was a remarkable number of companies and roles advertising remote or flexible that weren't actually true to that in the end, and so you've got candidates really struggling with this. They don't know who to trust. They end up in these situations they don't want to be in. It's a horrible candidate experience. And on the other side, you've got companies who are doing really good work in this space. They have great flexible policies, they really care about their employees and want to want to be progressive here, but there's nowhere for them to talk about that, and so we really bring these two groups together and through the verification process, which is such an important part of what Flexa does, they're able to really build that trust with candidates. So they know that not only have the hiring team or the talent team or the founder of the company said we work three days a week at home and this is the kind of culture we have and we have these benefits, but it's also been verified by a statistically significant proportion of their current employees, which is really important because all other platforms where you have the opportunity to get insight from employees are really old news.

Beth Carter: 27:30

A lot of people on there, so Glassdoor is the big one, right? There's a lot of people on Glassdoor who are. They worked at this company six years ago and they're just a bit pissed off. They've just got let go or fired and they're writing a ranty review. Now they've just been hired a week ago and someone's gone. Oh, go on, write us a review and it's this and you can't trust it, Whereas for us, because companies have to re-verify every year, the information is always up to date and the candidates can trust that they know what environment they're going into, and that's important for everybody, but it's particularly important for people like parents or people with disabilities and conditions, people who are diverse in lots of different ways.

Beth Carter: 28:17

You find that the statistics are I think it's 86% of the general kind of knowledge working population want some form of flexible working. If you cut that data and start looking at women, for example, that statistic goes up to 96% and this is really interesting. So if you're not offering flexibility and you're not talking about your offering of flexibility. You're automatically exposing yourself to a less diverse audience, which is obviously not something that most companies want to do.

John Hawker: 28:53

No, definitely not. I completely agree with that. I've heard about Molly's story from Molly, actually and once I heard that, understanding the drive behind the creation of Flexa, it all just clicked into my mind straight away. So I think I'd heard about Flexa before speaking to Molly and hearing about a company that was verifying or giving at the time it felt like a company that was giving badges to businesses that were claiming to be offering flexible working Then understanding Molly's story and the impetus and the catalyst behind Flexa, and then getting a bit more insight into the level of scrutiny that you put these companies under to really say we're not giving you this stamp of approval, we're not making you flexified or verified without you proving to us and without us speaking to your people. The process is really rigorous and, as you say on the website, it's not easy. So was it? Roughly a third of companies go sort of get that seal of approval? Is that right?

Beth Carter: 29:57

Yeah, but it's about 35% who don't pass.

John Hawker: 30:00

Right, okay, wow, so that's going to be a little bit more, then, about the process. So if a company are thinking about registering with Flexa and want to start showcasing the flexibility they can offer people, they'll reach out to you, and then what is the process from that point?

Beth Carter: 30:17

Yeah, so it's normally started off by a TA person, someone in HR, somebody in the people team. That's normally what we the kind of person that comes in. They've got all of this information and what they will do is they will come in and they will take the employer quiz on behalf of the company and we ask them about kind of six key areas at the moment, and there are some kind of additional additional aspects that we then ask in the employee side as well. We ask about location, hours, benefits, work-life balance, role modeling which is a really interesting one and autonomy, and by asking a series of quantitative questions we get an initial Flex score. That then gives them a kind of stage one. But to get flexified they have to send out the employee survey. So a large amount of their employees changes on each company size because it has to just hit our statistically significant marker. But we'll have a group of employees then take a slightly different survey and by this point we have millions of data points that we can benchmark against, that we can use to back this up, and some very clever stuff goes on in the back end which you'd have to talk to someone technical about, not me, and we match up those employee answers with the employer scores and figure out a way to give them a really truly verified, double-sided Flex score. It's much more trusted than just your company saying this is what we do. It's much more trustworthy. And so I think the two that are really interesting so kind of location, hours, benefits, work-life balance Everyone really knows what that means.

