Our HR Director and Director – Shared Services, Caroline Parsons has featured in a recent Gulf News article promoting the need for organisations to embed flexible working environments which empower employees to thrive in their careers as the world progresses towards the ‘next normal’.
Focussing on the practical and emotional challenges of mothers returning to the workforce after a career break, Caroline’s insights are quoted alongside several HR and wellbeing professionals including Dr Saliha Afridi from LightHouse Arabia, Helen McGuire, Co-Founder & MD at Hopscotch, and Louise Karim from Women@Work.
Here’s an excerpt from the full article, which includes Caroline’s comments about how a culture of flexibility is an integral part of our WSP Middle East workplace experience:
New normal: Here to stay?
While the pandemic led to flexible working conditions for many companies out of necessity, it is something that Helen McGuire Co-Founder & MD at Hopscotch, a recruitment website that specialises in finding skilled women flexible jobs, has always felt strongly about: “We have never understood the need for outdated 9 – 5 practices and have strongly advocated that those practices are not only unnecessary, but can be biased against those who have much to add to the working world, but simply cannot operate under such restrictive conditions.
“We hope that the ‘new normal’ can provide opportunity for women, mothers and those who are less fortunate – perhaps those who cannot commute or even emigrate from countries where opportunity is scarce due to financial, family or physical issues.”
Caroline Parsons, HR Director and Director – Shared Services at engineering consulting firm WSP in the Middle East, says that flexible working arrangements have been a part of their ethos for a long time, “and for good reason. Our ethos is that great people demand great workplaces that can be flexible and accommodate a reasonable level of flexibility for people to balance work and non-work. Of course, not all of the roles we have or the work we do will lend itself to the levels of flexibility we might prefer, but where it is possible we encourage and support flexibility.”
Click here to access the full Gulf News article.
