Nobody tells you how hard it really is to build a flexible team in a high-performance business, and nobody tells you what it actually takes to make it work.

I started Evolved in 2021, not long after my second child was born.

After my first, I had returned to a global corporate role and quickly discovered just how unforgiving the traditional working world can be.

Dropping my daughter at nursery at 7am. Not collecting her until 6pm. The call mid-meeting to say she had a temperature and needed picking up.

When I started Evolved, I was adamant it was going to be a business that worked around real life, but still delivered exceptional work.

I believed both of those things could be possible, and so that was the standard I wanted to hold myself to.

But this flexible way of working couldn’t just be for me as the founder.

I quickly learnt that the people with the level of passion, experience and commitment I was looking for also had a need or desire to work outside of the traditional office-based 9-5. Flexibility quickly became a non-negotiable.

What flexible working looks like

Across our team, we have seen it all. A team member who relocated to the other side of the world and continued to deliver from a completely different time zone.

Military spouses who need to work around deployments and the unpredictable schedules that come with them.

Parents working school hours, or wherever their focus is sharpest, whether that is 6am or 10pm.

None of this is complicated in principle. In practice, it requires structure, discipline and cost that most businesses underestimate.

The thing nobody tells you is that flexibility without infrastructure is just chaos with good intentions.

For clients to never feel the impact, everything has to be deliberately designed. Clear processes, real-time visibility of work, consistent communication, and a team that genuinely covers for one another.

It also costs more, sometimes requiring additional headcount to cover school holidays or deployment cycles. That is a real business cost that has to be planned for.

Recruitment has to be right

I will be honest, at the start we got this wrong. We hired quickly, the commitment to give as well as take was not there, and we had to part ways.

Not everyone is prepared to do the extra work that flexibility in a small business requires.

I have seen many businesses try to embrace flexible working and quietly roll it back six months later. Usually, it failed because the foundation was not built properly first.

When you hire for a flexible team, values have to be aligned and there needs to be total clarity on the commitment from both sides. That changes everything about how you recruit, onboard and manage performance.

The payoff is real

When it works, and it absolutely can, the results go beyond retention and morale.

You access talent you would never have found through conventional hiring, and you build a team with a level of loyalty and commitment that a standard contract simply cannot buy.

You also build a business that practises what it preaches.

We service global blue-chip clients, delivering across time zones and hitting £2.4m turnover in our last financial year, having more than doubled year on year since founding.

Flexibility did not hold us back. It is a significant part of how we got here.

• Evolved is a performance-driven L&D and consultancy business, founded in 2021.