Beth Carter: 32:19

The two that I think are really interesting that have come out of are years of research into flexible working, both from how does it help companies and employers, but also how does it benefit candidates and people that work for you Is role-modeling an autonomy? And so what we've found is that and this is why you'll see why the employee side of it is so important is, on the role-modeling one, it's all well and good for me to say, yeah, sure, people can leave by 4.30 if they want to. Like, I can say that I can have that written in a policy, it can be printed out on the office wall. But if none of the senior leadership team and none of the managers actually do that, nobody else does. So the reality of flexible working in that business is not flexible, and this is why that role-modeling score is so important to us, because you can't like. Hr policies need to be in place for a lot of different reasons, but it's not until they're put into practice that they really start to have an impact on people's life and on people's work. So that's the role-modeling part, which is really unique to what we do and how we work out the scores.

Beth Carter: 33:43

And the other side is autonomy, and this is really related to employee happiness. People who are smart and driven and know that they can get the job done. They want to be able to kind of be left to do that. And the reason that this is particularly important with flexible working is that traditional working environments, where you sat opposite your manager and they know what you're doing every second of the day and they can see how many hours you've worked or not that presently presentism has any relation to productivity, but you can kind of kid yourself that it does. In that situation and there's a lot more micro-managing goes on in those environments.

Beth Carter: 34:30

When you're in a flexible working environment, trust becomes a massive, massive thing. You have to trust as a manager that you are able to intentionally manage these people. You can't get away with being a lazy manager. You have to make sure that people have goals and targets and they understand what their remit is and that then you trust them to go and do that in whatever way they see fit. It's this transition to a really output-based culture that, if you don't get right, it's really hard to ensure the kind of survival of flexible working in your organisation. So I think that those are two parts of our scoring system that we don't talk about enough and we don't highlight enough, but there's so much weight behind them they kind of underpin all of the other bits.

John Hawker: 35:25

Again, both really good points. I think I'll address both of those separately. In terms of role-modelling, we had a guest on earlier in the season, darren Stewart, who runs a scaling in-sure tech business and they introduced the nine-day fortnight. He found post-implementation that unless he and his other founder actually took that every other Friday off, the team weren't doing it or almost thought they were being hoodwinked to say, yeah well, it's there for you to use, but it's up to you if you want to use it. So he and his founder had to start doing it themselves. And we talk a lot about how you act as a role model for your people and it's so important in flexibility and now they've been doing it just over two years Now. If they continue to not take that every other Friday off, I guarantee that it probably would have fallen apart before now.

John Hawker: 36:22

And on the autonomy, I think autonomy for me when I'm working with clients. I love working with managers that allow people to work with autonomy. There's an argument to say that maybe earlier you are on in your career, maybe you need a bit more support day-to-day than people that are very experienced at what it is they do. But the best companies I work for allow their people to work with autonomy. Whether you're in the office or not, just because you can be seen by your manager, doesn't make a huge amount of difference, but I think that's an underrated element that people don't usually consider until they've had the experience of three to six months working with a business and then you can say, oh, I'm left to my own devices and it works well. But actually being able to filter or assess a company based on that, I think, is really important. So that's great. How did you come to assign role modeling? Just because we're focusing on those two examples? But how did you assign role modeling and autonomy as two areas to focus on?

Beth Carter: 37:25

Yeah, so the flexification process and the flex score has been something that we have iterated over a few years and continue to iterate. It's a really core part of our offering and the more data we collect, the more accurate we can make it. So we're always looking at patterns in the data and talking to. We talk to our clients all the time and is this working? Is this not working? We get feedback from candidates who have gone and worked at companies and will say I really loved finding my job on Flexor. Or they'll talk to us about their experiences and all of this data. Those are more like flags, actually, I'd say, rather than data. If someone says, oh, this part of the company was really interesting and I love this, then we're able to take that as someone waving a little flag of look over here and then dig into the data.

