Exec about the house

Increasing numbers of City high-flyers are opting to spend more time with their children - without losing career momentum, and with the blessing of their employers. Viv Groskop meets the men who are following the 'daddy track'

Nine o'clock on a Friday morning and Antony Rush, a senior executive with an investment bank, is stressed and itching to get to his BlackBerry. He has four half-hour conference calls in his morning schedule and a stack of reports to read. But this is work with a difference. He will be holding his meetings over the phone from his Tunbridge Wells townhouse in his suede slippers, creased cargo pants and a surfing T-shirt that his one-year-old daughter has just decorated with regurgitated milk. Because on Fridays, he works from home - with the stairgate firmly closed so that his three-year-old son can't climb up to daddy's office.

	Andy Jamieson works a four-day week as a senior manager at KPMG in order to spend Fridays with his children, Victoria, five, and Christopher, three, at their home in Harrogate

At 6pm he clocks off, skips the one-hour commute and it's straight into bath time. While Rush is busy combining work and childcare, Andy Jamieson is enjoying the start of his three-day weekend. A senior manager at the management consultancy KPMG, he works a four-day week in order to spend Fridays with his children, aged five and three.

Rush and Jamieson are typical of a new breed of City worker: the men on the 'daddy track'. Like high-flying working mothers, they want to have it all - a serious career and a close relationship with their children. In their late thirties or early forties, these men are in senior management - only a rung or two beneath board level - running teams of several dozen people. But they are not tied to their desks. On the contrary, they are just as likely as female colleagues to ask for flexible hours, days working from home, and a leaving time that gives them the chance to do the school run when they want to.

In recent years one in 10 working men in the UK has increased the amount of time he spends at home. According to a TUC report on changing work habits, between 2004 and 2006 1.2 million men asked their employer if they could work flexibly. (Sixty per cent had their request accepted.) Rush, 42, is at the sharp end of this trend. It is only by banking standards that his hours can be considered 'flexible'.

He works from 7.15am to 6pm from Monday to Thursday (instead of the usual 8am to 7pm) and works from home on Fridays. An executive with Lehman Brothers since 2000, he has been head of tax for the past three years. His wife, Josie, 40, is on a two-year break from her career in accountancy and looks after their children, Jolyon and Lilia, full-time.

Rush says his reasons for streamlining his working week are simple: 'I'd be appalled to be a father who doesn't see his children all week. I really value the opportunity to see them every day. I like to be at home to bath the kids and put them to bed. I will never be the sort of father who misses sports day.'

But there is more to it than this, Josie explains. In December 2001 the Rushes lost their first child, Sebastian. When Josie went into labour at 42 weeks, their son was stillborn. Afterwards, Josie says, 'other things seemed more important than work. I went to three days a week to try to get my life back together.' When Jolyon was born, Antony restructured his schedule too. 'You realise that life is very fragile and this part of the children's lives is so short,' Josie adds. 'You can lose sight of what's important. Yes, career is important, but you only get one chance at life. After what happened to us, you work to live rather than live to work.'

Since April 2007 working parents in the UK with a child under the age of six or a disabled child under 18 and employees with caring responsibilities towards adults have the right to request flexible hours. A request can only be rejected 'for good business reasons'. This is a phrase wide open to interpretation, however, and the law is easier to enforce in the public sector than in private enterprise, which is why a council administrator might be more likely to get their four-day week than a stockbroker. That City disciplines such as banking, accountancy, law and management consultancy - traditionally seen as ruthless about the bottom line - are now actively promoting flexibility is a new development.

These changes were principally engineered by working mothers - but are now being increasingly taken up by men. 'It used to be that the old-fashioned flexible working arrangements were focused at mothers to get them to come back after maternity leave,' Rush says. 'Now it doesn't have to be women.' Of his 13-strong team, five - men and women, most of them parents - work at least one day a week from home. This is becoming standard in the City. A 2006 study by the campaign group Working Families analysed 23 major companies with high-level executives working part-time: Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, JP Morgan, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, BT and several legal firms featured.