Give to Gain: A case study in leadership, flexibility and commercial return

HR Unscripted with Helen Hodgkinson, Chief People Officer, TLT LLP & Jane van Zyl, Chief Executive, Working Families

The conversation around gender equality doesn’t end with International Women’s Day. Mothers experience a 42% drop in earnings within five years of their first child, women are twice as likely as men to reduce their working hours to manage childcare, and the UK gender pay gap still sits at 12.8% overall, widening significantly after the age of 40 when many women are balancing senior career stages with caring responsibilities. For employers, this becomes a bottom-line issue. When experienced women step back or leave the workforce, organisations lose skills, leadership potential and valuable institutional knowledge. 

Helen Hodgkinson, Chief People Officer at TLT, and Jane van Zyl, CEO of Working Families (the UK’s leading charity for working parents and carers), understand this completely. Between them, they’ve spent four years building a partnership that tests what ‘family-friendly’ realistically means when you’re running a business, leading people and supporting working parents trying to do both well. 

The results speak in commercial terms. Since 2020, TLT has doubled in revenue, growing from £99m to £187m, and reached its 2025 female partner representation target two years ahead of schedule. This conversation, held with International Women’s Day and its theme of ‘Give to Gain’ very much in mind, explores what it took to get there, what giving really looks like when it means trusting your workforce with flexibility you can’t fully control, and why the organisations willing to do that are the ones swiftly pulling ahead. 

How TLT Built Its Family-Friendly Strategy From the Inside Out 

For TLT, engaging with Working Families grew from a specific commitment. “We set a target to improve senior female representation in 2019, which naturally brought into focus issues affecting female progression, development, wellbeing and retention,” says Helen. “Working Families is widely recognised in the market, so when you want to demonstrate your commitment to supporting families, it’s the go-to organisation.” 

What’s worth noting is the sequence. TLT didn’t partner with Working Families and then start the work. They started the work and then sought external validation of it. As Helen puts it: “For us, this isn’t rhetoric. It’s about being able to externally evidence what we know matters to our people and what we know we need to deliver.” 

That distinction is more important than it might seem. Plenty of organisations lead with the accreditation and then backfill the substance. The ones that do it the other way round tend to find far more success. 

Jane observed this very early on. “We’ve been working with TLT since 2022, and they have always been relentless in pursuing family-friendly, flexible business practices. Their dedication to being innovative and open to ideas has landed them in our Benchmark list of top-ranking employers.” TLT was, she says, “a perfect fit for coming on board as a founding partner of our workplace certification scheme, Family Friendly Workplaces.” 

Since then, TLT has been named a Working Families Top 30 Employer, become a founding partner of the Family Friendly Workplace Certification and joined as sponsor of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Flexible and Family Friendly Working. 

TLT’s Commercial Results Are Impressive 

Those headline figures deserve context, because the commercial case for supporting working parents goes deeper than revenue growth alone. 

“Since the switch to flexible working in 2020, we’ve seen a significant increase in women at senior levels, particularly within our partnership,” Helen says. “Our lateral hiring pipeline is increasingly gender-balanced, and the type of talent we’re attracting has changed. People actively seek us out because of how we work.” 

TLT has been named one of The Times Best Law Firms for eight consecutive years. 

“What we consistently hear from new joiners is that they’re drawn to us because we genuinely live our commitment to flexibility. We don’t just talk about it, we deliver it. Many arrive expecting that flexibility to be withdrawn once they start, and it isn’t.” 

Jane’s perspective on TLT’s growth is worth hearing alongside those figures. “They have been great at leaning into trusting their employees and designing policies with a foundation of treating people like adults by giving them the autonomy to get the job done in the way that suits them best. They have built up engagement capital and they cherish it. And I don’t think it’s any coincidence that they have scaled at pace in the last five years.” 

Why Flexible Working Demands Cultural Change, Not Just Policy 

When TLT launched its fully flexible working approach (internally called TLT World) in 2021, it came with a multi-million pound investment in digital infrastructure and office redesign. Helen is candid about what it required. 

“Flexibility is a hearts-and-minds issue, regardless of where you sit in the business. Intuitively, every leader knows it’s the right thing to do, but aligning head and heart can be difficult because traditional ways of working have been entrenched for so long.” 

COVID, she says, gave organisations the chance to rethink. Not all of them took it. “Any business that didn’t critically assess its return to work through the lens of its people missed the point. Instead of solving a people engagement challenge, they focused on a real estate one. They’ve got a lot of square footage that they need to fill rather than a workforce that they want to trust and get the best out of.” 