Beth Carter: 38:24

We have so much data in the back end of Flexor. We really do, both from what candidates are interested in and what they want and also what companies are offering and the gaps between the two, and every time we notice a new pattern or trend we'll think about okay, do we want to change the weighting of the importance of these different categories? What would that look like? If we did, does that make it a truer representation of what it's like to work at the business? And I think that that is the core part for us and that's where role modeling and autonomy came from, because we're getting this data that actually location now is great, sure, but it's very kind of black and white.

Beth Carter: 39:09

What I really want to understand is how it feels to work at a business. We get a lot of that from candidates and that's our way to try and quantify that. But I think that the the aim that we have always, with Not just the flex score but the profiles and the way that we present information about the companies, is trust. And when I'm looking at Growth experiments, right at the end of the day, my job is to grow flexor right to help flex a grow as a business, as is everybody's job in a startup, by the way. But, that said, the thing that I will protect, and all of us at flexor will protect at all costs, is the trust that we have built with Individuals in the world who trust us and value our opinion on what makes a company flexible, and whether an individual company is or isn't flexible. If we damage that, we destroy our entire business. It's so core to what we do yeah.

John Hawker: 40:11

I mean, it's reputation of suicide, isn't it? I guess you? You need to make sure and this is why you're you're Putting the businesses that want to feature on the platform through such a stringent verification process. You have to do it because, yeah, the minute people start going to your platform, thinking well, I've heard from so-and-so that they join that business and actually reality was nowhere near the picture that was painted. How do you, or do you so? You say that businesses have to go through an annual review to get re-verified post someone joining a company through visiting the site on all their profile on the platform? Do you have you got any outreach to the candidate once they've started working, before that 12 month process? Beth?

Beth Carter: 40:58

Not proactively, because we're, if you, if you think back to the hiring funnel, we're at that top stage of employer branding. So some companies that are on flexor do create, do connect their applicant tracking systems To us and we can sort of see how things flow through. But a lot of them don't. A lot of them use us as a kind of Careers page add-on, right. So it depends on how someone's using it. So when we have the information of has somebody gone and joined it, joined a company, directly from us, our channels are always open. People can come and reach out to us and, again, because we've built so much trust with Candidates, they are very chatty. You know we get, we get people coming and speaking to us all the time about, you know, mostly, thankfully, it's positive stuff. But we would take it quite seriously. Yeah, if somebody came to us and said I applied for a job at X company and I got there and they'd lied about this, this and this on their flexor profile, or then then then we would take that very seriously.

Beth Carter: 42:03

But I think that the reality is is that flexible working is a spectrum and it's changing all the time, and so what we, what we really encourage Our companies to do so. The HR teams and people teams managing their profiles is to keep it updated. So we have places on flexor where you can kind of post up to date, you know, almost like a feed. You can post things about your company, about your culture, and the profile is available for them to edit at all times. They can go in and say, oh, we've just changed this policy or change that policy to keep it really up to date. Because that's where the power Comes from is candidates know what they're getting into and, as an employer, that means that you're finding candidates who are really aligned with your Mission, vision, way of working. You're not going to talk to people who don't, who don't fit that, fit that same mindset.

John Hawker: 42:59

Understood. Yeah, and I think this is where the whole brand Thing comes from, and the way you define or describe flexible working, because you're right, you say spectrum. I say flexible working is completely subjective. Everyone's definition and opinion of what that looks like is is completely different, and I think that's something I've had to Realize.

John Hawker: 43:20

I realized it and then started to get very frustrated with businesses that would just list flexible working in their adverts without being able to define it, which is exactly why flexor of and Gain this position in the market you have, because you're you're forcing companies to be able to, okay, describe it, define it will let you know where that sits. But but the great thing about the platform and and something that I was going to ask about how you Come up with the filters for it, because I guess it's evolving the way we're working, I'm sure more filters will come up as as more things become apparent that companies are putting in place, but you can really filter down pretty much Currently the way the world works now, any which way that you would like to work now is a filter on your platform, which I think is great. I Guess does that come from assessing and analyzing data points, seeing what companies offer and then just putting those search filters from there.

