Our people have lots of different motivations for wanting to work in an agile way. This month, we hear from Consulting's Northern Ireland-based duo, Steve McCullough and his line manager Gareth Sharvin.
Northern Ireland has a rich, iconic history and is home to our Belfast Delivery Centre - a core part of our Alternative Delivery Model (ADM) strategy. It's also home of the Titanic, the Giant's Causeway and most recently, it's provided a stunning backdrop to the award-winning fantasy TV series – Game of Thrones.
Steve McCullough has been an extra on the Game of Thrones series for the last seven years – and took advantage of our Time Out policy to make sure he was able to take part in the final season's filming.
"It's something I've really enjoyed doing, it's got such a huge fan-base and it's something a little different to talk about when meeting new people. I joined Deloitte in 2015, knowing that it might be a challenge finding the time to continue filming - that was until I read about Time Out."
"Gareth (my team lead) has been incredibly supportive. He joined towards the end of November 2017, and spent a lot of time getting to know each member of the team. It's the last series, which meant the filming was going to run into the summer until mid-December."
We spoke to Gareth who said, "It wasn't a surprise when Steve asked if he could take advantage of the Time Out programme, and I knew how much it meant to him - it's a once in a life time opportunity. I'd already shared the prospect with our Director and our Partner, so it was something that we wanted to make happen for Steve.
We asked him to map out his role, shared this with the team and challenged them to see how we could make it work before we took it to our director and Partner for approval. Our mindset was around how we can make this work, rather than why can't we.
It's changed the mindset of the team and others are looking at how they can work in a more agile way too.
It's something that I would like to consider more – both for the team and for me. I'm a local councillor, so will see if this is something that I can balance with what the business wants from me too.
I also think we should be honest that it does take time and consideration from all parties to make this work. Our answers to agile working requests should be 'why not?' as opposed to 'why?'. We should be supporting our teams and team leaders in the process, so the more we share great stories like Steve's, the more we will be successful in providing people the opportunity to work in an agile way."
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