Agile working

Working agile means we changed from having a culture where people are expected to be in the office from 9am to 5pm to one where we’re much more focused on what they deliver. We've built a positive culture where autonomy, trust, wellbeing, and flexibility allow us to recruit and retain the very best people.

Above all, agile working is about treating people like adults. If you want to go to your child’s assembly or a personal appointment and make up the time later, then fine. If you have a report to write and want to spend the day in a coffee shop because that’s where you do your best work, that’s fine, too.

Equally, there will be times when you’ll put in extra hours during a busy period, and for some of us working in the office means we perform our roles to the best of our ability. We also have colleagues with roles which mean they hardly ever work in the office. Agile means we can all balance trust and autonomy with responsibility and accountability.

For the vast majority of our roles, there is no requirement to work from one of our offices. We meet up as an organisation at 2-4 in-person events each year, such as all-staff away days.

We work in an agile way where we focus on delivering outcomes for people affected by blood cancer. We work in a flexible hybrid way which means in practice you'll work both remotely and in the office, depending on your role and team. There are no roles in our organisation that are fully remote or fully office based. As part of the recruitment process we will discuss with you what this looks like in practice. In addition to this, we all meet as an organisation twice a year.

We create spaces for our staff to do their best work in a place and space that suits them, their team and the organisation.

Underpinning this are our organisational agile principles, which are:

• We focus on delivering outcomes for people affected by blood cancer, whether that be in person or virtually
• We create spaces for our people to do their very best work
• We connect in person when it matters to deliver for people affected by blood cancer
• We provide collaboration and spaces for our staff, teams and supporters
• We make good use of virtual working
• We constantly review these principles and adjust them always making sure we continually deliver for people affected by blood cancer

Within each team, there are practical agile resources and principles, which give everyone a framework to make values based decisions on when and where they work from.

This approach means better work-life balance, making it easier for us to attract brilliant people, and to make sure that once they’re here they want to stay. And becoming more focused on the results will mean we deliver more for people affected by blood cancer.

We work in an agile way because it will help us deliver more for people with blood cancer.

This is because:

• We have the ability to make decisions about the most effective way to achieve our targets
• Agile working allows for better work-life balance = better recruitment and better retention of staff
• It supports diversity and wellbeing within the workplace – e.g. non-neurotypical employees, mental health, extroverts and introverts
• One size doesn’t fit all! We’re all different, with different strengths
• We want everyone who works at Blood Cancer UK to be able to thrive at work, and do the best work they possibly can

Please talk to us about this if you’d like to discuss how it might work for the role you are applying for, either before you apply, or as part of the application process.

For the majority of roles, your contractual place of work will be one of our offices. Very few of our roles require staff to work from an office, and so individuals are able to choose where they wish to live. And because we pay you for the role you do, not where you choose to live or work, we only have one pay scale rather than regional variances.

For travel expenses purposes, this means that we do not pay for travel into your contractual place of work (your commute). And if you have to travel to another location for your role, you’d be able to claim the difference between a normal journey to your contractual place of work, and the new location.