Beth Carter: 44:14

Yeah, exactly that. So we have both the clickable filters that you can go in and you click dog friends, the office, and you'll see all the companies that offer that. We also have a free text search, so we should we keep an eye on okay. So if, if, for example, we're seeing, if we see somewhere that's like free Christmas, advent calendars and that's coming up in the search results every day and it's all people want, there's some sort of like trend.

John Hawker: 44:43

Understood calendars.

Beth Carter: 44:46

We would then be able to add that as a clickable filter, and and companies are going to be able to add that as a tag to their page.

Beth Carter: 44:54

So some of the filters emerge that way.

Beth Carter: 44:57

They come from Very popular search filter search text and some of them come from all of the research and time that our team spends in this world of you know, following trends and understanding the world of flexible work, and you know, attending conferences and panels and Reading the latest research on flexible working and we'll notice a trend and add that as a filter and see what happens.

Beth Carter: 45:26

Right, because we'll also take one off if no one uses it, because no point having it clogging up the screen if it doesn't become popular. But that's really where that comes from. And and, like you said, we're constantly Trying to make sure that people are able to find what they're looking for, and one of the things that that we find candidates really love is we have a quiz, a candidate quiz, so they can go in and select different things about their lifestyle, and at the end of that we say, okay, well, based on the information that you've told us, these are the filters that we recommend for you, and here are all of the companies that Match that working environment that that we think, from the information you've given us, you will thrive in. And so that's another really interesting way that candidates can discover companies.

John Hawker: 46:14

That's. That's really good to know, and maybe what we do on the back of this. When the episode is in the episode description, we'll put into some individual links to those pages on the website and the platform so people can find those. And, in a slightly more simple way, although the interface on the website is very easy to use, I should say from a user perspective, what I've loved about flexor and seeing you guys grow and the content you're putting out there.

John Hawker: 46:39

And I'm gonna completely bodge up the title of the talk, the conversation you had the other day, but it was about periods and and about and the reason I bring this up. A couple of weeks ago I spoke to a hormonal cycle optimization coach that was talking about the differences and, during the course of a month, for, for, for people that have periods, and how that affects productivity, activity, well-being and a whole host of factors. And Maybe if we said two years ago there's no way those conversations would be as common as they are now and there's, there's probably definitely no way that a what is essentially a Platform where people are showcasing their businesses, they're not going to be talking about it same as menopause policies. No one was going to be talking about menopause support policies or anything around the hormonal cycle optimization as a as a Flexible benefit beforehand. So we're now in a much more open I don't know conversations are just much more easy to access now.

John Hawker: 47:41

I think. So what the content you're putting out there really shows that you give a shit, and that's nice to see, especially around what Molly does with employee value proposition, which is a huge. It really resonates with me because of the consulting work I do around the EVP as well, but it's, it's been brilliant to see. So the trust that you're building as a brand. I think a lot of that comes from the fact that you are showing yourselves as real, credible voices in in this whole space.

Beth Carter: 48:06

It's, but it was really interesting that, yeah, the webinar we did this week on Creating a period conscious workplace we called it that was the title that I couldn't think of.

John Hawker: 48:16

Sorry, beth.

Beth Carter: 48:19

It was amazing to me that actually, you know there was such a great response on LinkedIn when we were talking about the webinar and promoting it, and you know we had more than a hundred people coming live and to stick with us for a whole hour to listen to a webinar, which is huge in terms of webinar numbers.

Beth Carter: 48:40

And and it was really Interesting to me that you know the conversation in the comments, you know in the chat while we were doing it, and a Lot of people you know really wanting this to be more of a topic and we also spoke I did a webinar a few weeks ago with a lever who specialised in kind of mental health at work, and something that I Think about a lot when we talk about these topics is the the change to the role of working in HR and people teams in the last few years. You know we've gone from as a as a culture, thinking of HR people as I mean you've seen the office right, you got Toby in the corner of the office who everyone's like whoa HR. You know that that's the stereotype five years ago, ten years ago, of HR people is they're there to hire and fire and Tell you that you're not getting a pay rise and that's kind of the remit. Right, that was a real. I'm being deliberately Over the top, but that that was very much.

