At Schroders, flexibility is for everyone. But what does this really look like?
Hear how our people around the world are making flexible working a reality in this three minute video. Discover how Marina’s used the opportunity to change her lifestyle with the support of her team. Henrik describes how there’s now ”the option is to strike the balance between work and personal life in a way I haven’t experienced before” and Garth discusses the benefits of the home and office environment for different circumstances:
“The world of working has changed and Schroders is changing with it.” – Emma Holden, Global Head of HR
The pandemic has accelerated changes to our working practices, condensing years of change into a matter of months.
“The way our people have adapted to remote working has highlighted the strength of our culture and the agility of our organisation,” explains Emma.
We’ve long embraced flexibility, and in response to feedback from our people, introduced a new set of principles to propel us into the future of work.
Our industry-leading flexible working charter is central to our inclusion strategy, opening up opportunities for everyone to adopt flexibility.
It’s designed to empower our people to adopt working practices that best meet their needs, those of their team and our clients and wider stakeholders – either externally or internally.
Johanna Kyrklund, our CIO and Global Head of Multi-Asset explains that, “Our flexible working policy is a flexible answer to the question: how do we make the best investment decisions on behalf of our clients?”
Johanna further describes,“Our mission remains clear – to deliver superior investment performance. Understanding that there are many paths to delivering that performance is what has allowed our culture to stand the test of time.”
Emma explains, “We believe in giving you the power to decide what you want to do as an individual, considering what’s right for your team, but most importantly what’s right for our clients. And where those overlap is actually where we can enable flexible working and everybody wins from that outcome.”
By its very nature, our flexible working approach is flexible. This means extending it beyond prescriptive phrases, such as “you are entitled to work from home x days a week”.
Peter Harrison, Chief Executive Officer, said: “We used to do our work in the office, and we used to go out to meet to build teams and to socialise. Now, we’ll do our work wherever it is most appropriate and we’ll collaborate in the office.”
However, he added: “Our message to employees is they have to be capable of being in the office tomorrow. So it’s not an option for them to go and live on the Isle of Skye.”
It’s designed to empower teams and individuals to navigate working patterns together where they can be at their most productive, and deliver for our clients.
It doesn’t mean a complete divorce from the office – face-to-face interaction remains a key aspect of our culture which we believe is a vital ingredient in the collaboration, innovation and productivity that we value so highly.
Topics