Insurance giant Zurich is giving its 4,500-strong UK workforce more flexibility to decide where they can work.
According to the insurer, this new policy is based on four “personas”: the office-based employee, the contractual homeworker, the “on the road” employee, and the “fully flexible” employee. Since Zurich operates from six major sites across the UK, employees can choose which persona best fits “the day they have ahead of them” and work at any of these sites, or just work from home.
“The world has changed this year and we can’t ignore it,” said Steve Collinson, human resources director at Zurich UK. “We’ve all had a chance to re-evaluate our lives and reassess our priorities. Just by giving employees the chance to work from home one day a week for example, we would save them thousands of hours commuting that could be spent exercising, meditating, having breakfast with their families or simply catching up on home admin. This is valuable time that we’re effectively giving back to people.”
Before the COVID-19 lockdown, the insurer already had some form of flexible working options in place – a benefit enjoyed by three out of four of its employees. However, as businesses reopen their physical offices, Zurich carried out a “lockdown learnings” study across its UK workforce to find out what they really want when they return to work.
The study revealed two out of three employees (59%) would like to work from home for more than half of the week when the insurer transitions back to its offices – of these, a third only want to come into the office one day a week. This is six times the amount of people that worked in this way in the first quarter of the year.
“While there’s no silver bullet for how and where people work, we know they want the flexibility to work the hours that suit,” said Collinson. “But we’ve found the location is also a huge factor. Our research has shown us that not everyone wants to work from home five days a week forever. In effect, they want the best of all worlds, which is perfectly fine. As an early adopter of flexible working, we’re in a very different space to the majority of businesses. Our lockdown transition was seamless, so allowing people further freedom to revisit where they want to work is a natural next step in our journey.”
