Anne Boden, CEO of Starling Bank, worked in the office from dawn to dusk for most of her life.
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Anne admited that she has alwas worked long hours. This means from the start of her career as a junior banker in the 1980s to becoming the first woman to launch her own bank in Britain, Starling, in 2014.
Starling Bank now has 2.5 million customers, 400,000 of which are small businesses.
With about £8bn in deposits, the company is getting prepared for an IPO within the next two years and plans to debut its services in Europe in 2022.
“We are never going back to the old world. I’d spent many, many years — and I’m not going to tell you how many — going into the City every day. I was somebody who came into the City at 7am, grabbed a coffee, stayed all day and then did the same thing the following day,” said Anne to Finnancial News
“I was hooked on coming into the office. Now even I love this very hybrid life, which is very, very efficient. We’re morphing to the stage where we can make work much more forgiving for people, they can fit really interesting jobs around a flexible working style.”
However, some CEO’s are expressing concerns that being absent from the office is affecting teamwork and creativity.
Some even feel that the trend to working from home has gone too far and they now face a battle encouraging more staff to return to the workplace for even part of the week.
“The vast majority of people who work at Starling do customer-facing roles, and customers require Starling support 24/7. It’s not a 9 to 5 job. So the majority of our people do not work traditional hours; they work a shift pattern. Therefore we’ve always been very flexible,” adds Boden.
And then you have people who are not in customer-facing roles. That’s not very many people. Those people are obviously working very flexibly in a hybrid role. We don’t really care when they work as long as they do a great job.
“I think we’ve gone through this great realisation that many people are far more effective working from home,” Boden says. “So I’m embracing it.”
