Developing a flexible work culture by encouraging flexibility in when, how and where employees work: Phoenix Group

Organisation: Phoenix Group

Size: Circa 6,600 employees

Location: London HQ and offices in Birmingham, Edinburgh, Bristol, Telford, Dublin and Frankfurt

Sector: Financial services

Operational context

Phoenix Group is one of the UK’s largest long-term savings and retirement businesses. The company started in 1782 and grew significantly through mergers and acquisitions. It supports 12 million customers to plan for their future with guidance and products through its pensions, savings and life insurance brands. Its mission is to make longer lives better and help people achieve the retirement they want. 

Flexible working is a key part of supporting its own people to also live better, longer lives, and to have a ‘life of possibilities’. Key drivers for developing a more flexible approach to work included: 

• Recruiting and retaining talented people. Phoenix Group believes a flexible approach to work can give it a competitive edge and widen its talent pool. 
• Equality, diversity and inclusion. Flexible working is a key enabler of Phoenix Group’s EDI ambitions, including supporting a multigenerational workforce and working carers, and helping to address pay gaps. It enables people to better balance their work with their personal life and home responsibilities. Furthermore, as Kerry Dewar, HR director, explains: “The more we can reflect our customer base, the better we can perform as an organisation, reaching all parts of society and keeping people in good work for longer.”
• Meeting changing employee expectations after remote working during the pandemic. Enforced remote working during the pandemic, followed by a hybrid working approach, led to HR and other business leaders thinking about what was possible. People felt that a more flexible approach helped them to perform better and they liked being able to find a more individualised balance between work and home, for example to look after their health and wellbeing, to study, to have more time with friends and family, to manage caring responsibilities and to deal with the unpredictable things in life.

Redesigning ways of working

Dewar and her team established ‘Phoenix Flex’, a programme of work aiming to promote and embed a culture of flexibility for the benefit of their customers, the business and their employees. 

An evidence-based approach informed flexible working design 

The Phoenix Flex team took an evidence-based approach to examining what could work in its organisation and which options to trial. Data was gathered from a range of sources, including: 

• a monthly employee engagement survey that contained questions about flexibility and why it matters to people 
• a deep-dive flexible working survey to colleagues
• employee focus groups
• examining what other organisations were doing, including having conversations with other employers
• working with teams to pilot different approaches and scale up those that were most effective.

Developing a three-part framework 

The team developed a three-part organising framework for Phoenix Flex: customer needs, team needs, then individual preferences. When it came to preferences, there are options on where, when, and how individuals can work flexibly. Each part of the framework presents a range of flexible working options to employees, giving people more individual choice over their working arrangements. People can combine different working arrangements, for example, working condensed hours in a hybrid way.

Dewar explains: “Our customers are always at the forefront of our decision-making and we were very clear that we didn’t want to lose that focus. When colleagues have met the needs of customers and the needs of their team, we wanted to empower them to consider their own preferences in a way which encouraged great performance. Most people work well when their lives are in balance and they are able to get a great deal of satisfaction from work. Phoenix Flex is all about enabling that.” 

Where people work 

Working from home guidance was developed to ensure colleagues are set up for success. 

Employees are able to work from outside the UK (in certain countries) for up to 20 days each year. Dewar explains how people were enabled to work from abroad:

"[W]e understood the preference to work abroad if your relative is poorly or you want to work abroad during the summer. We set up a working group to see how we could facilitate working abroad in a safe way. We have continued to review and refine our offering based on colleague feedback to ensure we meet colleague preferences while meeting our regulatory responsibilities. We developed support tools to help colleagues work from abroad successfully including consideration of different times zones, Wi-Fi access and internet speed.” 

When people work 

Phoenix Group employees can work a wide variety of different contractual hours and working patterns. For example, compressed hours, part-time working and job-share arrangements. There’s also informal flexibility through discussion with their manager, for example, to flex the non-working day each week within a compressed hours model. 

Employees have the option to buy more holidays and Phoenix has relaunched its career-break policy. It has attracted interest from people at all stages of their careers, including a member of the executive committee. 

How people work 

Looking at how people work is also an important part of the Phoenix Flex programme. Dewar says “we worked with the IT and property teams to ensure people have the technology and the environments that support both in-office and remote working.” This included: 

• having a ‘neighbourhood’ team area, where teams can be together in the office 
• having different areas for different purposes, including pods, desks, quiet spaces and open spaces 
• meeting rooms being tech-enabled with video screens 
• using surface devices to work in a hybrid way and to dial into calls 
• ensuring the design of the new office in Birmingham supports a flexible working culture 
• senior leaders utilising the office in the same way as everyone else, as opposed to having their own area – they sit with their teams or utilise the different collaborative areas of the office.

Implementing Phoenix Flex 

Phoenix Group worked with Timewise to inform the implementation of Phoenix Flex in 2023. Timewise reviewed current policy and practice, spoke to leaders and employees to understand sentiment and need, and provided recommendations to inform the programme. It also gave specific advice on encouraging more part-time workers which led Phoenix to take the position of advertising all vacancies as being suitable for part-time work. Together, Phoenix and Timewise have created a podcast series that builds understanding of and celebrates part-time working. 

