Flexible working at Citizens Advice

Our new normal.

We’re recruiting for a range of vacancies in our policy and advocacy teams at Citizens Advice. You can find out more about these jobs below. This is part of a series of blogs explaining what working in policy and advocacy at Citizens Advice is like. You can also read:

• What makes our Director of Policy, Matt Upton, excited about working at Citizens Advice
• What former colleagues say about their time at Citizens Advice
• What impact our work has

We offer flexibility as a rule, not an exception. This is because it works for our staff and helps us attract great people. People are our biggest asset, so we build our jobs around you.

People at Citizens Advice work flexibly in all kinds of ways — we asked a few of our colleagues to explain what it’s like.

Working compressed hours — Charlotte Witso (Post and Telecoms team)

Compressed hours is a flexible working pattern where I do 10 days’ work over 9 days. This flexibility is ideal for me because I want to work full time but also have a bit more time to recharge my batteries.

This means I work around an hour longer on my working days to take 1 extra day off every fortnight. So I do the same amount of hours and work, I just choose to structure my time differently.

In my team lots of us work compressed hours or part time. We have access to each others’ calendars and clearly mark our non-working days so it’s easy for the team to know when I’m around and when I’m off.

On my days off, I do anything and everything — just not work! I tend to have my non-working day on a Friday. That’s a great day to go to the shops when it’s quieter, get a train somewhere to meet friends elsewhere in the country or just chill at home with my cat.

Working a four day compressed week — Taha Abrar (Research and Insight and Equity, Diversity and Inclusion teams)

My partner and I both chose to move to a 4 day week at the start of the year to spend a day during the week with our toddler. In truth, I was a bit nervous about moving to a 4 day week, but the process was super straightforward.

My manager was very understanding, even about the slightly odd choice of Tuesday as my non-working day! I wanted to do a form of compressed hours, working 4.5 days in 4, which was approved too. This flexibility has been really important to me, as I wanted to protect my income as well as spend time with my family.

There have been a few challenges. I initially felt like my lack of availability was letting people down, and I had to have some honest discussions about workload as I moved to working fewer hours in a week.

But I’ve found my teams to be very understanding of my new work pattern, people have worked around my availability, and I’ve set clear boundaries around what is work time and what isn’t, which has been a point of personal growth!

Working a part-time, compressed week — Cara Holmes (Net Zero homes team)

I’ve been working as a Senior Policy Researcher at Citizens Advice for 5 years. I started out working full time but after having twins and discovering the astronomical cost of childcare, I changed my working pattern so I could be more available for my children and save some money at the same time! Since returning from maternity leave I’ve been working 27 hours over 3 days.

I’m based in our Cardiff office, but I do almost all of my work from home. An average day starts around 7.30am (not hard to do when you have small children!) which means I can finish in time for dinner.

Working long days might not be for everyone, but for me, it makes it so much easier to feel part of family life.

Working as part of a job share — Kayley Hignell (Families, Welfare and work team)

Having a baby during lockdown involved lots of challenges but one thing I didn’t have to worry about was adapting my role to make sure I could balance a great job with my new family life. All options were on the table and after lots of deliberation we went with making my role a jobshare.

I now work 3 days a week and share responsibilities with my jobshare partner Morgan. This option has meant I haven’t had to drop any parts of the job and given that the work we do can be rapid and reactive, it means there is always one of us around. We each take a lead on different pieces of work and then join forces on things that benefit from having both our perspectives.

Morgan also works flexibly — he compresses his week to 10 days in 9. There’s no pressing childcare reason for him — it just fits with his life better to structure his work that way.

Even better, I now feel like I have a partner in crime — we bounce ideas off each other and figure out challenges together as well as helping each other develop. Jobsharing has meant that we can be more creative and ambitious with the role whilst also giving each other the flexibility we need to balance work with life.

If you need to work flexibly — or think it’d make a difference to your work life balance if you did — we’d love for you to apply for one of the many policy roles available at the moment.

Find out more about these roles and the recruitment process by watching our recent webinar on working in policy and campaigning at Citizens Advice.