Beth Carter: 49:45

I know it's good status of HR and a business? Yeah, five, ten years ago, and yet now this group of people are taking on an increasingly strategic role in the growth of a company and in the success of a company. Ultimately, a company, at the end of the day, is a bunch of people doing a school project. Right, it's just a bunch of people trying to get stuff done. How you work together and whether you've got the right people on the team Makes all of the difference. It is probably the biggest thing that's going to change the direction of your company. This is what HR and people teams are doing. Not only that and they are finally starting to be recognized for the work they do in shaping the street to the strategic direction of a company but they've also been given all of these additional responsibilities that that are new and have taken them on like absolute champions.

Beth Carter: 50:43

You know you've got people being trained as mental health first-aiders.

Beth Carter: 50:47

We've got people being trained on how to handle sexual assault.

Beth Carter: 50:52

We've got people being trained on grief, on LGBTQA plus issues.

Beth Carter: 50:58

We've got, you know, so many things that For a long time, were considered not appropriate to talk about at work that you wouldn't bring up a work and that were kind of shoved in the corner, and I really think that that a lot of the conversation about the future of work and how work has changed focuses around Productivity and the benefits to the employees in terms of work life balance, and the conversation we're really not having Is around the massive you know leap of faith that people teams and HR teams have had to take into this very unfamiliar world where there's a lot that you can get wrong Right.

Beth Carter: 51:40

There's a lot of nervousness about saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing and wanting to make sure everyone is feeling safe and secure and appreciated, and they're doing this with with very little recognition and very little guidance, and that's something that I always think about when we do some of these more unconventional topics periods in the workplace mental health at work. I leave a did a great one recently about grief at work and that always oversubscribed, and I think that it's because people who work in HR and people teams are trying to navigate this new responsibility that they have. I just don't think they're being given enough credit for it.

John Hawker: 52:26

Hmm, I think the role and this might just be my experience and probably to a degree that the level of insight I was given to what HR teams and the and the incredibly integral role they play within organizations really happened during the pandemic, during lockdown and actually the next level of responsibility and remit now HR teams are being given, seems to have kicked on from that point, and maybe that's just me not having enough exposure.

John Hawker: 52:56

But I was having conversations with very honest and very transparent chats with heads of people that were, you know, it was almost like counseling and just to have a sounding board to say, john, I've not done this, but they, they care, which is why they're the right people to be. For the most part, people in those heads of people role care and they've got empathy and they're kind and compassionate people. They want to make sure that people are supported in the right way. But I really saw a step up during the pandemic. The entire world was going through a period that we had never experienced and no one really knew how to do it. We're all finding our way in the dark at the same time. Sometimes just admitting that, I think is quite powerful and as long as the intention is right. You can be forgiven sometimes for getting the terminology wrong or saying something that might not be in line with with the most current way of thinking, as long as the intention is in the right place.

Beth Carter: 53:49

I think that's quite important to identify, but you can put your phone as long as you're trying to learn and correct yourself when you get it wrong right. But I think that this is why this is why the, the webinars and the workshops we do are so popular, because it's a community of other people experiencing this massive shift in responsibility and remit, who you can talk to and speak to, and you know some of the most popular stuff we produce. We produce guides and short videos and kind of templates and worksheets and all of these things that that we send out to our clients and to and also you can download them just for free. You don't have to be a flexor client. They're really popular, hundreds of people trying to get hold of these and and it really it's clear that people want more information and want things you know podcast like this and your videos, like the ones we do the people are really hungry for this information.

