My name's Melanie Marshall.

I've been a Director at MKDC for 25 years now.

My own journey along the way with motherhood and

being a mother that works outside the home certainly

has made me a lot more sympathetic to and

understanding of the position that some of our

key people have been in in terms of making that happen

and enabling it.

It's so important to encourage flexibility for

working mothers, and that was kind of a good driver

for me to come back to work and I'm at work.

And when I have needed support to be at home and work,

yeah, no qualms really.

How it benefits the organisation is really

retaining that knowledge and those skills that have

been built up in the time that person's been with us.

The gains from an economic and a morale point of view

are very much there.

In the past I'd been with other firms that maybe that

was said that it was flexible, but it really wasn't,

and culturally it wasn't comfortable to get flexibility.

Whereas here, they just said to me 'Look, if you

can hit all the KPIs of really just getting the

projects done in the way we need them to be done,

then we'll get there how we get there'.

There's a lot of evidence-based research to

show that part time working women are more productive.

You're probably going to get more bang for your buck

with a working mum.

Synergy is a management consulting firm that

specialises in provision of a range of consulting services.

People are brought up, they've watched their parents

go to work 48 weeks a year, 37.5 hours a week.

They've come through other organisations where that

was what was expected.

It was absolutely a key thing to remove that stigma

of part time or flexible work.

Part of what we have set up here is that flexible

workplace arrangements are the standard, the norm

for everybody, so whether that be flexibility in hours

or flexibility in the workplace of where and how you work.

That is so appreciated by our staff.

They don't feel like second class citizens because

they're a part time worker for example.

They feel just as valued as every other employee,

and hence they want to repay that loyalty

and that faith and trust.

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