Mar 15 2021
Article

Fully Flexible Working

Written by Orderly Marketing
Woman working from hotel

We believe in making Orderly an awesome place to work. We operate a fully flexible working policy in terms of location and hours for the majority of our teams. This gives our staff the freedom to visit the office as often or as little as they want, and to manage their work around productivity rather than sitting in the same chair for 8 hours each working day. 

Balance

 

We believe great work can happen at any time. We value working smarter over working longer. The central hub in Derby, UK is only one place our team can choose to work, and the times they work each week or their choice too. We champion a fully flexible working culture of trust, confidence and autonomous responsibility to allows our team to balance their work and life, to excel in all that they do.

The Guidelines

 

 

Sure, all that sounds good in principle, but how does it work in practice? We have a written set of guidelines that we all try to follow to ensure we can make the most out of working this way, and nobody gets left behind.

  • We agree the hub is just one place we can work.
  • We do not need excuses to work smarter.
  • We know trust isn’t about turning up.
  • We believe great work can happen at any time.
  • We value working smarter over working longer.

People at Orderly are not constrained to a single work location. Life happens, and people should be allowed to adventure if they want it. We believe that it should be okay for people to travel the world whilst working. To move away to care for a relative. To get on with their life. The office is open to those that want to travel in (public health guidelines permitting), whenever they want to travel in.

Transport is the biggest source of UK carbon emissions. In the UK, commuting accounts for 18 billion kg of CO​2e – 25 per cent of transport emissions and five per cent of total emissions. We don’t believe that we have any need to ask our team to add to that. When much of our work can be done just as well from home, there is no reason for us to force everyone to come to one location.

By agreeing to this set of principles we aim to remove any ‘face-time’ mentality. Work is judged on its merits and impact, not judged on who started the earliest and left the latest. We’re a busy scale-up and we don’t have time for office politics – we champion a collaborative, open culture where the quality of our output and our impact upon the world should speak for itself.

Recruiting from Further Afield

 

Our policies are allowing us to build an efficient, connected, globally distributed workforce. We have staff who can commute to our central Derby hub in 5 minutes, and other staff across continental Europe. This helps us to seek the best talent and people who support our mission. With everyone working flexibly and the right tools in place for communication – this means that people who cannot travel to our hub can still feel connected to our community. We run regular online activities and ensure video links are active for all meetings.

Management is also encouraged to work away from the hub for at least a portion of their week and to prioritise this time to supporting and connecting with workers who choose not to (or can not) visit the hub.

Is Hybrid-Working Here to Stay?

 

 

Things have changed immensely at Orderly. We have been working fully remotely for a year. We are extremely lucky to be a cloud-based company, with no servers to maintain and no physical hardware to put together.

For us, working remotely has been positive on the whole. Staff have commented they are more productive without their commute and have the ability to work much more flexibly. For that reason we have stated that our teams don’t need to return back to our offices – ever – and we have begun to recruit from across the world.

We realise that many companies aren’t as lucky as us with the ability to work from home, but at Orderly, hybrid-working is here to stay.

We realise that in other businesses there are managers that think their teams best work only happens in the office. We would implore them to really think about what is in the best interests of their staff (as that will most probably be what is in the best interest of their business) and go with that. In much of the SaaS IT sector, the staff mindset has changed, and the senior management mindset must change with it.

Interested in joining our team? Check out our careers page.