John Hawker: 54:51

Yeah, completely agree. Okay, so someone if a job seeker or someone looking for a new role has decided that flexibility is a key part of what they need, and they come across flexors website. All the search feels pretty much, as I said, from a user interface perspective, the usability of the site is really strong. If they find a company that is offering them, or they do the quiz and they find a range of companies that they would like to introduce themselves to. What's that process look like? Can you give us a bit of a look behind the scenes? So, okay, I find ex company. They offer I've got to say, dog friendly office it sounds like I'm being glib, but I'm not, because that is a big deal for a lot of people post pandemic as well A dog friendly office. They want to reach out to that business. What does, what is the process from there? How does, how does flexor facilitate the introduction to the client?

Beth Carter: 55:41

Yes, it is this two ways. So I would say about half of the companies that we have on the platform are actively hiring at any one time. Right, only about 50% of them. The rest of their building their employer brand, representing themselves. Well, they're still live on the platform, but they might not have any open roles. So the first one is simple right, you're on the, you're on the profile, you're looking at them on flexor and you're like this company looks amazing, click on it, you go to their systems, you apply very easy.

Beth Carter: 56:17

Yeah however, another real shift that we've seen in the candidate market is this rise in passive searching. So I think we're much more accepting now that people don't stay in jobs for life. Right that you know, most people will move to multiple different, different companies and through different careers, and I think a lot of us have a kind of dream list. You know, there might be some companies that you really admire, that you really think are great, that you would love to work out one day, and it's the same same on flexor. So you go on and you, you know you find a company that you think God, these are absolutely amazing. This is exactly the kind of place that I'd like to work. They're not hiring right now, or even if they are hiring, I don't want to leave my current role in this immediate moment.

Beth Carter: 57:08

So what you can do is you can save the company, not the job, the company to your flexor profile, and what that means is that whenever they do hire, you will get an email telling you. So you can save one company. You can save 50 companies. You'll obviously get more emails if you say 50 companies and if you save one, it really is up to the, to the candidate, to the user. So I might go on and create my dream list of 12 companies and that might mean that once a month, once every six weeks, I'll get an email that's like oh, by the way, multi versus now hiring, or Hul and now hiring to a hiring, whoever it is that you've kind of got your eye on, and then I can go through and look and make that application.

Beth Carter: 57:57

So that that's something that I really really recommend to to users, because you never to candidates you never know when something might really catch your eye and it's quite nice, I think, to have you know, always have a kind of an eye on the world and what's going on, and even if it's just to see what else is out there, you know you might not be planning on moving but to be able to go, oh, you know they've got the salary on that and they're getting paid. That's my role and it's more than I'm getting paid. Maybe I can use that to help me get a pay rise. Or oh, that company offers a four day work week. Now that's really interesting to me. Maybe I can campaign for that here. They're very similar type of business to us, so there's kind of lots of ways that you that you could use that.

John Hawker: 58:46

Well as a recruiter. But you're probably not surprised to hear that I condone the message that you don't necessarily have to actively be looking to start Putting the feelers out and just seeing what else is out there, because often some of the conversations I have with with candidates they were never looking in the first place and you present something compelling enough. All of a sudden that mindset shifts and they're making decisions that just so happen to be the best they've made from a career perspective.

Beth Carter: 59:12

I mean that's why I moved to Flex though. Right Right conversation at the right time.

John Hawker: 59:16

Yeah, exactly Okay. So I've got two questions left. One is from me and the other one is going to be the closing tradition, which I'll cover in a second. It's going to put you on a spot slightly, beth, potentially, but what would you say to any company that is reluctant to go through that flexification process and be enjoying the flexor platform?

Beth Carter: 59:39

Yeah. So the biggest, the biggest resistance that that we hear from from people were speaking to, is that they don't think they're ready, and I think that this kind of comes back to people being worried about getting things wrong. But what's amazing about flexible working is, you know, it is a spectrum like I love. Personally, I love going into the office. I go into our office three days a week. Right, we don't have to, that's not part of my contract, but I just really enjoy it. So a hybrid company that had three days a week in the office would not put me off as a candidate at all, and there are lots of people for whom hybrid is is what they want. So we'll get companies who say we're not ready because you know there's so much more we want to do. Or you know we're not ready because we're still finalizing the policies, or we're about to do a six month EVP project, whatever it is that they think they have to wait for to be able to be ready to get flexified.

