Siemens

It’s no surprise that global brands like Siemens are at the forefront of offering their employees benefits like flexible working.

Consisting of over 800 employees, Siemens’ Manchester office is demonstrating how a large global company can take their environmental responsibilities seriously and in doing so make a big difference to the lives of their staff.

With around 370,000 staff globally, and 15,000 in the UK, Siemens is the largest industrial manufacturing company in Europe specialising in many areas ranging from energy management, healthcare through to digital industries and infrastructure.

Olivia Whitlam (pictured), Siemens’ Head of Sustainability said, “At Siemens we have set ourselves the challenging goal that all our production facilities and buildings worldwide are to achieve a net zero-carbon footprint by 2030. Which includes our fleet emissions, so to help reduce mileage and congestion emissions we’ve been building a culture of flexible working, as well as other sustainable working techniques, for some time.”

Harriet Padina, Diversity and Inclusion Manager, says that Siemens adopts an employee-led flexibility approach, whereby the flexibility itself is flexible around the needs of the employee, enabling them to deliver their results in a way that makes sense for them.

“We’re moving away from a culture of asking permission, to one where flexibility is encouraged. We’ve seen senior level buy-in around these principles which in turn is helping our staff to feel empowered to be able to work wherever they like.”

Siemens is actively experimenting with flexibility in more traditional operational roles and is looking forward to seeing what benefits this culture brings the organisation.

Chris Melia, HR Business Partner, confirms, “It’s not just good for people, but for business results too. Having a flexible working culture allows us to attract the best talent from the surrounding area. If we were only able to recruit people who could be in the office from 9am till 5pm we would lose some really great talent.

“We don’t need people to clock in and clock out to see that work is being delivered – the results are proof enough.”

What’s clear is that Siemens is keen to explore and promote new ways of working to improve the work-life balance for their staff, as well as building towards their ambitious sustainability targets.