Governance 

An internal steering group headed up by Dewar was established. A programme lead was hired on a fixed-term contract to kickstart the programme. 

Embedding a flexible culture 

Flexible working needed to be rooted in the culture as the expected and encouraged way of working. Dewar explains:

“It’s now about thinking ‘why would we not?’… Tell us how you want to work and we’ll try and support it as long as customer needs and team needs are being met. And if we can’t, we’ll think of other ways we could support you.” 

All job roles are now advertised as flexible. In addition, people are asked to think about how they work most effectively (eg which tasks are suited to different work locations, such as collaborative work in an office, and focused, solo work at home). 

Trial new ways of working 

Phoenix Group asked for volunteer teams to try out the new working models and give feedback. The impact on key people and service level metrics was monitored with colleagues reporting they were much more productive due to the approach to flexible working. 

Developing and supporting leaders and managers 

Some leaders understood the need to adopt more flexible ways of working, but others were asking when people would be back in to the office. Development sessions were designed to engage leaders and managers with the organisational cultural shift and support them to manage flexible teams. These included: 

• briefings on the new ways of working through ‘all-leader discussions’ with the opportunity to ask questions 
• training sessions on the Phoenix Flex flexible working policy, how to apply the flexible working principles and how to support people to work from abroad 
• guides for people leaders on specific working models, for example a compressed hours guide.

Dewar explains:

“A leader’s job is to unlock potential and create the environment for employees to perform at their best. You can’t use a cookie cutter mould and apply a principle with no thought. Leaders need to know their people, the work they’re doing and what drives productivity. They need to enable people to perform at their best for their customers.” 

Introducing a right to disconnect 

As part of giving people more choice and control over their working model, Phoenix Group believes it’s important that people feel able to switch off from work. Dewar explains that “[i]t’s harder for people to disconnect with devices, not because of work pressure, but because of societal expectation that people are always reachable. We recognise that people are working in their homes so the lines between work and home can become blurred.” 

The ‘Right to Disconnect’ policy is explained on the careers section of its website:

“This policy formalises your right to set boundaries. No more being online outside of working hours. No more responding to emails on holiday. No more monitoring IMs when you’re off the clock. There may be exceptions, but these will always be by prior agreement and will never be the norm.”

Outcomes  

Giving people more choice and control over where, when, and how they work has benefited the business and individuals. 

• Organisation culture. A fifth (20%) of people now have a formal flexible arrangement in place with many more working flexibly through an informal arrangement. In addition, 95% of colleagues feel their manager is supportive of them flexing their working week as they need to. The organisation monitors how flexibility supports high performance working and colleague wellbeing through monthly colleague engagement surveys and is always looking for ways to enhance its approach. 
• Employee engagement. Survey results show that employees feel they have more autonomy, balance and flexibility. 
• Productivity. There are high scores in response to the employee survey question: “Do you feel flexibility helps you to be productive?” 
• Absence has decreased. Colleagues are able to work from home if they feel well enough, even if they are not well enough to come to the office. For Phoenix Group as a whole, absence has decreased from 3.4% in December 2022 (just before Phoenix Flex was introduced) to 2.4% in May 2025. Looking specifically at the servicing teams, which can see higher absence and attrition rates, absence decreased from 5.2% in December 2022 to 3.9% in May 2025. 
• Sustainability. People aren’t travelling to the office as often and the company is using less resources with a reduced amount of office space (including doing far less printing). 
• Organisational resilience. The organisation is no longer dependent on people being in an office for work to get done (for example in bad weather). 
• Talent attraction and retention. Dewar says that “we’ve been able to recruit a higher calibre and more diverse talent now that we’re not as restrictive on location. For example, the increased flexibility is appealing for people with mobility challenges and those with caring responsibilities. Flexibility has also helped us to retain older workers – we want people to be able to stay in work for longer to help them save for their retirement.” 
• Award-winning. The Phoenix Flex programme was awarded Best Flexible Working Initiative at the 2024 CIPD People Management Awards. It was also a runner up for Personnel Today’s 2024 Hybrid Working Award.

What’s next? 

Looking forward, Dewar says “Phoenix Flex comes through constantly as something colleagues value the most and we know it’s a big part of why people stay. There’s a warm sentiment from colleagues – employees want it to work. However, everyone needs to work at it to keep it alive.” She and her team will be focusing on embedding Phoenix Flex within the organisation as a cultural pillar, owned by everyone rather than being HR-driven. The team is also looking at the feasibility of offering term-time working. 

Top tips 

• Listen to what your employees are telling you about what they value and how and where they can be most productive. 
• Trial new approaches. 
• One size doesn’t fit all – give people choice and put them in control of where, when and how they can do their best work. 
• Don’t back yourself into a corner by setting out a strict set of rules. It’s about evolution rather than revolution.