Beth Carter: 1:00:41

But actually, the amazing thing about the way that our process works is that it gives you really good data across the time. Right, you know, if you, if you start tomorrow and say OK, as we are now. What kind of a score do we get? What kind of responses do we get from our employees? Because you get all of that data and feedback as a client in a year's time. How has that changed with all of this work that we're doing? You know, and I'd argue that actually, before you do a big project is probably a great time to start getting benchmarked, because even if all you do is go through the first part of the quiz, which anyone can do for free online, even if you just do that and get your kind of stage one unverified score, that's still a great benchmark for you to then come and retest against in six months, in a year's time. Good point, that's a really helpful piece of data and that that, I think, is a real fear that I hear from companies and the other side of it is companies who are a bit worried about having to the same thing, about it being a spectrum again, having to implement every single thing in flexible working right and like. We can't afford to do that and this isn't going to work because of the type of business we are.

Beth Carter: 1:02:00

But you don't have to go from five days in the office, you know, and this is more about your internal flexibility rather than the flexor platform. But you don't have to go from nothing to everything. You can say you know what, july and August, we're going to do summer hours and we're going to test it. And if it doesn't work, for whatever reason and believe me, your employees will make sure that it does work because they want to keep for summer hours but if it doesn't work, you can say this is how we were going to measure it. This was the data we collected. It didn't hit the thresholds we set out. We're not going to do it again. Great, same with a four day work week. Same with core hours or flexi time. You can really experiment with these things without having to change all of your corporate documents to reflect that. You can do it as a trial basis, and it's just becoming increasingly important, and I'd say we're at the point now that doing nothing is the riskiest thing.

John Hawker: 1:03:06

A really good point. I think I've learned in my own working life now to live by the adage that sometimes done is better than perfect. Getting something across the line and yeah, it's experimentation. This is all the sort of biggest people experiment that we've seen. That's happened for a good number of decades now. So we're all trying to find the right fit and the right balance. But using flexors from a benchmarking perspective is a really good way of utilizing the power of the platform. And you're completely right, from the EVP consulting work I do, if you're starting something like this, give yourself a score where you are now and assess it in 12 months and just see if the work you're doing is actually getting the return on the investment that you're putting in. It's great. So really what you're saying if there is a company reluctant to get on the flexor platform, they shouldn't be. It seems like there's a stage that anyone can get involved.

Beth Carter: 1:04:05

Exactly. And even if you go on and you don't hit our threshold right, say you are one of those 35% of companies that we say sorry, but you're not flexible enough to be on the platform, that doesn't mean that's the end of the road. We get a lot of companies who are, you know, kind of if you're scoring the zero, maybe it's a long way off for you. But we get companies who are sort of close but not quite there, and they'll reach out to us and ask for advice and we're able to say like this is why you didn't meet the threshold, because we've compared what you offer to what candidates want and you don't hit the mark. But if you did these three things, then maybe you would have a go at that and come back and see. And even in those situations it gives you a bit of an audit, a bit of a kind of areas to improve on which can be really helpful for teams.

John Hawker: 1:05:03

Yeah, definitely, and I think one point I'll make before I get onto the final question, beth, and it's something that a lot of people at flexor I think put on their content is flexibility doesn't equal remote working, and I think that's what a lot of businesses that are either reluctant or, as you say, too early on in the process of putting those remote policies in place they put off maybe joining a platform like flexor or flexor for that reason. But flexibility doesn't mean remote working. What you could be doing as a business is just taking the time to define what your way of working looks like, and it may resonate with someone, because it is a spectrum, it is subjective. So go through the process with flexor, give yourself a starting point, and you may actually be surprised that what you're offering is far more flexible than you perceive it to be. So there's nothing to lose by doing it.

Beth Carter: 1:05:55

That's the more usual way around. People are more flexible than they think they are.

