Flexy is a Living Wage accredited temporary employment agency, using technology and personality analysis to match temporary employees with job placements. The team is made up of 11 staff members, with 12,000 candidates on their books making hundreds of placements every week.
Flexy clients are encouraged to offer jobs at more than the Living Wage rate. The team report that this enables a range of business benefits and is a core part of ensuring that they can provide reliable candidates to clients. The Flexy team find that this is a win-win for Flexy users and clients.
Flexy users are treated as Flexy's employees, meaning that users have benefits such as holiday pay. Flexy run a full payroll service which means that users do not have to register for/manage tax themselves and can pay tax as they earn. Flexy have a strong commitment to prompt payment and guarantee that employees are paid every Friday for work done during the week. For clients, Flexy is 45% cheaper than a traditional staffing agency.
Managing Director Oliver Crofton blogs about the benefits of the real Living Wage:
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Flexy is a relative newbie in the world of temporary staffing. Launched in 2015, we set out to disrupt the temporary staffing sector by utilising technology to streamline the process of placing candidates into temporary and flexible work assignments.
Soon after launching, we made the decision to support the Living Wage Foundation, with the belief that candidates who were paid fairly would be more reliable, show more loyalty, and perform better during jobs.
We also felt that it was morally the right thing to do, during a time when "gig-economy" workers were widely reported to be at a disadvantage in terms of pay; we strongly believed we would be able to utilise the innovations seen within the gig-economy, but ensure workers received fair pay by cutting administration costs via the use of technology.
This strategy paid off, as now almost 95% of shifts hours posted on Flexy are at the Living Wage rate or above. We've seen new Hirers join our platform stating their reason for joining was that workers received a high rate of pay when compared with traditional temporary staffing methods.
Our hypothesis about improved worker motivation and performance in line with paying the Living Wage has been realised too. We have incredibly high reliability rates for what is traditionally a very transient and unreliable workforce model. Whilst some of this is down to how we use technology to remind workers of their shifts, a big part is due to the fact workers feel empowered that we're challenging the norm by not paying low wages, and therefore feel an obligation to ensure they turn up for work on time.
I know that our findings mirror that of other Living Wage employers too. An independent academic survey of more than 800 Living Wage employers saw that 58% stated they had improved relations between managers and their staff, with over half of employers reporting that the Living Wage had improved both recruitment and retention.
For companies thinking about registering as a Living Wage Employer, there are obvious risks; especially if you operate in a low margin industry such as ourselves. However, the business case shouldn't only centre on expected improvements of workforce productivity and retention (although of course these are incredibly important), but should also take into consideration the wider implications and benefits that come with supporting the initiative.
Perhaps the biggest way in which supporting the Living Wage has helped our business grow is the reputational value it has created about Flexy amongst our community of users. Our growth to date amongst our workforce (6,474 active users in June 2017) has almost entirely been built on word of mouth. A large part of why people recommend Flexy is due to our support of the Living Wage, which has meant we're able to operate on a lower marketing budget, yet compete with others in our sector who spend thousands on fancy adverts to attract workers.