A Life More Virgin: How Virgin Money's flexible work scheme tripled applications

From January to March of this year, the number of job vacancies across the United Kingdom fell by 47,000 compared to the previous quarter, and an even steeper decline of 188,000 when compared to the same period the year before. But most concerning of all is the fact that this fall in opportunities is nothing new with the Office of National Statistics (ONS) figures showing that vacancies had declined in each of its previous nine reporting periods.

Where before came The Great Resignation, where employees across sectors opted to walk out on their jobs, and in many cases chosen career paths, now stands a great stagnation, with companies across sectors proving either unwilling or unable to make new hires.

However, while much of this inactivity in the jobs market has been driven by the precarious economic environment that pervades the country, there are pockets of positivity where companies have been thriving rather than just surviving.

According to figures published this month by the flexible working specialists Flexa, the number of flexible job roles being advertised has increased by a fifth (20%) over the previous quarter. At the same time, the number of companies offering and candidates seeking such roles has increased.

“It’s not a coincidence that companies who offer flexible work are the same companies who are thriving and hiring right now,” said Molly Johnson-Jones, CEO, and co-founder of Flexa. “These companies know that flexible work is key to talent attraction.”

Thriving under flexible work

As evidence of this, one needs to look no further than Virgin Money UK, the high street and online lender that owes its heritage to the Northern Rock, Yorkshire Bank, and Clydesdale Bank brands that it has acquired, but has staked its future on being a bold, inclusive, and disruptive brand.

In just a single year, the company has succeeded in tripling the number of applications that it receives for each vacancy, while at the same time more than halving its staff attrition rates. And at the heart of this change in its fortunes, has been an ambitious and far-reaching initiative to maximize the flexibility that is granted to all its staff.

Under ‘A Life More Virgin’, the name Virgin Money has given to its flexible working program, all of those whose job roles are not explicitly location-based, are given the freedom to work from anywhere in the UK, whether that be a bustling city in England or a rural idyll on the Western Isles of Scotland.

And for those roles that must be carried out in a specific location, such as within one of its banking branches, measures have been taken to ensure that greater flexibility is still given, such as in terms of work schedule, or enabling people to work closer to where they need to be.

Understanding and enabling untapped employee potential

Like several other companies that have embraced flexible working, the proving ground for many of the processes and practices that are inherent within the Virgin Money UK scheme was the remote working practices that had to be put in place because of Covid-19.

From a practical perspective, this was a critical factor in establishing the policies, protocols, and infrastructure required to enable the company to operate with a workforce that was predominantly working remotely. It was also particularly important in motivating both banking regulators and internal IT and security departments, to find ways for the bank to carry out sensitive activities in a new manner.

But on a more personal level, the lockdowns also made clear just how different the individual employees’ situations and circumstances were.

“The lockdown process accelerated our confidence and understanding of how to enable different ways of working,” says Gill McNeill, head of people services at Virgin Money UK, in an interview with HRD Connect. “But the other critical thing it did was help us to understand that each of our colleagues is an individual.”

“Some people had a house full of people and couldn’t find space, some people were on their own and completely isolated, so we used that learning and knowledge, to create A Life More Virgin.”

This deeper understanding of what obstacles might lie in the way of staff of achieving their full potential and just as importantly what could unlock that in terms of new ways of working prompted McNeill and her team to initiate A Life More Virgin.

Appealing to a new pool of candidates

Given the full backing of chief executive, David Duffy, right from the start, the decision was taken to permanently change the way the company worked and to offer the staff the freedom to choose how, when, and where they worked, so long as it didn’t negatively impact productivity unreasonably.

In addition to the flexibility, this also included giving staff more time away from work in the form of five well-being days in addition to the 30 days of annual leave and bank holidays that they are entitled to. This was to ensure staff could maintain or attain a healthy work and life balance and has also seen the company adopt gender-neutral family leave.

All this was also granted to new starters, who were also given full sick leave allowances from day one, while the decision was also taken to do away with probationary periods altogether to further level the playing field between existing staff and new entrants.

“If we think you’re the right person to come and work for Virgin Money, we need to have the confidence that we have made the right choice and that we will get you to be the best you can be,” says McNeill, explaining the decision to scrap probation.

But of course, the benefits of such measures, and particularly the work-from-anywhere allowance, were not just designed and implemented to benefit the staff but to also deliver dividends to the business, such as making it a more attractive business to work for and expanding its reach.

“We have ‘locationless’ hiring, so the quality and number of applications are going through the roof,” says McNeill. “This has meant the breadth of people we can attract has widened, enabling us to reach into communities that we haven’t been able to before.”

One of the most powerful impacts of this change, and one which McNeill is particularly pleased about, is that the diversity of applicants for roles has increased substantially, with the research commissioned by the company showing that the number of people applying with protected characteristics such as ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender has risen by 204%.

This, coupled with the sizeable increase in the volume of applications, means that Virgin Money can now draw from a stronger pool of candidates as it looks to continue to evolve and grow its operations.

Flexible work is a golden opportunity for HR

But despite the overall successes that the scheme has delivered, delivering such a transformation in how it operates has not been entirely without its challenges.

As McNeill explains, and anyone recently introduced to working remotely can appreciate, there is sometimes a tendency among employees to see remote working or working as providing too much freedom.

“The shift is about how we deliver for the customer by reshaping our ways of working and continuing to evolve, it is part of a bigger drive and a bigger dynamic, so of course, you have more freedom, but the end objective remains the work that must be done.”

Similarly, the change in the way of working has also placed new pressures and demands on team leaders and managers, with some taking to the new style of management naturally, and others needing support to help them adapt.

As a result, McNeill and her team are already looking at refinements that can be made to the scheme to make it work even more effectively, with a key priority for the next year being how to replicate the community engagement and events that it used to carry out when its workforce was solely based in its offices.

But overall, with internal figures showing resoundingly positive feedback from staff, such as 62% believing it will improve their mental well-being and 88% believing that the ability to work from anywhere is a major pull to work for or stay with the company, it has been quite the first year under A Life More Virgin.

And as for McNeill, she has made the most of the opportunity to put HR at the forefront of reshaping how the business operates and delivers for both its staff and its customers.

“From an HR point of view, it has been absolutely outstanding, because we have been able to play with the traditional toolbox of HR stuff and kind of blow it out of the water and start something new that puts the power with our people leaders,” she says.

“We’ve been able to completely rebuild the HR infrastructure on this basis around A Life More Virgin, and that’s been a golden opportunity which I have loved being a part of.”