CWS Wins Another Workplace Flexibility Award

Flexible schedules, foosball, and the freedom to telecommute are standard in a CWS, Inc. employee’s workday. These innovative practices and others earned CWS, Inc. another award from When Work Works this year.

CWS excelled in six categories to win the award:

1. Autonomy
2. Work-life fit
3. Supervisor support for work success
4. Satisfaction with earnings
5. Benefits and opportunities for advancement
6. Opportunities for learning
7. A culture of trust

Sheryl Barlow, CWS Marketing Solution Architect, submitted a collection of surveys from CWS employees to nominate CWS for the award. “As I filled out the application, I became so thankful for my workplace. I started to think of previous workplaces where I would have had a hard time filling it out. At CWS, we have some degree of flexibility in every single category on the application,” Sheryl said.

The award cited several CWS workplace flexibility programs including phase retirement, sabbaticals, control over overtime, time off for volunteer work, paid time off (PTO), daily flextime, compressed workweeks, regular telecommuting/remote work, return to work gradually after childbirth/adoption, and maternity leave.

CWS views its employees as whole people with lives outside the workplace. Team members can flex time off for their busy children, sick parents, or home errands. They make up that time when convenient for them. CWS holds its employees to their work, not to their hours.

“People work differently. Some people need activity around them or their job entails teamwork in person. Others need to be alone in a remote office to be fully productive,” Sheryl said.

Technology has made that kind of remote work possible. CWS employees telecommute regularly using Zoom to teleconference, Google Drive to share documents, Slack for group chats, and Grasshopper to take business calls on their cell phones.

When Work Works is an initiative of The Families and Work Institute (FWI) and the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). Its goal is “to help businesses of all sizes and types become more successful by transforming the way they view and adopt effective and flexible workplaces.”

CWS also won the bi-annual award in 2012 and 2014.