John Hawker: 1:06:00

Yeah, okay, beth. Thank you so much your time. I do have a closing tradition. I feel I feel really sorry for you that if you haven't listened to an episode, because now what you've got is the closing tradition. Now, on a fairly famous podcast, there's a question that's asked to the current guest that's been left by the previous guest. On my podcast, you get a question that's been left by my mom. Now I never listen to. So my mom just just to give you some context has played quite a big part in my marketing for global tech collective over the years. Don't ask me why she was just around, I think. And what I've decided to do is mom asks a question. I give her a rough description of who my guest is. She leaves me a voice note. I don't listen to it, I just play it down the phone and hope that it's at least very vaguely relevant to the discussion we've had. So I've got to play it. Hi, beth, do you think there's such a thing as employees giving too much flexibility? Thanks very much. Did you hear that?

Beth Carter: 1:07:01

I did.

John Hawker: 1:07:02

First off, okay. So so mama's asked do you think this is such a thing as too much flexibility for employees?

Beth Carter: 1:07:09

I think that there is the wrong match of what an employee might think they want and how it actually materializes. So I think that when you would start to think that there is too much flexibility is when the jobs that we're all here to do in the business start to be not done. And if you look at the productivity studies that have been done around flexible working, ultimately flexible working has been proven to be equally productive to being in the office full time. The studies where flexible working was shown to be less productive it was because of things like they didn't have the right equipment at home and so they were unable to actually get their work done, or it was people who needed more training and it was hard for them to get enough time with their managers or with their peers to be trained up quick enough. In those kind of instances, there's I wouldn't I wouldn't frame it as too much flexibility, but the working environment that you've set up isn't working for you, and this is why it's so important in a flexible company to define your output based culture and really work on. You know what are the targets, what are the metrics, what are the key milestones we want to achieve this year. If that's happening, amazing. The other really important thing is we say there's a lot of flexor, which is you can't have flexibility without boundaries, and I actually think it's harder to manage a flexible team and, in some ways, harder to be a flexible employee than it is to know.

Beth Carter: 1:08:56

I know where I need to be at all times and this is things like so we have core hours at flexor, so everyone needs to be around between 11 and four. Outside of that, if you want to, you know, do your other hours at 3am, go for it, we don't care. But between 11 and four, that's the amount of time that we know we need to be all together and or available to each other if we're needed. That requires time management skills. It requires being strict with your self discipline and your own personal boundaries to know that you're going to stick to that, and it requires your managers to trust you on that. That. That's probably more the way I would take that question is flexibility needs to have some boundaries. I have never seen it work when it is just a complete free for all. There has to be some cohesion and some boundaries for people to know where the limits are.

John Hawker: 1:09:55

It's a really good point and I'd argue for anyone that has ever found their cell themselves in a position where they are in an environment where there's too much flexibility, there's always something you could probably do to put those boundaries in yourself, to work in a slightly more regimented or structured way.

John Hawker: 1:10:11

But thank you for that question. Mum, that's probably been one of the more serious ones she's posed to guests at the end of the episode. So, beth, I'm going to let you get on. Thank you so much for investing that time and having this conversation with me. Just a sort of parting shot and a call for action for any business working in any way, shape or form and offering environments for people to get on the Flexa platform and give yourself a start, even a benchmarking score to see how flexible you are deemed to be by the team at Flexa, and just start your journey, because I can echo the sentiment that Beth said it's the businesses that aren't doing anything or aren't willing to showcase their flexibility that are really going to struggle both to attract people but also retain them when you've got so many other organizations doing so much more work in this space. So, beth, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

Beth Carter: 1:11:03

My pleasure. It was nice to be here.

John Hawker: 1:11:05

Thank you. Thanks for listening to Jobs Worth. If you enjoyed this episode, please feel free to like and subscribe. You can stay connected by following me on LinkedIn for more insights on the world of work behind the scenes, content and updates on upcoming episodes. We're already thinking about guests for season two, so if there is a particular topic you'd like us to discuss, then please send in your suggestions to hello at jobsworthcom.