WE’VE MADE IT OUR BUSINESS TO WORK FLEXIBLY – HERE’S HOW. MEET SAMANTHA….

Sam became a flexible worker over 15 years ago when she decided to leave her high-pressured London PR career and move to Brighton. Here she started a new adventure as a qualified massage practitioner (later diversifying into infant massage instruction for new parents), running her own business, and balancing this with part-time office Marketing and support roles (for a steady income stream).

As often happens in life, her situation dramatically changed in early 2020 when she returned from maternity leave as a new mother to twins, and found that, due to double-whammy childcare costs, she sadly had to leave her part-time university admin role to ‘stay-at-home Mum’ for a brief period. Thanks to a global pandemic this turned into almost two years!

Now children are in school, Sam has returned to the workplace (delighted to be conversing with adults again!) and is enjoying her new flexible working adventures with Flexibility Matters, and a second local network coordinator role. Both roles make good use of her strong organisation and project management skills – and also allow for some creativity and networking (aspects she enjoyed in her PR days). Sam says that the flexible hours of the roles does involve a bit of juggling (especially throwing school runs into the mix) but that she reaps the benefits when there are additional ‘spanners in the works’ (sick children, medical appointments, school meetings etc) and she just forward-plans her hours at the end of each week to allow for bigger pieces of work etc.

As a true advocate of flexible working, Sam really enjoys having the opportunity to place others in roles that will benefit their lives in the same way, and believes these options should be open to everyone. Sam says: “We no longer work in an age where 9-5 office hours need to be observed – and in fact businesses only gain from having staff members who can work outside of those hours and locations (for business continuity, saving on office costs etc), AND it opens up the candidate base for them. I’ve seen some truly stunning CVs in our database – high achievers who will really reap rewards for whomever hires them – but require some flexibility on hours and location. I encourage businesses to be bold and open themselves up to this. And I encourage jobseekers to demand this for themselves – you’re worth it!”

If you want to find out more about Sam’s journey to becoming a flexibleworker, email her at samantha@flexmatters.co.uk. Or, if you want to talk to any of the team about the flexible roles we have currently or you’re a company looking to recruit flexibly, contact us below.