This seems to be a long-lasting point too. The Bright Horizons Modern Families Index 2025 found a 22% drop in parents’ ability to work flexibly compared with the previous year, alongside 7 in 10 working parents expressing concern about increased return-to-office expectations. Meanwhile, according to the CIPD’s 2025 report on flexible and hybrid working, around 1.1 million employees left a job in the past year because flexibility wasn’t there. That’s a lot of experience and organisational memory walking out the door because employers couldn’t bring themselves to let go of how things used to work. 

“True flexibility is about trust,” Helen says. “Trusting people means they’ll deliver for you in spades.” 

Why the Choice Between Flexibility and Business Needs is a Myth 

There’s a question that enters most conversations about workplace flexibility: what happens when what your people need and what the business demands run in different directions? 

Jane challenges this directly. “I think it’s a common misconception that these things are in opposition, when in actual fact, meeting the needs of employees will inevitably see a boost in performance and client delivery. We would always advocate that the needs of the business must be balanced with the needs of individuals, and so it must be a two-way street of negotiation.” 

Jane is also very realistic about the difficulty of this. “We must acknowledge that getting it right and finding solutions that work for everyone isn’t always easy, but the trade-off is an engaged workforce who are committed to the company because you have enabled them to have a career and a life outside work.” 

Jane’s point can certainly be reinforced. The 2025 Working Families Index, a survey of over 3,000 UK parents, found that 73% said working flexibly had increased their loyalty to their current employer, 77% said it had allowed them to stay and 64% said it had discouraged them from looking elsewhere. For any CPO trying to quantify why flexibility matters, those three figures tell the story better than most business cases. 

Helen frames it through leadership. “The cornerstone of every cultural moment and people engagement moment is conversation. Progress starts with honest dialogue between leaders and their teams, and equally from teams back to leaders.” She makes a point that’s very easy to overlook: leaders are human too, with their own caring responsibilities that change week to week. “That’s why investing in line managers, equipping them to lead differently in a hybrid and flexible environment, pays dividends. The investment now is in leaders, not just policies.” 

This is where the ‘Give to Gain’ idea earns its weight. Giving your line managers permission to be flexible themselves, rather than just administering flexibility for others, is one of the most underestimated decisions a Chief People Officer can make. People lead differently when they’re not pretending their own lives are frictionless. 

What Modern CPO Leadership Looks Like Today 

Helen’s career has taken her through people leadership at Vodafone, KPMG, Nationwide Building Society, the NHS and Essex County Council before TLT. The weight of CPO leadership now, she says, is something previous generations of HR directors wouldn’t recognise. 

“Today, the people function has a seat at the board table, which brings real influence. The focus has moved from policies and procedures to how we get the best out of a modern workforce.” That influence has a personal dimension too. “What matters most to me is the personal impact. Hearing directly from someone that something we’ve done has positively affected their life. That’s why I do this job, and why staying connected to people remains so important.” 

Working with Working Families has sharpened that, she says. “We don’t believe in badges without substance. Our partnership with Working Families goes beyond accreditation; they actively challenge and influence us, helping us address areas where we still have work to do.” 

One of those areas has been understanding other sectors. “I’ve learned a great deal through that collaboration, not least how challenging flexibility can be in sectors like the public sector and retail, where it should, in theory, be simplest.” 

That’s a point worth pausing on. If the sectors with the most working parents are the ones where flexibility is hardest to deliver, the problem isn’t willingness. It’s design. And that gap is precisely what the Family Friendly Workplace Certification is trying to close. 

What It Takes to Qualify For Certification 

In 2025, TLT became one of the first law firms in the UK to receive the Family Friendly Workplace Certification, a scheme it helped develop as a founding partner alongside Working Families. For CPOs and senior HR leaders reading this, the question is what the certification realistically demands. 

Jane is clear about its structure. “It recognises the hard work of employers who are already doing great things to support parents and carers, while also focusing on continuous development. Becoming certified requires the organisation to have an action plan stipulating what it wants to work on in the next two years, signed off at senior leadership level. This endorsement is a commitment to delivering change, and the plan provides a road map of how to get there.” 

Culturally, there’s more at play. “The assessment framework encourages employers to go beyond policy so that it’s not being applied in a vacuum and the family-friendly mindset permeates from top to bottom. Line manager training, senior leader role models, understanding the barriers to policy take-up; they are all examples to think about when making sure both men and women feel able to use the support that’s on offer.” 

