Flexible working: just new age nonsense...right?

The pandemic has shown that we do not need to be slaves to the needless practice of travelling to and from a fixed location ten times a week. It also revealed the negative economic effects of this legacy practice, as well as the human and environmental cost.

That being said, a layer of lower-to-middle management continue to ensure that a large proportion of the workforce remain stuck within rigid work hours. This can be due to a belief that output is proportional to the time a manager can see a subordinate work.

This productivity paranoia was highlighted recently (Sept '22) in a Microsoft survey which found, whilst 87% of workers reported no change in performance when working remotely, only 12% of managers had confidence in their teams remote productivity.

So, it would appear that the issue is not necessarily with the workforce, but with a lost management function that doesn't understand how to manage remotely. With that in mind, here are three aspects that you may want to consider for your own organisation:

1. Line managers can be the biggest blocker to flexible work options. Training is required to gain buy-in and redefine productivity to manage a flexible workforce. This requires access to guidance , peer support and coaching & mentoring is absolutely essential .
2. Flexible work needs to be recognised as far more than simply WFH or part-time. Recent research by Bristol University found over 300 ways to work flexibly ranging from job shares to compressed hours and term-time working. There is clearly significant scope.
3. Telling the market about your flexible work aspirations will ensure your access to the widest talent pool (in 2019 87% wanted to work flexibly; but only 15% of jobs offered the option). The simple fact is that the best talent can afford to vote with their feet.

In summary, the business benefits associated with flexible work are hard to ignore, as are the societal upsides (carbon emissions, demands on health & social care systems). However, organizations can only benefit from these when they stop measuring output in terms of time (a 9-5 Mon-Fri 'bum on seat'), and start recognizing it as a deliverable.