How Is The Flexa100 Calculated?
25th Jan 2023
The most flexible companies in 2023
We've announced the most flexible companies for 2023, but how do we know they are truly flexible? We explain all here.Our Flexa100 ranking is the first list of its kind. We benchmark our companies using hundreds of thousands of data points that evaluate factors such as working from home, remote working, flexible hours, dog-friendly offices, flexible benefits, and other key ways of working and cultural indicators.
Flexa calculations - how do we do that?
The FlexScore represents a company’s flexible working environment. It consists of a 2-step verification process first determining the flexible working options a company provides and then verifying this by surveying a statistically significant portion of its employees, asking them to rate their satisfaction against six indicators.
Our two Flexification steps are as follows:1# Employer FlexScore:
This first stage benchmarks companies against the market based on key factors such as location, hours, benefits, and ease of access to flexible working. From compiling millions of data points from companies across the world to understand exactly what the average offering is, and what a truly flexible company is.
Every company on Flexa has to score over 50% (above average) to proceed to the second step.2# Employee FlexScore:
The second stage of the process is employee surveys - current employees are best placed to understand how truly flexible a company.
To compare different working environments fairly, perception-based questions are asked, such as, “When it comes to the flexible working culture at your company, how well do you think your senior leadership team role model and support flexible working?”.
The questions are based on six core elements: location, hours, benefits, senior leadership, trust & autonomy, and work-life balance.
A minimum number of employees must partake in the quiz to ensure that statistics are relative. The sample size depends on the size of the company; this means that our users can be assured that our FlexScore is a reliable work-life indicator at any Flexified company hosted on Flexa.
It's simple and quick, with each survey that takes around 1 minute to complete.What next?
Flexibility means something different to everyone. That's why our unique flexification tool measures employee satisfaction against the company's level of flexibility. This allows us to benchmark and compare various companies offering different kinds of flexibility to suit every need and compile our Flexa100 list.FAQ's
Why are there four scores on some cards and six on others?
As of October 2022, we changed how employees verify their company’s flexible working environment to reflect their satisfaction with what the company provides. We did this to better compare different types of flexible work environments - since no one way of flexible working is better than another, different environments suit different people depending on preferences and lifestyles.
Implementing these changes has allowed us to provide better insights for candidates to see whether they'd like to work at a prospective employer. The employee surveys a statistically significant portion of employees to understand how satisfied they are with the working environment on offer - plus it's completely anonymous.
We have collected the new and improved scoring methods for 20% of our employers and counting; however, this leaves most of our Flexified companies on the old scoring. For the 2023 Flexa100 awards, we wanted to showcase our new and improved scoring to demonstrate how much value it can add for candidates and companies alike - candidates have verified information on what it’s like to work for a company. Employers can build a pipeline of candidates already keen to work for them. To do that across the board, we used the old employee verification survey answers to approximate satisfaction scores for four of the six areas. These are:
- Location
- Hours
- Work-life balance
- Role-modelling
While this is not a perfect method, it allows us to get closer to our mission of bringing transparency to the global hiring market. It does not change the scoring or ranking of our Flexa100 list. Rank is based on the overall employee FlexScore, which is consistent throughout the lists.
What do the scoring headers mean?
- Location: we asked employees how satisfied they are with the location flexibility provided by their company (e.g. if they worked for a remote first location, how happy were they with how that works).
- Hours: we asked employees how satisfied they are with the flexibility around when they work (e.g. if the company offers core hours of 11-3; how happy were they with working that way).
- Benefits: we asked employees how satisfied they were with the benefits supplied by the company (i.e. do they wish there were more benefits available).
- Role-modelling: we asked employees if they felt satisfied with how senior managers and leadership role-modelled flexible working in the company (e.g. they all do it, it’s just part of the culture versus it would be awkward to ask to work flexibly).
- Work-life balance: we asked employees whether they felt they had the opportunity to strike a good balance between work and life at their company (e.g. work fits perfectly around life versus they feel burnt out all the time).
- Autonomy: we asked employees to tell us whether they felt they had a good level of trust and autonomy in their company (e.g. they feel supported and trusted to get their work done versus being micromanaged all the time).
What are the company sizes for each category?
- Emerging: 20 or less
- Small: 21-100
- Scale-ups: 101 - 299
- Medium: 300 - 1000
- Large: +1000