For Helen, the process also involves holding up a mirror. “Benchmarking is always healthy because it allows you to sense check your own work. While accreditation has influenced some of our policy decisions, it has also highlighted where we want to go next. Paternity support is one such area, shaped both by external insight and by feedback from our workforce.” 

More broadly, she sees a simplification challenge ahead. “We recognise that our policies have become complex. Simplifying them, creating a clearer, more accessible suite of options around flexibility and family support, is a priority. That means reflecting family needs alongside religious commitments and other caring responsibilities.” 

Supporting Employees and Employers at the Same Time 

One of the less understood aspects of Working Families is its dual role. The charity provides free legal advice to working parents and carers (particularly women trying to retain their jobs while seeking greater flexibility) while simultaneously partnering with employers to build more inclusive workplace cultures. Jane doesn’t see a contradiction. 

“Hearing the everyday challenges of working parents and carers is actually invaluable to informing how we work with employers, making sure that the advice and guidance we provide has relevance and makes the most impact.” 

There’s a clear ethical wall between the two services, she says, protecting against conflicts of interest. But the results speak for themselves. “90% of the people who contact us get to keep their jobs and get most, sometimes all, of the flexibility they need. In our experience, employers want to keep valued staff and employees want to keep their jobs. It’s just a matter of finding a way through with dialogue and negotiation.” 

That 90% figure deserves attention. It suggests that most workplace flexibility disputes aren’t irreconcilable. They’re just under-negotiated. 

Can Smaller Businesses and Frontline Sectors Offer Real Flexibility? 

An obvious question is whether standards developed with well-resourced organisations like TLT can benefit people in smaller businesses or sectors with less built-in flexibility. Jane says the early adopters serve a specific purpose. 

“Working with larger organisations is a great exercise in seeing what’s possible, and they are a blueprint for best practice that can inspire or influence policy in smaller organisations or site-based sectors. Family Friendly Workplaces is a global movement and the early adopters, like TLT, are helping to drive up standards through leading by example. But it works for all sizes and sectors.” 

The 2025 Working Families Index provides helpful context on this. Eight in ten parents now work flexibly in some way, up from just over half in 2018. But parents in households earning under £25,000 a year are almost three times less likely to be hybrid workers than those earning over £60,000. Access remains deeply unequal, and that inequality falls hardest on the people who need flexibility the most. 

Jane points out that remote work is only one form of it. “Most jobs cannot be done from home, but all jobs have some form of flexibility, be that staggered starts, flexi-time, term-time working, job shares or shift-swopping. It’s about helping employers understand what solutions can work for their business and their employees.” 

Through its membership service, Working Families worked with employers covering a total of 800,000 employees last year. The reach is growing. 

What Comes Next for Family-Friendly Employment Policy 

Helen sees TLT’s next chapter through the ‘Give to Gain’ lens. “We’ve increasingly used this internally to frame our role not just as supporting our own people, but as contributing to the wider market. The next opportunity for us is influence: sharing what we’ve learned externally and helping shape best practice.” 

That includes engaging with government on employment policy. The Employment Rights Act 2025 means new requirements around flexible working requests from October 2026, including a duty on employers to consult before refusing and to demonstrate that refusal is reasonable. 

“We’re in a strong position and are already ahead of where the law is moving,” Helen says. “For us, this is about using that position to influence further and create broader impact.” 

For any CPO or senior HR leader who agrees with everything described here but feels they don’t yet have organisational backing, both women have direct advice. 

Jane suggests starting with evidence. “Information is your friend, so equip yourself with data about the business benefits of flexible working. Many businesses will be worried about productivity and profitability, but you can lay the groundwork for buy-in with market research or even financial analysis of the cost of recruitment versus the cost of the policy.” 

Helen’s approach is relational. “You need a clear stakeholder map, a strong understanding of where decisions are made and the willingness to invest time in those relationships. Everyone around the board or influence table will have their own story. The key is to understand those perspectives and connect with them. When you align with what matters personally to senior leaders, the agenda gains momentum.” 

That’s the real ‘Give to Gain’. Give the people around you a reason to care personally, and the professional case follows. 

Career Moves Group works with organisations building people functions that reflect exactly this kind of thinking. As a B Corp-certified, women-owned recruitment consultancy with specialist expertise in senior HR and people leadership hiring, we partner with businesses looking for CPOs, HR Directors and people leaders who understand that flexibility, trust and genuine cultural commitment aren’t extras; they’re how high-performing organisations are built. If this conversation resonates with where your organisation is heading, or where you are in your own career, we’d welcome the chance to talk. 

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