Lucy Bolton has an arrangement with her employer, Microsoft, that many working mothers would envy. Whenever she has to tend to her charges, she can zip off to sort them out and work the rest of the day from home.

Bolton, the head of UK employee relations for the technology giant, is not a mum, however. She is a polo player. “I don’t have children, but I do have ponies,” she says. Four, to be precise, and all need exercising. Her teammates in the De Nada team, based at Ascot Park Polo Club in Chobham, Surrey, are amazed, she says, at how accommodating her employer is.

Bolton goes into the office, either in London or at Microsoft’s Reading campus, on Mondays and Thursdays, but otherwise can be flexible about when and where she works (“where” includes at the polo club, using her laptop and phone). Bolton is not the only one who works like this. One of her team is a Pilates instructor who takes classes in the afternoons.

But what about employees of companies where being in the office is important, such as an investment bank? Can they work flexibly too?

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Background

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• The spy who came in over the gender divide

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• Avoid a waste of talent

Background

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• More than one of the boys

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At J.P. Morgan they can, or at least Kirstin Eriksson can. An executive director in the European equity sales business, Eriksson works Monday to Thursday in the City. “I have a longer weekend. I share a cottage in the country, go horse riding,” she says. “The original thought for doing this was to get more involved in charity work, so I am doing a project based on fair trade principles at the moment. I’m also looking to get involved with youth work at a local church.”

Eriksson’s reasons for starting to work flexibly were partly to do with being burnt out after 15 years working in London. “I said to myself that something has to change – either I quit the City or I find a flexible solution,” she says. “I was lucky to have a boss who was supportive and flexible and he was really explicit about valuing me as a member of his team. So we found a solution together.”

She admits that working in this way is not the norm in her industry, and she has worked hard to make the system work for her. “My clients and my job are my priority. If my clients suffered I wouldn’t have done it,” she says. “I can’t expect my company to be flexible and not me.”

Because staff need to be available for clients, an investment bank has to treat flexible working requests on a case-by-case basis. But at Google, whose business model revolves around innovation, you could work in a sauna if this helped you to think and you got your job done.

At least, that is the impression given by Rachel Mooney, the head of benefits and people policies for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at the search engine. Although she works in a fairly conventional way herself (office-based in Dublin, regular hours), she did take three months off this summer to go travelling with her husband and two young children.

“Everything around our Googlers [employees] is based on trust,” she says. “The approach is that we trust that everyone is going to do the right thing and make good decisions on an individual and team level.”

In practice this means employees meeting in groups to discuss more efficient ways of working. It also plays out in little acts of kindness: Google will arrange catering at home for new parents for the first couple of weeks after their babies’ births.

Asked whether allowing Googlers to work in this way is a strategy to increase productivity or an act of paternalism, Mooney says: “It’s not an either/or; it’s the roots of who we are. Google produces innovative concepts often in markets where they haven’t even thought they needed them. To produce that innovation you need an environment where people can take risks – it drives the engine.”

Hewlett Packard, on the other hand, has more hard-nosed business reasons for offering flexible working. “Giving HP employees the freedom to work with more flexibility is key to increasing productivity, which is ultimately good for business,” says Kate Rider, the HR director for the UK and Ireland.

The company has commissioned research that found that employees who are offered the choice of flexible working are less stressed, Rider says. So everyone – company and employee – is a winner.

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