Our new flexible working approach set out to simplify what we offered and identify new oppor-tunities to expand our policy. The new options addressed the gaps in our existing approach. We introduced the right to request a sabbatical or career break of up to 12 months whilst pre-serving the contract and added the right to purchase an additional five days annual leave and to take one days’ paid emergency leave annually for unexpected personal situations.
Our family friendly provisions were already generous with 18 weeks fully paid for maternity leave and two month’s salary paid as a return to work bonus. But we wanted to do more for our Dads, so increased paternity pay to two weeks at full pay and equalized pay arrangements in Shared Parental Leave.
To make sure our employees were made aware of their new offering we ran an internal cam-paign using the #Hiltiinmylife as we felt this perfectly reflected how we wanted our employees to balance their Hilti role with their lives.
This included a video message from our Northern Europe Region Head, Gareth Lewis, to en-dorse his personal commitment to flexible working at Hilti, as well as some video case studies from team members who already enjoyed flexible working practices
Since our launch in July 2017, we have received more applications in two months than the total received in the previous two years. Our flexible working journey will not end here and next up is a trial of home working. We truly believe that by embracing flexible working in all its forms, we will have highly engaged teams who will want to stay and be part of our ‘Great Place to Work’.