Explore Becky's inspiring journey at Azets
Reflecting on her career, Becky, Tax Partner and Office Managing Partner in Leeds, is proud of the decisions she's made to maintain a healthy work-life balance and support her colleagues in doing the same. Embracing flexibility has been key for her, from taking a career break to travel and grow, to adopting a four-day work week during challenging times.
When I look back at my career to date, I realise that one of the things that I am most proud of, is the decisions I have taken to enable a healthy work-life balance and how this has helped me to support my colleagues to do the same.
I have always taken advantage of flexibility options in my own career. I took a career break a few years into my career to travel and not only did this enable me to grow as a person from the new experiences and cultures I travelled in but I also took back to the firm the knowledge that taking time out of work to experience new things and make memories was something I should encourage in others.
Later in my career whilst in a very challenging working period in 2010, I realised I was close to reaching my limits of resilience and I started to trial a 4 day working week.
Working part time is something I am still doing 14 years later and I have actively encouraged others to think about ways they can build flexibility into their working lives. Work / life balance is something mentioned a lot in our workplace but what I’ve come to realise is that balance is achieved in different ways by everyone and as the leader in my team, taking the time to understand what helps people build resilience, noticing when someone is struggling and supporting them to think about what would help is hugely important.
Since covid, ways of working have changed enormously. I’m pleased to see that hybrid working has been adopted across our business and is popular and working well, allowing staff the flexibility to work from home as well as the fun of the office environment. Agile working is also popular, offering staff the ability to flex their working day around core hours and their other responsibilities.
Becky Maguire
Office Managing Partner, Tax