Scoring Your Flex Work Strategy: How It’s Impacting Your Workflow (Part 2)

Hello again. You’re joining us midway through a series about how to score your org’s flex work strategy.? I’d recommend you start with Part 1 - Measuring Flex Work’s Impact on Team Health - before digging in here.

Now that we’ve taken a look at how flex work is impacting the team, let’s turn our attention to its impact on workflows.? Here are some of our favorite metrics to look at when we’re evaluating the impact that flex policies have on productivity.

1. Have you effectively adopted asynchronous collaboration or are meetings taking over?

Metrics to track: % of collaboration time that is asynchronous and focus time

Much has been written about the explosion in meetings brought about by the shift toward remote and hybrid work over the past few years.? An explosion of time spent in countless recurring meetings, check-ins and coordination events has made it incredibly hard for people to find time for focused individual work. A key component to the success of a flexible work program is ensuring that your organization promotes asynchronous forms of collaboration. Working asynchronously allows people to determine when they want to respond within their flexible schedules. Fortunately, this transition to asynchronous work can be directly measured by comparing collaboration data from various synchronous and asynchronous collaboration channels.

2. Are people still being responsive?

Metric to track: Average Slack or Teams response times

Flexible organizations allow for more flexible schedules as well as increased odds that teams are more geographically distributed. One potential negative side effect of this change is teams may experience slower response times from remote peers. This is not a problem in the general case but at the extreme it can significantly slow down workflows and decision making.?

There are several metrics one can use to identify this issue but a typically useful proxy is Slack or Teams response times. How long does it take for the average person to respond to a new question sent over chat? A couple of hours is okay but consistently taking many hours can be quite problematic.

3. Do you have enough overlap on distributed teams?

Metric to track: Workday hours overlap among close collaborators

As discussed above, flexible work programs tend to go hand in hand with greater geographic distribution of an organization's workforce. This is a blessing in that it allows for access to a far wider pool of talent, but it also introduces challenges as teams may be split over multiple timezones.? People working on flexible schedules and across different regions may find it challenging to find sufficient overlap for collaborative work. This overlap in availability can be measured using organizational data and organizations can do much to ensure their flexible work programs take this flex work challenge into account.

4. Is your office or space suited for flex work?

Metrics to track: Meeting room demand and utilization during spikes in attendance

Flexible work tends to lead to “spikey” in-office attendance. Office occupancy may be low most of the time but will spike up close to capacity during end of year planning or similar employee high density onsite events.?

What’s worse is that greater distribution has significantly shifted what people need from their office spaces. People are far more likely to spend a large portion of their days in hybrid meetings with a small number of peers in the office and others offsite. There is now a far greater need for smaller 1 to 5 person spaces and less need for far larger spaces. As a result, people are left waiting for space or struggling to get work done as peers take calls in open spaces. These issues make people less likely to want to visit the office and less likely to feel a benefit from time in-person with peers.

Look out for part 3 of this series on how your flex work strategy impacts employee engagement.