Flexa

The Most Flexible Workplaces, As Rated By Flexa

6th Oct 2021

What does it take to make the Top 5 in our coveted most Flexible Companies list?

Since launching our latest Most Flexible Companies list, we’ve been inundated with people asking us: “how did the top companies really stand out?”.

The Flexa elves had been crunching our company and employee survey results for months, figuring out which companies are offering the most awesome flexible working environments. We saw common themes amongst the top performers, such as Locum’s Nest, Prolific and Whereby.

What is workplace flexibility?

Workplace flexibility is a great way for companies to attract and retain top talent. Not only is this a benefit for employees - creating an improved work-life blend, but it's also great for employers as they'll have happier and more productive employees. With that being said, for workplace flexibility to be a success, it stems down to the processes put in place to ensure employees are supported and have the necessary tools, resources and equipment needed to do their job. It's about trust and autonomy!

What makes a flexible workplace?

Let’s look at the main areas where the highest-ranked Flexified partners stood out from the crowd:…

Flexible location working

Our top-ranking partners typically offered a wide range of choice over working location. Our FlexScore appraisal assigns a particularly strong weighting to instances where employees are offered choice in their working environments. Many Flexa users enjoy interacting with colleagues and being in the same physical environment from time to time, so having this option can be just as valuable as the option to work from home.

More often than not, standout performers offered team members the opportunity to work from home or the office (or a co-working space), with the decision being at the discretion of the employee. Some employers went further and also provided budgets for co-working spaces and / or home office equipment.

Flexible working hours 

As we all know, the days of set hours in the knowledge sector and slipping further into the past. Some of our highest-ranked employers actually work “asynchronously”, with no set timetable whatsoever. Other employers asked for a relatively narrow set of “core hours”, wherein all team members needed to be available, but other responsibilities could be performed at any time; side not - this is the approach we take ourselves at Flexa.

The nice extras

Something that we’ve noticed increased massively since we launched Flexa in early 2020 is the popularity of wide-ranging additional flexible benefits. For example, people are often surprised to hear that dog-friendly offices are nearly as popular as flexible hours (who’d have thought that, eh?!). Perhaps, given the enormous increase in puppy ownership during the lockdown, this shouldn’t be so surprising. 

Another interesting benefit that has come to the fore during the Covid era is Work From Anywhere. Off the back of offices being closed globally for extended periods, many employees learned that they can perform their role from home, from a beach, or pretty much from anywhere! There are a number of technical tax considerations to think about when introducing this benefit but, nonetheless, it is a common offering amongst our top-ranked employers.

The FlexScore process takes into account all the wonderful additional flex benefits offered by our employer partners. It’s no surprise, therefore, that our top performers typically offer a range of these benefits. Other popular items on the flex menu include: enhanced parental leave, job sharing, sabbaticals and compressed hours.

Workplace flexibility is about choice

Ultimately, what matters the most to employees is the choice about where and how they work. The companies that came out on top in our Most Flexible Companies list have focused on delivering that choice and allowing their teams to bring their best selves to work every day. 

We couldn’t say it better than Nicholas Andreou, CEO of our Most Flexible Company, Locum’s Nest: “It’s a multi-faceted thing, actually. When a lot of people think about flexible working, they think about working outside of the office, which is a major part of it, but it goes beyond that…. … It’s their place of work…  it’s (also) about providing flexibility to people to carve their own role, to change and adapt it as they grow within the company.”