EDI Case Study resource 2025
Spotlight on flexibility as a factor
Flexible working arrangements were considered a key enabler by almost all of the interviewees and there are examples of this throughout this toolkit. Flexibility is typically considered with regard to gender but there were a number of examples beyond this. Flexibility contributes in a number of ways to the overall ambition on EDI:
- Sectors with longer standing flexibility in their working arrangements tend to have a naturally larger pool of senior women due to historic choices made by some women around which industries better enable a family friendly approach.
- Flexibility is a strong cultural indicator – the most flexible organisations highlighted that where the flexibility is celebrated rather than tolerated, it is utilised by a wide range of staff at all levels for a wide range of reasons beyond family life. One private school described their first step in changing the culture as being to ‘assume the answer to a flexible working request is yes.’
- Often there appears to be a lower tolerance for flexible arrangements in the early career grades, where women and employees of more ethnically diverse backgrounds are overrepresented in healthcare. Evelina London has taken an interesting approach to tackling this, through an Anti-Racism lens.
Evelina London: Tackling racial bias in their flexible working approach
The Evelina Women and Children’s Clinical Group’s cultural change programme exemplifies a forward-thinking approach to fostering inclusivity and equity in the workplace. Their cultural change programme leverages demographic insights to address disparities and drive organisational equity.This allows managers and leaders to identify proactive actions they can take to reduce disparities, and also to note the collective impact of decisions they make and the associated characteristics of those groups. As it stands 71% of their staff are from the global majority at bands 2-4 but this reduced to 60% at the more senior bands 5-8, and diminishes even further when examining bands 8b to very senior managers.
As part of the cultural change programme they examined the uptake of flexible working, the number of formal requests approved and those rejected. This was undertaken through an anti-racism lens to understand whether there was any racial bias in their flexible working approach. The programme commenced with a 1 minute video explainer which sought to break the assumptions that flexible working was simply about working from home. The video was socialized internally and externally including on LinkedIn and gained a huge reach. The video explored the meaning of flexible working, the different types of flexible working, the assumptions and barriers and the plan to survey the entire workforce. The methodology for conducting the data analysis included combined data from the formal flexible working requests, ‘informal’ flexible working (captured via a survey), and focus groups (virtual and in person). The data very clearly showed disparities for black and Asian staff, where their flexible working requests were more likely to be declined in some services. After a significant push on building awareness and understanding, and challenging assumptions, the average chance of Asian staff having their flexible working request approved increased from 60% to 86% in under 9 months in one of our directorates.
More specifically, Asian Staff saw the largest increase in the percentage of Flexible Working requests approved, from 59.3% to 85.7%, (+26.4%) and a relative likelihood of Flexible Working being Rejected going from 2.07 to 1.02. Black staff also saw an increase in the percentage of Flexible Working requests approved, from 63.2% to 72.3% (+9.1%) and a relative likelihood of Flexible Working being Rejected going from 2.03 to 0.98. Through the Flex Evelina programme, they have focused on building technical and cultural awareness that everyone needs a degree of flexibility irrespective of band, role or protected characteristics. More broadly, the cultural change programme has seen an improvement in the number of formal flexible working requests from 32% – 34% up to May 2024. A number of recommendations have been devised with the flex Evelina stakeholders which is due to be published and made available next year. The recommendations are based on the Timewise Arc, and the 6 key areas of focus that support improved flexible working cultures. There is still some way to go to build a culture of encouraging requests, but we have made inroads and addressed issues of inequality and bias as well which has led to a reduction in racial disparities in the approval process.