A Financial Planning firm plans to regular close its office for a month each summer after two successful trials.

Expanding Northern Ireland-based AKFP repeated last year’s successful month-long office closure trial, to encourage staff to work remotely, this year.

Calls to the office were rerouted to mobiles and staff worked remotely on laptops for the whole of July as part of the month-long office closure.

Now the firm plans to make the scheme a permanent summer staple.

One member of staff who benefitted from the initiative is Rachel Chowdhury, technical support at AKFP.

She told Financial Planning Today: “The plan is that this will be a permanent fixture, it’s worked really really well.

“There’s three of us in the office with children under four and it just takes away so much stress for us and means we can actually spend time with them and there’s no worries about what you’re going to do for childcare for a month.

“We’ve got our phones and laptops and there’s a great deal of trust in our office and everyone pulls their weight.

“It has been another fantastic success this year.

“Our clients are very very happy and there are no issues, they are still serviced in exactly the same way.”

She added: “In terms of morale and workplace wellbeing it’s been really good.

“It is so good to work in a place where you’re trusted enough.”

Director and Chartered Financial Planner Roger Kennedy, said: “The initiative was really welcomed by the whole team last year and fully supported by our clients so it made sense to repeat it this summer.

“We know we have the systems in place to deal with any client queries in line with our usual high level of service.”

“Many of the team have young families so the added flexibility of this approach at this time of year is greatly valued.

“Last year, the firm reported that the exercise was shown to really boost morale and increase motivation to get daily tasks completed.

“The philosophy behind our form of lifestyle Financial Planning is ‘one life, live it’ and this way of working shows we practise what we preach.”